The Provider Loft

Supporting small and medium NDIS and health providers in Australia

David Kinnane

ALOFT March 2021: the future of work after COVID-19, the status of workers in the gig economy, and defining your risk culture

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ALOFT: Advances. Legal Updates. Organisation. Frameworks. Tips.

In this month’s ALOFT, we focus on the future of work after COVID-19, ongoing legal skirmishes about the status of workers in the gig economy, and what it means to define and improve your risk culture. We also provide some useful tools for communicating the story of your business to others, and highlight a free course to get yourself going again when it all seems too hard and you want to give up. 

At The Provider Loft, we’re focused on giving your quick, practical tips you can use to improve your provider business. Let’s go!

Advances

COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on the way we work. While it’s too early to tell whether some of these changes are permanent, it would take a brave person to bet against trends towards remote work, digitisation and automation. Check out this provocative infographic from the corporate consulting fortune-tellers at McKinsey: 

Legal updates: UK guidance of the rights of gig economy workers – the Uber case

The line between who is an employee and contractor has always been fuzzy, and never more so than now, with the gig economy. While tax authorities, legal commentators, and others have different views, it’s better to be safe than sorry – especially as most of the legal, tax and financial risks of getting it wrong fall on providers (as hirers). This month, we’ve been looking at the recent UK Supreme Court decision about the status of the Uber worker. Natasha Bernal, of Wired Magazine, has an interesting take on the implications of the decision for gig workers in the UK and internationally here.

Organisation success: how to define and improve your risk culture

To thrive in uncertain times, you need a strong risk culture. This requires a clear acknowledgement of your exposure to risk, and a commitment to manage it. A provider’s success may also depend on its commitment to values like responsiveness, transparency, and respect. 

According to Richard Higgins and colleagues, defining your risk culture involves thinking about your organisation’s confidence, openness, challenges, speed of response, level of care, communication practices, tolerance for risk, level of insight, adherence to rules, and your team’s ability to cooperate. Once you’ve measured your organisation’s current status for each of these elements, you can address any shortcomings, using an influence model composed of four elements: understanding and commitment, role modelling and leadership, capability building, and formal reinforcement mechanisms. For a detailed blueprint for how to do this, read more here.

Frames of mind to improve your marketing

Way back in 1991, Kenn Adams developed the “Story Spine” – an 8-sentence basic structure that underpins thousands of human stories – everything from classical myths, to Pixar movies, to marketing campaigns. This framework can be adapted easily for a provider’s traditional marketing efforts, social media, blogs, YouTube videos, staff training days  – any material that tells your story. Just remember: the hero of your story should be your client – not you! Thanks to @alexgarcia_atx for this practical summary: 

To hear more about this useful model from Kenn himself, check out this short video.

Tips for practice

Procrastination, perfectionism, and the imposter syndrome are all forms of resistance – invisible forces that get in the way of us sharing our best work with our clients and participants, and the world. To overcome resistance, it helps to have a mentor – someone to push you on when you want to turn back or give up. There’s no-one better placed for the fight than Steven Pressfield, author of “The War on Art” and “Turning Pro”. If you are coming up against a blank page, or something else that stops you from doing the work that matters, I recommend Steven’s free audio course, which you can access here: Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.

That’s it for this month’s ALOFT.

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ALOFT February: Managing Staff

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ALOFT: Advances. Legal Updates. Organisation. Frameworks. Tips.

For NDIS providers and health providers, people management is a constant challenge. High turnover and attrition rates make it hard to build teams and systems to support them. In this month’s ALOFT, we focus on managing staff. As usual, we include practical tips you can use to improve your provider business:

Advances

Leading a distributed or remote team is challenging. Home and work boundaries have increasingly blurred into each other, making it harder to act in different ways with different people. COVID-19 has hastened and intensified these trends. But digital transformation also creates new opportunities for managers to lead and for teams to work together more effectively. In this report, Michael Schrage from the MIT Sloan School of Management and his colleagues, look at the trends and make some recommendations for managers to make their staff feel more valued.

Legal updates

Australian workers fall into two broad categories: employees and independent contractors. But the line between them is often hard to draw, with courts looking at the whole relationship and testing whether the worker is in fact carrying out a business of their own. Many workers are hired as contractors, but may in fact be employees, and getting it wrong exposes providers to legal (and tax) risks. The growing gig economy is challenging traditional employee/contractor categorisation in Australia and many other countries In this article, the lawyers at Norton Rose Fulbright look at the employee/contractor distinction in several countries, including Australia, in the context of growing government interest in better protecting on-demand workers and contractors from exploitation.

Organisation success

People who have a strong sense of purpose tend to be better in times of crisis and uncertainty, and, on average, live longer and happier lives. Purpose is also linked to higher levels of employee engagement, stronger commitment to employers, and increased feelings of wellbeing. This provocative article by Naina Dhingra and colleagues at McKinsey, explores the employer’s role in helping employees define their purpose, using a model identifying nine types of purpose: achievement, conservation, caring, freedom, respect, tradition, enjoyment, stability, and equality and justice. They then provide some practical ideas about how to help connect an employee’s purpose to work, including through guided conversations, personal reflection, and helping employees to take action toward achieving their purpose. 

Frames of mind

Check out this graphic summary of McKinsey model for identifying an individual’s purpose, with short descriptions of characteristics associated with each purpose:

It’s a useful tool for recruitment, onboarding, and performance development of your people (not to mention self-reflection and imporvement).

Tips for practice

“Talk less, and listen more.” Advice often given to managers, not easy to follow in practice. Research tells us that people who talk for more than 30 seconds are often perceived as too chatty. In this article, Mark Goulston suggests training yourself to stop talking for more than 40 seconds to encourage better turn-taking and listening. 

Finally, a coaching tip from legendary music producer Rick Rubin (via the Brian Koppelman Podcast, “The Moment” ): One of your challenges as a leader is to raise the standard for the team, while simultaneously lowering the pressure. The whole podcast is well worth a listen for tips about getting the best out of people without micromanaging them.

ALOFT January 2021

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ALOFT: Advances. Legal updates. Organisation. Frameworks. Tips.

Happy New Year! We wish all our readers – regular and new – a happy, healthy and successful 2021.

Now let’s get on with the show, with some practical tips you can use to improve and how your provider business:

Advances

Are you kicking off 2021 thinking about building a scalable health business in the digital health space? The big brains at McKinsey & Company have identified six, interconnected building blocks required to build a scalable digital health business, including talent, a clear value proposition, robust/compliant products, a “delightful customer experience”, proven value, and a scalable model.

The authors summarise five business models, giving examples of startups using each model – prescription digital therapeutics, employer-as-customer solutions, payer-as-customer, healthcare providers as the customer, and direct-to-consumer – and include examples of providers who have switched strategies. Read it in full here.

Legal updates

When participants are unhappy with NDIA decisions about their supports, they can appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). But not everyone is in a position to go through the appeal process. Some people with disabilities don’t have the money, time, energy, communication access, or other resources to go to the AAT, even though there are some law firms that offer free representation to clients seeking to challenge the support plans in the scheme.

The AAT’s 2019-20 Annual Report disclosed that almost two-thirds of agreements for NDIS matters that were reached before an AAT finding, saw a change to, or a complete overturning of the NDIA decision (compared to 16% for Centrelink decisions). This contributes to the perception that the NDIA will give way if challenged – albeit at the last minute. 

Fortunately, this lamentable state of affairs has received some mainstream press coverage, including this piece from Rick Morton in The Saturday Paper from mid-December last year.

Organisation success

Success as a provider is based on a bunch of skills that are learnable. Yuri Elkaim, of HealthPreneur, has distilled 10 core tenets of a health business. Many are relevant for all providers. Paraphrasing for providers, here they are:

  1. You are responsible for your business (not others).
  2. The letters behind your name and how smart you are don’t entitle you to a successful provider business. (Conversely, a lack of letters after your name does not mean you can’t thrive.) 
  3. The better you market, the less you have to sell.
  4. Your success is determined by your systems.
  5. The more you earn, the more you can contribute. The more you contribute, the more you will earn. Money is a by-product of the value you create in the world.
  6. Your provider business is more than a business – it can change your community for the better.
  7. “If it’s all in your head, your business is dead.” Learn to extract your knowledge into training, frameworks and systems that others can replicate.
  8. You can get ahead by just being a little bit better than your competition.
  9. Business growth follows personal growth. 
  10. Isolation hurts. Don’t stay solo. 

For more detail on each of these ideas, check out Elkaim’s article here.

Frames of mind

This year, I’m making several resources about my areas of expertise (NDIS and health providers). But I’m outsourcing everything I have no expertise in, from hedge trimming to blog artwork. Why?  

The “Circle of Competence”.

It’s a term coined by investor Warren Buffet, and a useful model to reduce your team’s risk, and to develop training plans. As you look to grow your provider business, monitor your team’s circle of competence. You can’t be an expert on everything. You need to know what you know, and what you are an expert in, and know where the boundaries of your competence lie. You can expand your circle with experience, reading, training and effort; or shrink it by failing to keep learning in areas of expertise. The model suggests you are better off focusing on deepening your expertise and expanding your circle by building on existing strengths, and outsourcing the rest.

As Shane Parrish, of Farnam Street puts it in this excellent overview of the model:

“So, the simple takeaway here is clear. If you want to improve your odds of success in life and business, then define the perimeter of your circle of competence, and operate inside. Over time, work to expand that circle but never fool yourself about where it stands today, and never be afraid to say “I don’t know”.

Tips for practice

Two quick tips for this month:

It can be challenging to avoid wasting energy and time arguing with people on social media, and I don’t know many people who have ever changed their mind based on a Tweet or post. You only have so much energy – don’t waste it. I recently came across this Marcus Aurelius quote, which I’m now using as a mantra as I scroll through my various feeds:

“You always have the option of having no opinion.” 

Did you know that NDIS Providers need waste management policies and procedures to comply with the National Disability Insurance Scheme Practice Standards and Quality Indicators? Don’t have one yet? We’ve got you covered.

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ALOFT 4: The fortnight’s most useful information for small and medium Health and NDIS Providers in Australia

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ALOFT: Advances. Legal updates. Organisation. Frameworks. Tips.

Advances: Memory Systems

In my early 20s, I had a great memory. As I get older….not so much, which is why I rely on tools like Evernote. All of us forget things (sometimes for good reason), but, with a bit of work you can improve your memory without apps. In this video, I show you how to remember any 10 things in order using the number memory peg system:

For those who are highly motivated to do the work, this piece by Matt Reynolds in Wired outlines five steps you can take to improve your memory, introducing the “memory palace technique” used by the Ancients of Rome to remember those long speeches.

Legal Update: Defamation and social media risk

Finally, NSW has passed defamation law reforms designed to modernise defamation laws and to reduce defamation risks, including in social media. It’s hoped the other States and Territories will soon follow now that the changes have been approved in principle by all Attorneys-General. Read more about the reforms in this summary by the good folk at the Lawyers’ Weekly.  

Organisation

Acquiring some new, tiny habits has made a big different in my life and business this year. Small and simple things like daily writing and making one useful thing a day for clients have made a huge difference to both my productivity and mental clarity. For a primer on why small habits can kick-start an explosion in output, check out this short read in the Harvard Business Review by Sabrina Nawaz.

For a longer, more detailed read, check out the excellent Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. This is the book that got me going after a long period of apathy and procrastination.

Frames of Mind: Life in 2022!

Way back in 1962, Walter Molino produced this artwork forecasting what life would be like in 2022. Even a year ago, it would have been laughable. But, in these very strange times, who can discount the possibility that he was on to something?  

Source: Walter Molino, shared via Twitter @krug_heyde.

Tip: Leave yourself a summary!

Sometimes, getting re-started on an ongoing project is hard. Often, it’s easier to put it off and get lost in busywork – stuff that has to be done but adds no value to your Provider business. Even though we all know that doing just a bit every day will lead to great things in the long run – the so-called compound effect – putting pen to page on a project after a break is easier said then done. And, even if you get started, you then stop, and go through the whole procrastination and resistance cycle again. That was me to a tee, until I learned the “leave yourself a summary tip” from David Perrell (@david_perrell), aka “The Writing Guy”:

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ALOFT 3: The fortnight’s most useful information for small and medium Health and NDIS Providers in Australia

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ALOFT: Advances. Legal Updates. Organisation. Frameworks. Tips.

Advances: 12 dimensions of innovation

Providers with a narrow view of innovation can miss opportunities (and risks). To help expand your worldview and “innovation radar”, here are 12 dimensions of business innovation, courtesy of the MIT Sloan Management Review. Read the full article here here. 

Legal Update: responding to negative online reviews ethically

Negative online reviews can be devastating on your business, mental health and team morale. As providers, we are sometimes ethically constrained in how to respond, e.g. because of our confidentiality obligations to clients and participants. Other professions have the same issue, including lawyers, and it’s interesting to see how they manage negative online reviews.

One suggestion, is to respond by saying [Provider] “confidentiality obligations prevent us from correcting the factual background in this post. We are very proud of our track record of client satisfaction and favourable results”. For more tips and suggestions from Cynthia Sharp, read the ABA Journal article here. For more on managing negative online reviews in healthcare, check out our article here.

Organisation: how to persuade your team to follow infection control procedures during the pandemic

Managing infection control risks during the COVID-19 pandemic is a big job, and we are all trying to manage it. While infection control policies and procedures can help, compliance efforts alone are not always the most motivating way to change people’s behaviour. Instead, use role-modelling, education to build understanding and conviction, team confidence and skill building, and reinforcement to change behaviours and keep your team safe. Learn how to use McKinsey’s organisation influence model to get and keep safe during the pandemic here.

Frames of Mind: use uncertain times to develop new strategic directions for your business

Tip: managing your energy is more important than managing your time

As providers, we tend to think of ourselves as time-poor. But, as I get older, I realise the real constraint on my productivity is energy. Get better outcomes by managing your physical energy and emotions to help focus on what’s meaningful and purposeful for your business. Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy have written an excellent article jam-packed with suggestions to improve your energy management.  

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