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Building a Pharmacy Culture You’re Proud Of

Your pharmacy business begins and ends with your people. As a Community Pharmacy, the numbers say that, on average, your people are probably unhappy. Let’s look at how to flip that script.
hands on a table signifying team culture

Get everyone bought in.

What do the numbers say about Pharmacy Culture?

  • Only 17% of Pharmacy Owners think every member of their pharmacy team operates with a unique set of values they want their pharmacy to be known for, according to our Perfect Pharmacy Scorecard.
  • Pharmacy technicians rate their career happiness 2.8 out of 5 stars which puts them in the bottom 15% of careers. (CareerExplorer.com)
  • Just 16% of the 2,694 pharmacy students in a joint study between Health Education England and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society chose community pharmacy over hospital pharmacy.

This doesn’t paint a great picture of working life in a Pharmacy. There’s clearly a disconnect between top and bottom. Pharmacy Owners want their teams performing better, and the teams just don’t seem motivated.

So many pharmacists we speak to cite being short-staffed as the main problem they’re dealing with right now. Couple that with Locum rates being so high, and there’s something of a staffing epidemic in Community Pharmacy.

Changing the narrative

Most pharmacies are currently in a vicious circle. The work is stressful, the employees get stressed and demotivated. A demotivated, depressing environment isn’t appealing for prospective new team members and so you end up stuck with the demotivated, overworked team.

What we want is a virtuous circle. Creating an environment where your pharmacy team loves working makes that environment appealing for job applicants.

So how do we move from that vicious circle to a virtuous cycle? Implementing culture that incorporates your team.

Creating your Pharmacy Culture

Building a positive culture in your Pharmacy team can have numerous benefits, including:

  • Improved patient outcomes
  • Increased job satisfaction amongst team members
  • Reduced staff turnover

Here are 7 steps for building a good team culture in your pharmacy:

1. Clearly define the values and goals of the team

What kind of pharmacy do you want to be?

Remember that values and Pharmacy Culture aren’t about what you do, it’s about the way you do it.

If your team understands and buys into the mission and values of the organisation, their performance aligns parallel.

Your culture comes from the top, from your passion as a leader. This means you need passion for your values! People follow leaders for their passion and because they align with their vision. You’re the driving force of your pharmacy.

Do you show up with passion and drive every day, and lead by example?

2. Foster open communication and transparency

Encourage sharing ideas, concerns, and feedback openly and honestly throughout your team. Giving people agency and control in their role both helps their sense of worth and productivity within your pharmacy.

Do this by sharing your own thoughts and visions for your pharmacy’s strategy with your team. Sharing begets sharing.

3. Show appreciation and give recognition

Let team members know that their contributions are valued and appreciated. This is as simple as saying thank you or recognising their efforts in team meetings, but make sure it’s sincere. This small gesture goes a long way.

4. Encourage personal and professional growth

Offer your team opportunities for developing their skills and advancing their careers. People invest in their own development. Offering development opportunities makes them invest themselves with your pharmacy.

5. Promote work-life balance

Help team members find a healthy balance between their work and personal lives. This can include offering flexible work schedules or providing resources to support employee well-being.

Naturally, if you’re already short-staffed, you might feel this is impossible. You need them to work, right?

You have options.

Investing in technology and automating your team’s most repetitive or time-consuming tasks is a major solution here.

Talk to your team, let them know you’re grateful for their efforts and, whilst it’s a struggle hiring locums and/or new staff, you’re investing in taking the pressure off them.

6. Foster a collaborative and supportive work environment

Encourage team members to work together and support one another. This can include things like providing opportunities for teamwork and building strong relationships amongst team members.

Again, lead by example on this.

The junior members of your team aren’t there to lend the senior members help exclusively – and often the junior members of the team are the ones who need the most help.

7. Lead by example

I’ve said this about three times already throughout this guide, because it’s critical to your culture.

As a leader, it is important to model the behaviour you want to see in your team.

If you never take a break, it makes your team feel like they can’t take a break. That’s not setting the right tone.

Being open and transparent, showing appreciation and respect for team members, and acting with integrity? That’s setting a great tone.

We understand that life in Community Pharmacy is usually high-speed, and can be very stressful. There are external influences that make the job harder e.g. drug prices or the GP surgery not sending a patient’s RX on time. These are not within your control.

However, your “culture” is within your control, and you have the power to shape and nurture that. It’s not easy, but the rewards make it worth it for you, your team and your patients.

This article was written by JP, our Brand Content Editor who has been with PM since the early days and has extensive experience in working with multidisciplinary teams, with the help of Saam, a pharmacist by trade and our CEO, and who has extensive experience in leading teams in both the pharmacy and digital worlds.

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Pharmacy Mentor’s 2022 Recap

2022 managed to both whizz by, and also be a year in which we achieved so much for our Pharmacy clients! Here’s our round-up of what we learned in 2022, as well as what we look forward to in 2023.

The team assembles at our HQ in Sheffield for a Training Day!

Pharmacy Mentor’s 2022 in numbers

  • 65 New Clients
  • 65 Websites built (coincidentally the same number, not every new client had a website built!)
  • 12 New Positions hired
  • 14 New TrustPilot reviews

Client Wins and Growth

There were some really great client wins in 2022. It’s especially great when re-strategising becomes necessary because clients have outgrown the service.

We understand knowing what’s working for other pharmacies is super useful, so here are a couple of those successes that we can showcase without this article getting too long.

1. Migrating 1,000’s of patients over to our new Prescription Ordering System

This pharmacy wanted a new website, but felt stuck with their old one because they had 1,000’s of patients registered to the integrated prescription re-ordering tool.

We established an affordable method of migrating these patients over to the new system, which we can now replicate for other pharmacies in the same situation of feeling chained to a provider because of their patient base.

an image showing the internal patient dashboard for an EPS systemThe Patient’s Dashboard where they can manage, order and pay for their prescriptions and any family’s prescriptions.

They now have a beautiful website, with a modern interface which keeps things simple for both patient and pharmacist. The migration was rolled out carefully, with patients being sent emails with simple instructions of how to log-in to the new system.

  • 1000’s of patients successfully using the system and ordering prescriptions
  • Live chat system – which is very busy, showing patient’s preference for communicating that way
  • Separate Private Prescription Ordering
  • Online bookings for services

2. 7,200+ Flu Bookings generated through organically ranking on Google + Optimised Booking Calendar

This year’s Flu Season was as busy as ever, but this UK Community Pharmacy chain increased their outreach and also streamlined their workflow with over 7,200 appointments between September and December.

This was achieved through a combination of Search Engine Optimisation work, making sure they appeared on Local Google Searches when patients searched for Flu vaccines, and optimising their website by adding an optimised Booking Calendar, making booking an appointment a breeze for patients.

With it being a larger organisation, we also trained their teams across the UK on using the Booking Calendar, making sure that patient experience was consistently a delight wherever they were based.

What was the ROI?

The Return on Investment with this project was MASSIVE – between 720% and 1,008% return on the £5k investment.

  • Installation and optimisation of our popular booking calendar
  • Online recorded training provided to the entire team
  • Entire cost of implementation = £5000 one off
  • Average gross profit of flu jab = around £5 to £7. Therefore, gross profit generated = £36,000 – £50,400.
  • ROI = 7x to 10x.
  • The online booking calendar is now being used for many services. No subscription fees paid or commission taken.

3. Generating 18,400+ Online Clinic Bookings throughout 2022

This Pharmacy has a thriving clinic, because they committed to marketing it properly.

Over the past three years, we’ve developed their marketing piece by piece, until now they’ve got a thriving model where any input (investment) drives significant output (returns).

With SEO in place, they drive a significant amount of organic page views to both their Travel Clinic and Pharmacy Websites. The image below shows how many people are visiting the Travel Clinic website on any given day and the source of the visitor.

screenshot of Google Analytics showing that the website gets more organic traffic than paid

They’ve also invested significantly into Google Ads, with our Advanced Google Ads management. Their lifetime spend with Google is around £117k over the course of around five years, but it’s been dramatically increased since we’ve set up the rest of their digital ecosystem. (£68k of this budget was spent in 2022).

That sounds like a lot.

But with a total of 18,429 bookings, each averaging around £60 spend with some spends in excess of £300, that £68k investment has yielded between £1,105,740 and £1,842,900 in revenue for 2022.

What did we do for them?

  • Built them an online booking calendar that can be used across two websites – their custom-built pharmacy and travel clinic websites – they didn’t have a booking system before. This was £500.
  • In 2022, they generated a total of 18,429 bookings, mostly made up of PCR Testing and Travel Vaccinations. This booking system also reduced walk-ins and phone calls which reduced disruption to the pharmacy workflow.
  • The total spend for 2022 was around £75k including improvements to their websites.
  • The typical purchase for Travel Clinic bookings is £60. However, some people pay over £300. That means generating anywhere between £1,105,740 and £1,842,900 in revenue for 2022.
  • The culmination of all of this is we’ve helped this pharmacy turn £68k into £1m+ in 2022.

Our Evolution

Naturally, in helping pharmacies grow, we’ve had to grow ourselves. In 2022, we added 12 people to our team.

Developing the Development Team

Many of our new hires were in the Web Development team, as that side of our agency has, quite simply, exploded in demand.

Hiring two Senior Developers changed the game from what was a struggle in coping with the demand to getting on top of things and delivering to our PM Standards.

David Watson, David Fisk, Ben, Shar and Joe all joined the Web Dev team in 2022, and their collective efforts is in no small part responsible for delivering excellence. With the plans that we have for evolving our online prescribing systems and building out The PM Members Dashboard, expanding our development team was a must.

A TrustPilot review from a Pharmacy Mentor Client which reads: We have worked with Pharmacy Mentor for a while now and the service has been excellent. Our journey began with building a website which has developed in to creating bespoke features such as a prescription ordering system. Our website booking system for pharmacy services has been an integral feature. It has allowed us to organise the pharmacists day and drive uptake. From this we have worked with the marketing team to advertise and reach out to a wider patient base to offer both private and NHS services. Communication has been great with all staff members on various platforms. Staff have always been friendly and more than happy to help. In my personal experience they have gone above and beyond to ensure we receive a solution to any issues or queries.

One of our favourite reviews from 2022.

Cultivating the Client Relations team

Something else we wanted to improve on was our communications with clients. We know that people want one point of contact, so we hired two additional Account Executives, Joan and Roa, who now act as client ambassadors between our team and clients. This means clients don’t need to go around the houses to find the right person to speak to, or chase things up – it’s all handled for them by someone they know.

Improving our Processes & Output

Improving through client feedback

This really is what shapes our business for the better. We are continuously trying to get feedback from our clients, understanding where we can improve, whether that’s delivery, our communications, or elsewhere.

We know we can always do better and therefore, it’s a critical part of our journey at PM, and helps us deliver better for our clients. We’ll never stop learning and innovating.

Being more regular

Not like that, although we did learn to speak Pharmacist’s language a lot more when discussing digital marketing as a business.

No, this regularity is about the consistency with which we held both Company Updates and Training Days.

Our CEO, Saam giving a presentation to the team at the latest Company Update.

Company Updates and Training

The monthly company updates are where the company’s progress and goals were reviewed. For a team that works more remotely than not, these meetings are so important for fostering a company-wide team spirit.

Our team is based all over the UK (and beyond), so getting everyone in a room together isn’t a regular occurrence.

However, we’ve committed to a training day every three months, when every UK based team-member meets up, and we go through both skills training within departments and Pharmacy training, where the pharmacists in our team lead sessions improving the knowledge and understanding of pharmacy life across our whole team.

We’ve learned that these events are critical to fostering a better culture in our team and thus, helps us deliver more effectively for our clients.

Diagnosing & Prescribing

This was an interesting change, as it was far more of a mindset change, with ripple effects into process changes.

We’ve never wanted to “sell” to pharmacies, we’ve always wanted to help them. It’s similar to healthcare. You don’t want to sell people medicine they don’t need. You want to help them fix their problems, and the sale follows naturally afterwards.

Thinking of ourselves like Pharmacists also led us treating the rest of our processes like Pharmacist-related activities.

  • Pharmacist Information Leaflets – We now include the guides we’ve written as attachments when sending proposal emails. Let’s say you’re beginning a Google Ads service, whilst you’re thinking over whether it’s the right time for you. We’ll send you a link to The Complete Guide to Advertising Your Pharmacy Online, for example.This gives prospective clients the chance to revise everything our Pharmacy Growth Specialists have discussed with them in their own time, with all the relevant information on demand.
  • Marketing Use Reviews – We’re still working on this process, but we’ve got something really exciting planned for later this year, making sure every PM client is getting the most out of their marketing, and that results and performance is transparent.

What we’ve got planned for 2023

2022 was a successful year, but we’re not resting on our proverbial laurels for the year ahead. There are some big things coming regarding what we can offer pharmacies, and the seeds of what we’re going to develop have come from client feedback, demand and understanding the direction pharmacy is heading.

Data. Data. And more Data.

We’ve been there and done it, as far as Pharmacy Marketing is concerned. But we haven’t quite got the T-shirt’s printed.

One of our main objectives for 2023 is how we can capture data for our pharmacies better that we are doing, and make it more “visible” what the work we do equates to for a pharmacy. We offer a plethora of critical digital treatments for pharmacies and we’re looking at how we can centralise everything for the pharmacy more effectively.

Without giving too much away, we’re heading to a place where pharmacies will understand the most important metrics from the work that we do more easily and transparently, and what this means in terms of growth for their pharmacy.

We’re going to help you understand, with better and relevant data, how imperative your website is for your pharmacy, and the marketing we do around it that generates business. We already know what the most important data and metrics are for a pharmacy when using our services. It’s why we exist – to grow these numbers for a pharmacy.

In short, we’re going to take a deep dive into how we’re going to extrapolate the following better for our clients:

  • No. of patient/EPS sign-ups
  • No. of clinic bookings and revenue generated
  • No. of POM, P-Line and GSL treatments sold online
  • Your ROI from general marketing spend
  • Communication frequency online
  • The trends in growth
  • What all the other analytical data means around these, for example your website traffic, keyword scores, your social engagement and more

We’re also going to help you find more growth opportunities than ever before – and there are so many out there.

Working with 100’s of pharmacies across the UK means that we can also begin to “benchmark” data . This will mean you can see what’s working for pharmacies in similar situations to you, giving you the ability and knowledge to make better business decisions and be confident investing in marketing.

Our Culture

Better delivery for our clients starts with our people. As well as investing in better data analytics for our clients, we’re going to be investing in more advanced training and development for our team.

Innovation is a strong value of ours and we’re going to be looking at ways to further improve how we communicate with each other, our system and process, and always recognising greatness within our teams .

With the regular employee satisfaction surveys we send to our people, just like our clients, we look to make sure they are heard and the feedback is acted upon. This helps us build on a culture where we feel great at work, and is all part of The PM Code that we’ll be more of in 2023.

Want to scale up your pharmacy business in 2023? Book in a consultation call with our Diagnose and Prescribe team.

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