If you’re a new manager, you’ve certainly faced your fair share of surprises. For many medical practice managers, one such surprise involves being caught up in office drama between your staff members.

Office drama can take up a lot of time and cause great employees to leave, so it’s important to avoid these issues if you can. Check out three ways to stop it before it begins.

1. Establish a Positive Tone

As the manager, you need to set the tone at your practice. Even if office drama existed in the past, it’s up to you to turn that around and make it a place of positivity. This means you should:

• Lead by example by respecting your colleagues and never speaking negatively about others at work
• Be empathetic to your co-workers, patients and the healthcare providers
• Engage in a spirit of collaboration, showing that the team working together is what makes the practice stronger
• Celebrate staffers, not just on their work anniversaries and birthdays, but even for the small triumphs like fixing scheduling mistakes or calming angry patients

By providing your team with a consistent example of positivity, you can slowly adjust the tone at your practice. Before you know it, your colleagues will become increasingly less engaged in office drama.

2. When Staffers Argue, Ask for the Facts

Even if you don’t engage in office drama, it’s inevitable that some of your staff members will have an issue, and you’ll be called upon to rectify it. If that happens, your best bet is to ask each of your colleagues for the facts.

Ask them what happened and stay neutral. Once you get the facts from each side, then you can help them work on solutions. If you remain solution-oriented — rather than joining into the drama — then staff members will come away with the message that office drama won’t be tolerated in the future.

3. Keep Conversations Face to Face

Office drama is more likely to arise when people misunderstand each other. One big source of misunderstandings is when staffers communicate in writing. Messages sent through email, text or digital messaging services (like Slack or Teams) can be easily misinterpreted, which can lead to drama. By keeping conversations face-to-face, you’ll prevent office drama before it starts.

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