Rooting out bad behavior at the front desk

When clients go to visit health care providers at their neighborhood health clinic, they must first check in with the receptionist at the front desk. The receptionist then alerts the person with whom the client has an appointment. The health care professional comes out to greet the client in the reception area and then leads him or her back to the office where the appointment will take place.

Generally, the process goes smoothly. But a few weeks ago, one of the health care professionals (let's call her Constance) was taken aback after she led a client back to her office, settled in, and listened as her client recounted a troubling exchange with the receptionist.

According to the client, the receptionist checked her in, then asked her how she liked working with Constance. After the client told her she liked working with her just fine, the receptionist responded that she was just checking because some clients don't like working with her. Constance was unnerved by the report, but she managed to stay focused on the client's needs during the rest of the session.

Once the session was over and the client left, Constance consulted a colleague to tell her what had happened and to ask her if she knew who the receptionist might have been. Given that two people regularly check people in, and different receptionists work throughout the week, Constance was not sure who the person was. More importantly, she wasn't sure why the receptionist said what she did to her client.

"No one's ever complained to me about being hard to work with," writes Constance. "But even if they complained to others, it seems wrong for the receptionist to have said something like she did about me."

Constance is not entirely sure what, if anything, to do. She could let the whole issue go without saying anything, but she writes that beyond troubling her that her own reputation was called into question, there might exist the possibility that this particular receptionist is violating the confidentiality of clients who regularly visit the health clinic.

"But I also don't want to drag the client who told me what happened into this," Constance writes. "What's the right thing to do?"

Constance has every right and reason to be concerned about client confidentiality. And it isn't petty for her to simply be upset over the fact that the receptionist allegedly painted a negative picture of her to one of her clients. Such behavior is totally inappropriate.

If Constance is not certain which receptionist made the comment, the right thing would be to let the person who manages the receptionists know what happened. She needn't involve her client if she wants to protect her privacy. The right thing for the manager to do is to let everyone who is working the desk know that such behavior as reported is inappropriate. Even more importantly, the health care clinic management would be wise to revisit how it trains the staff, including the receptionists, who interact with the clients.

Bad-mouthing professionals in such a setting, even in the guise of idle curiosity, is wrong. It diminishes the capability of people like Constance to do her job well and puts clients in uneasy positions. It's best to root out such behavior. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2019 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.