Archive for Dental Practice Management
Maintain A High-Integrity Environment
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There is so much in the news lately about the importance of integrity in institutions and business. The Golden Rule of treating people how you want to be treated, in many ways seems like a thing of our parent’s generation. We are all able to think of a time when we were treated without the proper respect. How did that make you feel? Is that the way you would want any of your team members to feel toward you or a coworker? No way!
Respect breeds respect. And if you don’t show respect to even one individual, you lose respect from all your team members. It is vitally important to show dignity and respect for each person you encounter and in all situations.
- Enforce appropriate standards. Treating people with respect is not only an important value – in the workplace, it is also the law! Do some research online to learn how to recognize and prevent harassment based on gender, sex, age, race and religion. Train everyone on your team to recognize and report inappropriate behavior. Make sure that all reporting is done in writing.
- Use Coach Ron’s “Publishing Test”. Not sure if yours or another’s actions could be viewed as inappropriate? Ask yourself: “Would I want this incident to be the subject of a newspaper article tomorrow morning?”
- Embrace diversity. Does your office reflect the cultural, racial, and age diversity of your community? People like to do business with others like them: so when hiring, draw from a diverse pool of talent. You send a more welcoming message to potential new patients. Bonus: a more diverse team will generate more ideas from different perspectives to help the business grow!
- Follow the Platinum Rule. Others have different needs and values than you. You show even more respect when you “Treat others as they would like to be treated.”
- Know that conflict is okay. Disagreements are inevitable when we encourage people to voice their opinion. Address them in an open and positive manner. To the contrary of what most people think, conflict often leads to better, more reasoned decisions.
“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.” ~ H. Norman Schwarzkopf
Four Tips on Practicing Open Book Management With Your Dental Team
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Educate your team to what each line item means and how it impacts the practice profitability. This ensures that you will grow a successful dental practice and have a stronger “buy-in” from your employees.
Follow these 4 tips and action steps to engage Open Book Management into your dental practice:
- Consult with your accountant to develop financial statements that are easy to read and organized.
- Bring in your accountant or CPA to read and review your financial statements for a Lunch and Learn with your team members on a quarterly basis.
- Begin tracking important practice numbers each month and share their significance with every member of your team. Examples include: production, collection, collection percentage, hourly production for the hygienist and the doctor, treatment recommended vs. treatment accepted and the associated percentage, amount of broken appointment time, and the impact on practice income.
- Develop solutions to reducing overhead and increasing production so that profitability can be shared.
“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
Four Simple Tips on How to Make Everyone An Ambassador
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In a previous blog post, I suggested that you train every member of the team to sell themselves and the practice to their customer—the patient.
Here are my four tips on how to do so.
- Enroll in a sales training program. Every member of your team benefits. This program should include learning how to sell/recommend needed dentistry, asking for referrals, and how to deliver service excellence as perceived by the patient.
- Role-play “asking for referrals” at every staff meeting. Spend a few moments acting out a situation for how to ask for referrals; include all staff members.
- Visit a Ritz-Carlton or other 5-star hotel with your team so that everyone understands what true quality service feels like. Hold a team meeting to discover ways you can duplicate such service.
- Provide business cards for each team member and encourage them to share the cards with others in their community, i.e. at the grocery store, library, school, and church or synagogue.
“Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.” ~ David Frost
Job Title: Dental Hygienist and Ambassador
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As a Dental CEO, how well have you combined the talents of individuals into a team? Research shows that people who work on teams are happier in their jobs, produce higher quality work and increase customer satisfaction. People need other people around them to achieve the goal of growing the dental practice.
Make all employees an Ambassador to your dental office.
Successful dental practices make selling everyone’s job. Selling is about being a positive Ambassador for the practice, both in and out of the office. Every member of the team is selling themselves and the practice to their customer—the patient. It is through marketing the benefits found in your dental practice that the business grows while generating the profits to compensate the doctor and team.
Action step: List and review every type of service you provide, ie: Cosmetic Whitening or Invisi-lign. Once you have the list, answer these two questions:
- What will your team do to let your patient base know what you have to offer?
- How will you measure your efforts as a team?
The Most Important Skill In Your Dental Practice – Hint: It’s Not Clinical
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“Soft skills” are the most valuable and most undervalued in your practice. Certainly, clinical skills are important; but your staff is already taught in their school training. It is up to you, the Dental CEO, to instruct and train on those “soft skills”.
- Invite guest speakers to a team meeting. Think about bringing in a business coach or customer service trainer—they don’t have to be related to the dental industry. In fact, it’s better if they’re not! They will bring a fresh perspective to issues facing your dental team.
- Do a Google search for course information at local colleges. What unique courses can you offer as an educational benefit to your team that will improve their “soft skills”? Look at courses in the Business, Management and Hospitality sections.
- Reward staff members who voluntarily add continuing education to their career potential by giving them gift cards for dinner and a movie. When other staff members see this, they will be encouraged to do so themselves. Post this new benefit on your team bulletin board and newsletter.
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” ~ Confucius
Measuring: Making the Annual Performance Review Better
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Some dentists dread the annual performance review because they’re unsure how it relates to practice growth. Most reviews, in fact, talk about the past. That’s not how to do it.
The personal performance evaluation is one of the tools the doctor has at his/her disposal to recognize hard work and commitment, as well as determine how people can better perform. How can you make this better? When a performance review is based on a two-way match (practice and employee expectations), outcomes are measurable and profitable.
Dialogue between the doctor and the employee about past, present and future job performance enables both to understand what is expected, how to best establish (realistic) goals and how the employee’s performance compares with those expectations.
Investing time to support team members identify their strengths, develop their talents, work on their weaknesses, and identify needed resources will help them enjoy their work more.
The result for your dental practice? A profitable bottom line.
How to Make Good Behavior Come Naturally
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stand·ard [stan-derd]. noun. something considered by an authority or by general consent as a basis of comparison; an approved model.
In a dental practice, this simply means the behavior that you naturally want for yourself. This is probably vastly different from what you were taught. Standards are not “shoulds” or “coulds”. Standards are about doing what’s right for you, your team, and patients — without having to force yourself or even think about it.
When you identify personal and dental practice standards, you establish rules and a basis for measuring quantity or quality. Your dental practice standards specify areas for behavior, knowledge, or expertise. Thus, your standards are used to improve your dental practice. They provide opportunities to learn and improve performance levels.
A useful start for how to set standards is to explore all areas of the practice and develop a set of behaviors or performance expectations for each. Remember, the clinical area of your practice needs different performance standards than the administrative part, so keep them separate. Take time to fully develop those standards and be sure to put them in writing. Put yourself in imaginary situations and determine how they should be handled. This is important, so do it with care.
Now, take the standards and share them with team members and operate your dental practice with everyone knowing how they are expected to perform.
As THE DENTAL COACH© my job is to help my clients reduce their stress and increase their practice income. By creating standards in your practice and expressing them to your staff — you do just that!
Walk The Talk – It Starts With You, The Doctor
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Do you consider yourself an ethical leader? You instantly might want to say “Yes!” However, think harder. Have you established a set of standards that coincide with your mission and vision statements? Do you know how much ethics and standards impact your dental practice?
By definition, ethics is a blend of professional and personal behaviors and qualities. Values and ethics are your framework for decision-making. How much thought about integrity and responsibility really goes into the decisions that you make?
We have a responsibility to uphold standards of the dental profession, but to our staff, we have a larger responsibility. It is to “walk the talk”, to model the qualities we want in our practice.
Start by sharing your Core Values. These are the guiding principles around which all your practice decisions will be made. It defines who you are, what you are and what you value in your business life. This is your compass. It unites you, the CEO, and your team members into a purpose. Do you need assistance in developing your Core Values? See an earlier post here.
When you articulate your Core Values, it enables you to make objective assessments and provide appropriate responses to every situation that will arise in your practice. Your Core Values and commitment to them as the practice leader provide a context for values-based decision making.
The operative words here are: “your commitment to your core values.”
Next Step: Set S.M.A.R.T Goals For Performance Growth
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In my previous post, I spoke about goals—how to define them, measure them and reach them. Because this is a popular subject, I want to give you additional guidelines to use in your dental practice:
- Make sure your team goals matter. The “R” in Smart can also stand for Relevant. All performance goals – for you and your team – need to support the overall goals of the dental practice to increase your profitability.
- Get the team involved. Teach everyone the S.M.A.R.T model and encourage them to apply it. This habit improves accountability within the office.
- Pull out your business plan and review your own goals. For each goal, ask: “Is this SMART?” If not, “punch it up” and make the goal more real and dynamic for you.
- Use the S.M.A.R.T. model to evaluate to-do items that come out of your next staff meeting. Tweak the goals until they meet all five criteria.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” ~ Lawrence J. Peter
Pay Competitively – There Is A War Going On!
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The pool of candidates for dental office positions is decreasing, you know that. What can you do?
Be creative in offering benefits. In an earlier post, I spoke about other options in addition to healthcare benefits. What else can you offer? Flexible scheduling can mean a lot to a working mother and educational benefits are attractive for a young, motivated staff member.
Create long-term partnerships with employees through pay-for-performance systems. Focus your pay efforts on measurable outcomes and performance improvement. The better the employee performs, the bigger their paycheck is. Clearly outline this pay structure and review in your annual evaluations.
Determine the competitive wage range for each position in your office. Call other dental colleagues and ask business owners in other healthcare professions to describe their compensation package. If this is impossible, do a Google search or visit a website like www.GlassDoor.com
Survey your team to discover what non-pay related perks are most attractive to them.
“You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.” ~ Albert Einstein
