Archive for Dental Practice Management
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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What behavior comes naturally to you?
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
Write Ads That Attract The Top 25 Percent Of Potential Employees
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It is important to attract the best if you want to hire the best. When you treat candidates as customers, not subordinates, you change everything about finding people. Most job ads and sourcing techniques are set up to simply fill a void. YOU want to attract the top 25 percent, not just a warm body.
Most ads are written with one single criterion: experience and lots of it. This is a fundamental flaw associated with traditional hiring practices. Rather than hiring someone with lots of experience who are not competent; hire someone who can do the job, regardless of their experience.
To find these candidates, write ads that focus on past performance, talent, energy levels and the ability to learn. When candidates see the job as a career opportunity, you’ll attract more people and close more candidates on your terms.
A good ad focuses on outcomes rather than activity.
Example: Dental Hygienist wanted who can do all phases of soft tissue management and can head up a productive, profitable hygiene department. While we offer flexible scheduling, great pay, the latest technologies and don’t mind if you Whistle While you Work — we want someone who exudes leadership, energy and commitment to a team. Call now or fax your resume for a confidential audition!”
For The Future:
• Emphasize what you want successful candidates to “do” versus just what you want them to “have” when you advertise a position. Screen out those who do not possess what you need. It is just as important, however, to attract those who really want to perform the duties you have in mind, and who fit into your office environment. You will have a better match in the end.
Right Hiring for the Dental Team
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How would you like to set yourself up for success in your dental practice? What kind of training have you had to help you to determine when to hire, how to interview, and who to invite into your dental practice? If you’re like most dentists, the answer is NONE! You have had no training on this! It’s true that the hiring process is overwhelming when caught short-handed.
It is much like treating a patient. First you determine the source of the pain, formulate your differential diagnosis, decide which treatment is most appropriate and put a prevention plan in place. Training in hiring – right hiring – helps you put a plan into action for your practice. It eliminates the stress of what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.
Over the next 2-3 months, I will offer over 40 positive ideas and insights to make the process of hiring the “right” people more structured, organized and easy to follow. These tips help you manage your staffing needs proactively, and give you and your team a plan for the future. While I’m not providing an exhaustive guide covering every aspect of right hiring like I do with my Dental Contact Coaching™ clients, I will share a foundation for your hiring road map. I will offer several step-by-step outlines for developing your treatment plan for right hiring.
I suggest that you have open discussions with your team and solicit ideas on staffing needs and specific position descriptions.
This upcoming series of posts focuses on the human side of business– the human resources of your practice. A study by the Kwasha Lipton Group, a division of Coopers & Lybrand, HPA, discovered that turnover can cost a company 75-150% of an employee’s salary. As THE DENTAL COACH© clients hire me, in part, to provide this information to help them hire right, manage more effectively, and reduce stress. The end result? Saving tens of thousands of dollars annually.
“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.” – H. Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. General
Ask yourself: What are the right things I need to do today? What is keeping me from doing them?
Did You Read It Yet?
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A few days ago, I suggested that my blog subscribers read Service America. It is a useful, helpful guide for introducing a true relationship-based service model into your dental practice. The concept is more than 20 years old, but, guess what? It still works!
This book isn’t about fluff. It’s about real management principles that can be swiftly applied in your dental office to make you stand out from the competition. It is about using customer service to stand out – not the priciest equipment or the lowest prices for cash-pay patients.
The book encourages you to use a customer-centric approach to have a successful dental practice. Treat your patients like gold, and your dental practice will be majorly successful. Some of you might say – Hey, Dr. Ron, this is common sense! To that I say – Then why aren’t more dentists doing this?
