Hygiene Consultant Finding and Keeping Great Employees

One of the most important decisions you can make in your practice is that of hiring someone to work in your office as part of your team. The wrong decision could have far reaching effects for your practice for years to come. The very success of your organization depends on the quality of the individuals that you hire to become a part of it. With increasing chances of being sued for firing someone, (some may be covered under disability, discrimination, or wrongful discharge laws) you don’t want to make a mistake. How can you guarantee that this new employee won’t turn out to be a major disappointment, or a major pain in the … Well you can’t guarantee anything, but there are some steps that you can take to increase your odds of success. If you’ve been a practice owner for any length of time, you’ve discovered the “bonus system” through listening to keynote management speakers, in-office dental practice management Hygiene Consultant and/or your friends and peers.

Morale, Benefits, & Incentives

Dental benefits consistently survey as among the workplace-based benefits offerings that employees want most. But there’s no consistent evidence that the more you pay people the higher their motivation or performance. The idea is still in wide use and will remain so until doctor-owners and consultants alike understand that you simply cannot buy attitude and behavior on a long-term basis, if at all. Have you tried to get teammates to change their behavior by offering a monthly bonus for compliance? This may work well for a month or two, when everyone is motivated and jazzed up after the dental consultant’s recent rah-rah session. But what happens the first month your teammates miss bonus by a few thousand dollars? Office morale takes a nosedive, the entire team starts verbalizing in the negative, it becomes contagious, and before you know it the entire practice is back to where it was – or worse. Guess who is responsible for the morale in the office? You! Who approved the new bonus system? You! It’s time for a change. If you don’t want to change, just remember the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach every holiday season. Dentistry is a profession. All the people who make up the dental team need to start thinking, feeling, performing and acting as professionals. The first change you can make is to treat your team like the professionals they are, not subordinates or hired help states Hygiene Consultant. If you treat your teammates like employees, they will act like employees.

Teammates with Your Leadership

Great leaders respect people’s ideas, encourage others to contribute, and support their team. Great leaders know when to step back and let others bask in the glory of the credit for a job well done. Great leaders are wonderful communicators, which begins with listening skills. Now that you’ve honed your skills and character traits, communicated to your team, and improved your workplace productivity and environment, pat yourself on the back. Hygiene Consultant wants you to ask yourself if you have teammates who can take on “ownership” attitudes, go the extra mile and show great performance each and every day. If you don’t surround yourself with high-quality, well-trained, self-motivated achievers, no amount of bonus money will turn them into great team players. Productivity and feelings of ownership and responsibility cannot be purchased. If they don’t believe in your practice philosophy and direction, they need to go. If your co-workers do have those qualities, you should be paying them the most you can! That is a new concept in the dental profession, but it is past time you stopped paying the least amount you can negotiate to your practice’s most valuable assets – the people who take great care of your patients, provide great customer service and really experience a high sense of self-satisfaction at the end of every day. Those positive traits are the result of internal choices individual team members must make for themselves, and you can’t buy it from them through a bonus system that will inevitably lower the overall office morale. You as a professional must change the way you manage your practice, your teammates and yourselves. If you don’t change the paradigm of management, you will never achieve what you would like in your practice no matter what else you do.

Great Work Environment

Creating an atmosphere where it’s ok to talk about what’s wrong. Let your dental staff know that it is ok to talk about what’s wrong in the practice, but that they also need to bring 1-2 positive solutions to the table. Talk about what is going well, but also what could be better and how can you make the changes happen that you need for the success of your dental practice. You’ll notice over time that your ability to function as a team goes up and down. For awhile, everything will be going great! Everyone is getting along, doing their job well and patient care is wonderful. Then something happens that bursts the bubble: a marriage, a divorce, someone leaving the team or a new member is added. The loss of morale and teamwork can drop from simply installing new computer software! Dental team members are getting to know each other and making new friends says Hygiene Consultant. They’ll also learn how each of the members work as an individual and how they respond to pressure. People are tentative during this time, because the “safety” of the situation has not yet been established.

Hygiene Consultant Finding and Keeping Great Employees