According to a recent Gallup Workplace survey, 51% of US employees are actively seeking a new job. This statistic is especially worrisome in the dental industry due to an existing shortage of dental personnel. Learn the primary reasons dental employees depart and ways you can prevent it from happening. 

In this Dental Leadership Baseball game, the pitchers are your patients and your employees are up to bat. You are the owner and head coach and have assistant coaches on the field and behind the scenes helping you and your team win the league series. Running to first base is when your employees started transforming into team members through the implementation of several leadership tools and best-practices, and patient-oriented operating systems discussed in earlier blogs. Now, second base is looming ahead. The current question is: what leadership skills and tools are needed for your team to arrive safely on second base?

Look, the game is starting! The pitcher is winding up. It’s a classic fastball speeding toward one of your players. Who is the pitcher? It’s Mr. I’m Important, who is one of your patients that is constantly on an impossibly tight schedule. STRIKE 1… STRIKE 2… STRIKE 3… YOU’RE OUT!! What? How could your player be out? You carefully vetted your team players before hiring, you explained to them the ultimate goal of your game, outlined the rules of your game, and supplied your expectations. Where did you do wrong?

This month, we’re playing baseball, specifically, leadership baseball. You, the dentist, are the owner of this team, which we will call, “Team D” (for dental). You purchased Team D with a boat-load of money, time, and sweat by graduating dental school and purchasing or buying into a dental practice. Those decisions are what launched you into this game of leadership baseball.

The most effective team structure for a dental practice is a self-managed team structure. Why? In dentistry, the dentist-leader is the business's primary income producer. If the dentist-leader is not doing dentistry, the business is losing money. Over time, the stress of dealing with a dysfunctional team structure and being the number one producer will result in professional burn-out.

We started the year with a blog about the infamous “bad apple” employee; next we tackled how to avoid hiring a “bad apple” employee; and now, after following our effective Concepts Hiring System, we have a new employee, who is excited, energetic, a little nervous, and eager to learn. This is the point, right after hiring a new employee, when so many leaders (and not just in dentistry!) make two key mistakes.

In my previous blog, Is a Bad Apple Employee Ruining Your Team?, you met Francis, a problem employee. Francis’s problems weren’t so much her job performance, but rather her behavior and attitude, both of which are more subjective and difficult to manage.  Here are some tools to help prevent and protect you from being saddled with, or “held hostage” by, a bad-apple hire.

You can spot disengaged dental employees a mile away. Research giant Gallup has found that globally, 85% of employees are disengaged in the workplace, and they under perform as a result. The dental industry is not immune! Your practice is not immune!

Scheduling is one of the most important elements of your practice. It is intimately tied to your profits, stress level, and patient satisfaction, yet I see practice after practice allowing their schedule to reduce their income, create work chaos, and drive patients away.

Professional burnout is an epidemic! In a study, just this year, of over a thousand Human Resource managers 98% indicated burnout was actually “sabotaging” their businesses. Many managers indicated professional burnout accounted for 50% of their employee turnover!

Having organized and participated in Annual Dental Practice Retreats for over 25 years, I have seen first-hand the many benefits of team retreats. But that is just my perspective, what’s really important is: what does the hard-core evidence say?

Want a day where you meet your goals, feel a sense of pride in your work, and leave relaxed and on time? Who doesn’t? So, how often does it happen in your dental practice? Once a week? Once a month? Never? There is one way, without a doubt, you can make this happen more frequently and consistently. It is the use of an organized Morning Huddle.

When working with practices, often I see significant savings, increased efficiency, and higher patient satisfaction when outsourcing specific tasks and duties. Creating a modern office with progressive technology and effective operating systems makes the difference between a thriving practice and a struggling practice.

There is a serious conundrum in every dentist’s work life: 99% of your training was clinical dentistry when in reality you spend more than 50% of your time focused on interacting with employees and patients. How do you hear those affirmations from your employees?

First coined by the philosopher Aristotle, the phrase “a whole is greater than a sum of its parts” still has a lot of relevance in this day in age. This is the basis behind the idea of teamwork. If the full dental team isn’t working in synergy your practice isn’t going to be as effective, efficient or run as smoothly as it could, or should, be.

Many practice owners feel like they need to be SUPERDENTIST by day, and the business-minded Clark Kent by night to make sure both of their roles as a dentist and business owner are taken care of. This doesn’t have to be the case. A dental practice that is “organizationally-organized” can alleviate the stress on the practice owner and let them focus on being a dentist.

It’s Monday morning and your team is gathered for the Morning Huddle. Each goes through their reports and all agree that the schedule looks perfect! There are no openings in the schedule and everyone is ready to roll. But what happens? The infamous NO-SHOW BOMBS start dropping. It hits hygiene first…second…third!!! The final bomb takes out your most productive appointment of the day!

Are you looking for ways to increase your dental practice’s annual production? According to a study conducted by Harvard Review, businesses with healthy work cultures produce, on the average, 31% more than those businesses without one. There are three fundamental pieces to ensure a healthy work environment - and bottom line - for your dental practice.