Dr Phillip Palmer, March 2000 - Unemployment in the greater cities and even in many regional cities across Australia is the lowest it’s been in many, many years. Dentists across the country are complaining of the difficulties in attracting staff to work in their practices. We consistently hear how hard it is to find good people, but we have never heard it so often as we have heard it these past 1-2 years. Building and retaining quality and a loyal team is now a number – one priority.

At Prime Practice, we travel around the country giving workshops and seminars and see a wide variety of practice management and staff management styles. Often excellent dentists have terrible teams and very productive practices, but in most practices, dentists have to work hard to ensure their staff is motivated, eager and productive.

Many dentists feel that they are constantly working very hard dragging their staff along behind them. Why doesn’t the staff know that the dentists want them to do and just do it? Show some initiative! Why don’t they stop waiting constantly for instructions from the boss – just go ahead and get the job done? Unfortunately usually the staff person doesn’t know what the dentist wants and is afraid that if they show initiative and get the job done, the dentists may not like what they chose to do and get angry with them. And so the situation continues. All of us, constantly, need to work on and with our staff, just like we all need to work on and with, our dental practices. The situation will never exist, that our practices, or our staff, will just run by themselves. Leadership and management constantly need to be applied to our practices. It’s somewhat akin to our patients’ mouths. Our patients can never stop flossing and brushing and say that now their teeth are fixed, won’t need any more work (or cleaning) ever again. Constant attention is needed to keep mouths at a high standard and similarly to keep our staff and practices at a high standard.

There are many tools we can use in staff management:

• Staff meetings both daily and weekly – to help in fine tuning our patient care
• Philosophy and vision statements from the dentist, to let everyone know where they’re headed
• Sharing trend indicators of practice production to compare them to goals that have been set,
• Sharing operating statements of practice expenses to compare them also to our goals.

We also have to use salary increases as a motivational tool. Do staff members get an increase because:

1. They ask for it
2. It’s time – after all they’ve put up with us for another year or
3. Targets have been met, and they have worked well to ensure that they have played their part.

Patients come to your office because of the relationship they have developed with you and your team. They do not value their treatment from you on the quality of the occlusal carving, nor of the marginal integrity of your crowns (not that these aren’t of vital importance – it’s just that our patients don’t have the technical expertise to judge them).
They assess their treatment on how they are dealt with by you and your team. How you treat your team becomes exactly how the team treats your patients. We all must learn to be quality staff managers in order to build greater staff loyalty and thus greater patient loyalty.

[Published in Australian Dental Practice, March/April 2000]