Dr Phillip Palmer, April 2013 - I often hear from practice owners: "I don't want to invest in training my team. What if they leave? I will have wasted all this money”. Being a massive advocate for team training (and having built a career around this over the last 15 years), my response to this is "What if you don't train them and they stay?" Having a cohesive team who are all trained to do their jobs effectively provides a surprising amount of freedom to otherwise stressed out dentists, allowing them to focus on their most important role: practicing dentistry.

You can train your team in hard skills (how to sterilise, how to set up the appointment book properly, how to pass instruments, etc) or soft skills (answering the phone, customer service, communication skills, etc). Both are extremely important and practices with fully trained teams consistently tell us that they have:

1) A team that is likely to stay for the long-term.
Providing training is seen as an investment in the team. They are more likely to feel valued, fulfilled in their roles and that they are growing in their career. As a result they are more likely to stay.

A practice with low staff attrition needs to allocate less resources and expenditure towards things like advertising for new staff, interviews, reference checking and lost productivity due to training and acclimatisation of new team members.

2) A more productive team providing better service.
Providing training should mean that your team will get to know their role and job description in the practice better, they will become more efficient at what they do, and be more prepared for each day. As a result your team will be more productive and able to get through more work at a high level of accuracy and quality at a faster rate. Having these clearly defined roles will also ensure patients are looked after at each step of their journey through your practice and can therefore better support the dentist in provision of care.

3) Team members who are more aware of the impact of their behaviour.
Many team members (and dentists, for that matter) are unaware of the verbal and non- verbal cues they give to patients that make the difference between the patient having a positive or negative experience at the practice. Good training can provide participants with an opportunity to look at and assess their own behaviour and job performance.

4) Patients who are loyal not just to the dentist but to the team as well.
Whether it is answering the phones, supporting the dentist chair-side or booking appointments, team members have an opportunity to help build a patients trust, loyalty and support for your practice. If these roles are not done correctly, it also has the potential to jeopardise their relationship with the practice.

As team members develop their relationship-building skills and service levels in the practice through training they concomitantly develop stronger bonds with patients. In addition if the training leads to a longer tenured team (as we suggested earlier) there will come increased opportunities for your patients to build relationships and trust with them.

5) Less stressed dentists.
A principal carries a lot of practice responsibilities and jobs on his/her shoulders that frankly a well trained team member is more than capable of doing. The more training a team gets (and the more they prove themselves to be competent as a result), the more comfortable the principal will become with delegating and let go of these tasks.

Regardless of why you choose to train your team, the outcome is the same. The dentist can truly focus on what they are trained to do- the dentistry, leaving all other tasks, including handling of many business aspects to the team.