A happy practice is a sustainable practice. Creating a positive dental office environment starts with understanding that your team will stay with you, come to work with a smile, and offer a higher level of performance. Your patients will feel more welcomed and grow loyal. However, if everything is just a transaction and everyone is just there for the paycheck, you’ll see high turnover with your staff and patients who don’t feel special enough to stick around.
Work is work, but it doesn’t need to be a dreary environment. Building dental practice culture through professional relationships within your office can make the difference between whether you and your team are happy to climb out of bed on a cold morning. It creates a fun-loving environment that people are excited about and where they feel they’ve found a second home.
So, how do you get there? What are four steps you can start taking, today, to build a great practice culture and focus on enhancing dental team satisfaction?
1. Go above and beyond in making your team members feel valued.
Serve your team and they’ll stick around. When it comes to dental practice employee retention, if a DSO is offering your dental assistant a higher wage—maybe it’s fifty cents or two dollars more per hour—your culture is going to make a big difference in their decision. And, if they choose to leave you for that DSO to get that raise, then you can count on them knocking on your doors in eighteen months once they’re feeling miserable over there.
So, get to know your team on a regular basis. Improving dental team morale starts with sitting down, chatting with them, and learning about their personal lives. That in itself will help them to feel more valued. But, that shouldn’t be the extent of showing them you care for them. From there, perhaps you’ll be able to deduce what thoughtful gestures might mean a lot to them.
For example, if you know that one of your team members wishes they could take their kids to Disney world, maybe you can buy them tickets come Christmas time. Alternatively, if they have a family living on the other side of the states, you could offer to give them some PTO to visit for a week. Creative gifts like these are essential for dental practice employee retention and help your team to feel cared for, and you can be sure they’ll keep them in mind before they think about leaving your practice. It goes beyond reducing turnover, though. Happier employees will do better work, it’s as simple as that.
2. Create an impact that goes beyond your practice walls.
Most people want to make an impact that extends beyond the practice walls. Creating a positive dental office environment means not just focusing inside your practice, but outside too. Treating patients can feel uplifting, but it can feel even more empowering to make a difference in the community as a whole.
If your team members can contribute to communities through your practice, they’re going to feel like your practice enables them to make a difference in the world. This approach to improving dental team morale gives them a sense of purpose. And that sense of purpose can do wonders for motivating them to be the best people they can be.
There’s a reason so many successful companies take steps to enact Corporate Social Responsibility and help the underprivileged by donating food, clothes, and money. It makes their workers feel uplifted and emotionally fulfilled, not to mention how great it is for their brand.
So many organizations out there revolve around providing free dentistry to those who can’t afford it. You can easily enroll your team in one of their events. And, while you’re there, make sure to take pictures. The feel-good emotions will then extend to your patients, too, and do wonders for the reputation of your business.
3. Show up ready to set an example.
A team’s mentality starts with their leader. Building dental practice culture begins with how you show up every single day, as this will set an example to each of your team members.
If you show up late everyday, what’s stopping your team members from doing the same? If you can’t present treatment to your patients in a way that builds trust, how can you be frustrated when your hygienist doesn’t have high case acceptance rates? Enhancing dental team satisfaction requires leading by example, especially when dealing with challenging situations. If you have an upset patient and you become short-tempered with them, how can you tell your front desk staff that they need to stay calm and be kind when similar situations happen to them?
Leadership qualities can be learned from anyone, whether you look up to a family member, friend, mentor, or even a TV show character. However, when it comes to becoming a leader, I believe there are certain qualities that one must have in order to be successful such as ambition, empathy, honesty, integrity, self-awareness, and accountability.
4. Be fun.
Again, work is work, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be a boring environment where everyone keeps their head down and waits for the clock to hit 5 or 6 pm. That’s one way to lead to high turnover rates or downright unhappy employees.
So, have some fun. Creating a positive dental office environment means decorating the office for the holidays. Let your hygienist play the music she wants to play when they’re doing cleanings or whitenings. Allow your front desk team to put items on their desks that make them feel more at home. These strategies for improving dental team morale include allowing for your staff to take longer lunch breaks. The list goes on. Just don’t hesitate to add some color to your dental practice and let your people bring their full personality. You don’t want the office to feel like an ant hive, to say the least.
Without a great culture, your hard work may go for naught.
You can have the best team in the world, be located in the ideal spot, and have the best marketing the dental game has ever seen. But none of that will matter if you don’t have a great culture. Successful dental practice employee retention and building dental practice culture go hand in hand.
I run a community full of dental professionals who can give you some nuggets of wisdom about creating a positive dental office environment. So, join the Nifty Thrifty Dentists Facebook group and reach out! People from all across the globe will be happy to let you in on their two cents.
