Struggling to find reliable & motivated staff? Losing even one good employee can quickly spiral into less patient satisfaction, less profit, and more stress. Here’s how to do it:
Struggling to find reliable & motivated staff? Losing even one good employee can quickly spiral into less patient satisfaction, less profit, and more stress.
These proven staffing strategies, once implemented, can immediately take stress off your back and increase your practice’s productivity. Here’s how:
If you had to choose over the ultra skilled dentist, that came all the way from the other side of the world and with a bit of an attitude, or a dentist who’s good enough, is a local and also very friendly and good with people, who would you choose?
You see, technical skills are something that is easier to learn.
“When hiring, weigh candidates based on 80% attitude and cultural fit, 20% technical skill. Technical skills can always be taught – attitude rarely changes.
Every candidate who’s open to dedicate themselves - even if they’re not perfect now, has the time to get better technically under your apprentice, while keeping the advantage that he’s a local and will relate easiest to your patients and the clinic values.
What I’ve, seen from the clinics I work with, is that highly skilled candidates are perfect for specialized roles that require minimal teamwork, but most positions demand someone who fits your practice culture first.
This also improves staff retention, because they align with the practice’s values easier and are naturally more engaged and motivated to do a good job for the local reputation of the clinic.
I don’t know how you onboard your staff (and every owner has their way of doing it), but the most important thing you can have for your staff to make sure they build discipline to do a good job for years and years to come - is to have an onboarding checklist.
This checklist is very simple to make, here are the points I recommend:
Not doing this will cost you in staff turnover, lower productivity and poor patient experience, so don’t skip it.
You can adjust to your particular style, this is a rough guideline you can use.
And also, another thing you need to consider is:
This will massively help to build your staff and overall good will between the team. It’s easy to implement, just make sure you open up and speak.
Every week, when you can reunite everyone together, go over these two things to boost the morale and better the patient experience (you can do it in less than 10 minutes):
Along with this, you should encourage feedback loops into your staff - ask what they are comfortable doing, what they feel could be changed or improved, and what they want to learn or do training on.
This will help you to incrementally improve the skill and keep motivation high for your staff, as they feel they have a bigger purpose than just doing the job.
So, to make sure you start actually using this next time you need it, write this down somewhere you’ll remember:
If you want me to help you out directly, you can book a free clinic review by clicking here and filling out the form. We’ll schedule a call and go over a bunch of questions to see what makes sense for you.
