Get smart with your staff: Part 2 -- 4 key management tips

In the first part of this series, Kevin Tighe of Cambridge Dental Consultants discussed how to look at staff disagreements and noncompliance in terms of the bigger picture of practice productivity. In part two, he offers four easy-to-implement, common sense management tips to improve the efficiency, productivity, and profitability of your practice.

1. Time is money

It is the small things that add up to consuming vast amounts of time, and as we all know: Time is money. Too often, staff members look busy but are in fact simply handling unnecessary work they needlessly generate caused by inefficiencies, lack of training, and so on.

Kevin Tighe is a managing partner at Cambridge Dental Consultants.

Some examples that generate unnecessary work are listed below:

• Lab case is not in the office when the patient arrives.
• A message is taken but not given to the correct person.
• A patient leaves the office without an appointment.
• The patient's phone number is incorrect.
• There is incomplete information in charts.
• Incomplete insurance information has been submitted.
• Appointments are not confirmed.
• Insurance is not verified.
• Patient health history is not completed.
• Financial arrangements are not made.
• Treatment plan sequence is not written up.
• Incomplete treatment is not followed up.
• Extra dentistry services are delivered in the back, but front desk is not notified.

Part of being an excellent leader and executive is seeing that employees are provided with effective on-the-job training and overseeing routine quality control of them as employees.

2. Focus on one area

It can be difficult, but fight the impulse to address multiple issues at the same time. When there is a downtrend, practice owners tend to try to fix more than one area at time. The best approach is to find one area to focus on. For example, if doctor productivity is your focus, fight the impulse to address other issues, such as marketing, continuing care, or financial arrangements, at the same time.

3. Active feedback

If you wait until the end of the month to notice that none of your plans was implemented or effective, expect your team to get upset. When it comes to coaching your team to excellence, you must be active and timely with your observations and feedback.

If on the first day of the new month, you have added $1,500 in new treatment to the schedule, you need to praise your team's progress, analyze the success points, and reinforce the remainder of the plan.

4. Monitoring the numbers

Monitoring numbers is one of the most important functions a practice owner has. It's all about control and keeping an eye on achieving certain goals. How to "read" the numbers and decide what actions to take depend on what the numbers tell you.

Statistics are like x-rays or a car dashboard. Statistics tell you and the employee what's going on in a specific area of the practice. If a statistic is trending down, then it is likely that something changed, which means you need to figure out what changed and get it back.

This often happens when someone new takes over a position and changes things, or some successful action is changed or stopped.

As an example, you see that the new patients statistic is trending down. You know that handing out referral cards is a successful internal marketing action, so you look into it and discover that referral cards are no longer being handed out. Obviously, you want you get that fixed quickly and implement changes so that successful action does not drop out again.

A smart fix would be to assign responsibility to one employee so there's accountability. You would also be wise to set a quota in your morning huddle for the number of cards handed out on a daily and weekly basis, as well as having the statistic of "number of referral cards handed out" reported daily at your morning huddle.

Dealing with staff issues is not fun. In fact, I think it's what dentists like the least about owning a practice. I've had clients who have literally gotten ulcers at the thought of disciplining or dismissing an employee. The good news is that, even if you are not a natural-born leader, you can still learn enough management and executive skills so that you are able to get smart with your staff.

Kevin Tighe is a managing partner at Cambridge Dental Consultants. He can be reached at [email protected].

The comments and observations expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions of DrBicuspid.com, nor should they be construed as an endorsement or admonishment of any particular idea, vendor, or organization.