Australasian Dentist Issue 93

CATEGORY AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST 119 BEST PRACTICES Q&A Dr Toni Surace the Managing Director of Momentum Management. Momentum is the premier dental practice management consultancy and training firm in Australia. Momentum has been empowering dentists in Australia and New Zealand to reach their professional, personal and financial goals for over 18 years. On average, Momentum clients increase production by 30-40% and achieve a 579% return on investment from the Momentum Practice Management Program. If you would like to learn more about Momentum Management programs, call 1300 519 000, and request a free 1-hour consultation with an experienced coach. D ear Dr Toni, How do you get your team to perform well? I am way too busy to be constantly checking up on them! Dr TL, NSW This is something that a lot of practice owners ask me! And you’re right that your time is valuable and can’t be spent constantly chasing staff. The best thing you can do is set them up for success right from the beginning. I notice that often practices that have hired well sometimes struggle to get teammembers functioning well. What’s often missing is: u Complete, thorough induction; and/or u Well-planned, well-executed training. It’s common to cut corners here is for exactly the reason you said: you’re too busy. Taking the time to plan feels hard, so new recruits get thrown into the deep end. The problem with that is that it often takes more time to undo mistakes than it would have to set things up well. In short: if there’s no time to do it right, there’s no time to do it over. When it comes to induction, develop a thorough checklist that can work for every new hire. If you do a thorough one once, you can keep using it on an ongoing basis. The list should aim to answer this question: what does any new team member need to know about working here?This can include: u Expectations about uniforms u Car parking arrangements u Who has keys to the practice u Mobile phone policy u How to report absences u How to apply for leave u An indication that they have read and understand legal policies (e.g. EEO, anti-bullying, OHS policies). This is just the beginning! Be as thorough as you can, and make sure that each new recruit gets the full induction process. If you’re busy, ask your existing team, “What do we need to do to make sure that the new person gets the thorough induction? How can we make it happen even when we’re busy?” Similarly, training should be planned to be as thorough as possible. Remind yourselves that no-one has time to fix mistakes; preventing them is way less stressful. Create a training chart by: 1. Breaking the job description down into individual tasks. 2. Prioritising those tasks. Aim to stagger the training over 6-8 weeks, and use the high-priority tasks to identify what you will train in the first day, and what will be trained by the end of the first week. 3. Keep working through the priorities so that you have included all the tasks that need to be trained over about 6-8 weeks. 4. Work with the team to identify who can train the new person in those tasks. Do you have training videos they can watch, or manuals they can work through? Is there any support from external sources (e.g. your software support people) who could help here? Remember: the aim of training is to ensure that new recruits can fulfil that task on the job on an ongoing basis. It’s not enough to just show or tell the person what to do; you have to make sure that they feel capable of doing it, and that they can demonstrate to you that they can do it. Practice owners often complain to me that someone isn’t doing a task well, and say “But I don’t know how many times I told them how to do it”, or “They watched my senior DA turn a room around and they didn’t have any questions, so why can’t they do it?” What’s happened here is that the new person has been told or shown, but they haven’t been supported in developing the skill to a level at which they are actually competent on the job. Again, it can feel really time-consuming and difficult to conduct effective induction and training, but you’re better off doing that than having a new person making mistakes that you then have to fix. If you take on the mindset that prevention is always better than cure (just like in dentistry!), you can design induction and training processes that allow you to get consistently excellent results. u For further information on Momentum Management, visit www.momentummanagement.com . au or call 1300 510 000 for details on short courses, Momentum’s Management Program, coaching packages, short courses, in-practice visits, or other ways in which Momentum can assist you. “