If you ever get the chance to visit the offices of a large corporation you will probably be quick to notice the size of the cube farms occupied by an army of bored looking employees. And why shouldn't they be bored, there are hundreds of them in tiny cubicles entering data or answering help lines. If you're from the dental world and you are exposed to this scene from a dreary forced labor camp, the first thing that comes to mind is how do they get all of these people to be fully productive. The answer to this question is usually that they don't get them to maximize their performance, they just pay them accordingly.
I mention this phenomenon because too many dental offices have outgrown their ability to supervise their ever growing contingent of employees. No, there are no cube farms in dentistry but you can experience the same frustration corporate supervisors face when they're charged with getting under supervised employees to perform at or near their potential. In dentistry, staff's performance falls along a continuum ranging from lackluster, near stupor-like zombies, all the way to highly motivated, compassionate employees with a laser focus on customer service. Unfortunately, they all want top pay. If you're normal, you're probably so busy triaging patients that you don't really know where you're staff fall along this continuum. You may not, but I'll bet your patients know where they fall.
What are the symptoms of an under supervised dental office?
1st: Inability to implement new systems. You return from a practice building meeting with a three ring binder filled with great ideas, only to find that staff humor your enthusiasm, but put off implementation until you've lost your zeal for the new programs.
2nd: Barely disguised hostility toward other team members. The office runs more like a sand lot football game with no referees. New staff are especially vulnerable to the natural abuse veteran staff are likely to dish out to the uninitiated. It's not unusual for a sorority like environment to set in with an unendurable hazing in store for the new arrivals.
3rd: Staff pick and choose which patients they will connect with. In the under supervised office, staff will go out of their way for people they would normally like if they met them outside of the office. Those who remind them of someone who has previously mistreated them, are treated with barely disguised contempt. This isn't an indication of how corrupt a staff person is, it's simply the natural outcome of the unprofessional environment that arrises when no one's in charge.
4th: Staff defaulting to a reduced work load. This is actually worse than it sounds. A reduced work load in this case refers to staff consciously or unconsciously failing to do their part to push for daily production. This can be as simple as front desk staff failing to check with the clinical staff to determine if an emergency or same-day opportunity can be accommodated.
5th: Staff mistakenly believing that they're super stars: In the under managed offices I've visited I'm always impressed at how many people who I would quickly identify as needing to be fired, are instead, at the head of the line of those demanding higher pay. In their supervisory vacuum, they've reinvented themselves as irreplaceable workhorses, when in fact, they're anything but.
No, dentists are not cube farmers, but their inability to maximize team productivity can easily match that of a sprawling nest of under worked corporate employees. So, what's the answer to this problem? Simply this, appoint a member of your staff as the leader of the practice or of a department. Yes, I know, you don't have a single person on staff with a management background. Not to worry, the best leaders in Whitehall have little or no management background. In the majority of offices I've encountered, they're better off with poor leaders than having no one in charge. In the leadership vacuum of dentistry, a nasty feral community grows up to eventually block all hopes of practice growth.
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