Fostering a positive dental office culture and work environment is essential to building a successful practice. Your patients’ experience in your office is directly tied to your mood and that of your staff. Your patients will notice if you feel overworked or unheard! A toxic work environment makes it harder to keep long-term employees.
What can you do to build a positive culture that will keep your employees energized and enthusiastic about work? How can you maintain that energy day to day and year over year? Community Dental Partners can help you with a few simple shifts to create a positive dental office culture and avoid burnout for the dentist and the whole clinical team.
Burnout: Is It Really a Problem?
Long story short: YES! Burnout is a potentially massive problem for dentists and clinical staff in general. Burnout has affected dentists, hygienists, and assistants at increasingly high rates. According to a study from the American Dental Association, 86% of dentists experience at least one instance of abnormally high stress in a given year.
What is burnout, and how does it differ from everyday stress? Stress happens. It’s just part of life. It should feel manageable and not affect your ability to do your job well. It might last a few days, but it usually fades once you resolve the challenge causing it.
Burnout is a chronic psychological syndrome characterized by exhaustion and lack of energy, the need to distance oneself from their job mentally, and a decrease in one’s ability to work effectively, according to J. William Claytor Jr., DDS, MAGD. Burnout contributes to errors in diagnosis and treatment. Dental providers experiencing burnout may struggle to connect with patients and coworkers and feel a heavy mental fog at work. Burnout can also affect personal relationships outside of work and negatively impact clinicians’ marriages and feelings toward their families.
To keep your practice running effectively and provide the best possible treatment for your patients, you must prevent burnout and maintain a positive environment in your practice.
How Will a Positive Dental Office Culture Benefit Your Practice?
Preventing burnout gives you and your staff the opportunity to perform at your best. In turn, you and your team will have the energy and enthusiasm to create a welcoming environment for your patients. Building a positive dental office culture can prevent burnout and keep your practice running effectively. Create a work environment that lets you look forward to work!
A positive dental office culture leads to better relationships among staff and a practice that feels energized and fulfilled, so you can better serve patients. A positive culture in your practice means less friction among all those moving parts, which means better production and lower turnover. Ultimately, reaching your practice’s highest potential begins with building its culture.
Building Your Dental Office Culture
A great culture is critical to achieving an enjoyable, profitable work environment. But how does great culture happen in a dental practice? It certainly doesn’t happen by accident!
Set a Clear Intention
It’s nearly impossible to reach a destination unless you know where you’re going. Setting an intention for your office culture gives you a focus point. A clear mission statement can serve as your touchstone when you feel your office needs a course correction. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Just a few short sentences that summarize your highest hopes for the work environment you want to create.
Once you’ve homed in on your priorities, write them down. You could share this with your team or patients, so they understand your values as a practitioner. Or you may choose to keep it for yourself. Either way, check in regularly with your mission to stay on track. It may need a little tweaking over time as you grow and your priorities change, but it’s a great way to keep your focus on what truly matters to you.
Practice Mindful Hiring
As you assemble your team, try to bring in coworkers you believe will share in your vision and augment your quest to achieve it. Surround yourself with clinicians and coordinators who share your empathy for patients and who can interact with genuine care for others. It may mean hiring an applicant with less experience, sometimes in favor of one whose personality shines.
Establish Consistent Protocols That Reinforce the Culture You Believe In
The psychology of motivation is complex. However, most people find motivation easier to access when they feel invested in their work. That means giving your team members a sense of investment in your practice and in each patient’s well-being. It means showing respect and faith in their ability to grow and develop those skills.
Culture Protocol: With Your Patients
Small gestures can reap tremendous results. When writing a patient’s hygiene treatment plan, try calling the hygienist aside to look at their images with you. Ask their opinion on what would benefit that patient most and how to plan their periodontal treatment. This doesn’t have to happen with every new patient, but even an occasional consultation shows you respect their expertise as a hygienist and value their input.
Culture Protocol: With Your Staff
Valuing your team’s input also means being receptive to critique. One of the primary sources of burnout for dental staff is feeling overworked or like they don’t have enough time to do their best. Dental practices must always tread that thin line between maximizing production and burning out their team. If your staff feels spread too thin, listen and work together to adjust what you can.
Build open communication with your staff and check in regularly. Listen when they share concerns and celebrate their successes. Consider bringing in donuts to celebrate an assistant’s great work! And don’t skip your morning huddles. A quick, five-minute meetup each morning can help put your team on the same page and make everyone aware of potential hurdles they may need to tackle together.
Maintaining a Positive Dental Office Culture Over Time
Like any successful relationship, maintaining a good dental office environment means consistent daily work. All too often, when things are going smoothly, we tend to get lazy. We start to let things slide. Then, before you know it, your team is lined up outside your door to complain about things going wrong, and the rising tension is evident the moment you walk into the office.
As discussed in a previous post, conflict management in dental practices is essential. Try to resolve problems peacefully and behind closed doors. Your team should feel comfortable voicing concerns and trust that you’ll hear them objectively and take them seriously. However, if you’ve established consistent expectations and protocols to preserve positivity, you should find it easier to prevent burnout and maintain a healthy, welcoming dental office environment.
At Community Dental Partners, we create an amazing experience defined by The Gold Standard. We’re on a mission to completely change how people interact with the dental industry. Schedule a call with a Hiring Manager today to learn how you can join one of our amazing offices and experience our culture.
