The Importance of Staff Meetings

Regularly scheduled staff meetings are essential to maintaining the effective day to day operations of a dental practice as well provide for the ongoing development of a dental practice. 

Staff meetings provide an important forum for problem solving and correcting day to day operational problems which are impossible to get in the middle of your day.  The ongoing correction of problem areas is essential to:

• Maintaining high standards of patient treatment, service and care.
• Maintaining high standards of teamwork and communication.

Staff meetings also provide the opportunity to work on the development of practice systems free from day to day operating pressures which is key to developing effective systems.   Developing effective systems also requires that teams follow planning, decision making and change management processes in order to effectively incorporate change.

Competitive Advantage

In today’s economy, you will find companies across a wide range of industries that have acquired competitive advantage with their industry groups and are doing phenomenally well.   

Studies demonstrate that many of these organizations acquired competitive advantage as a result of their continued focus and commitment to consistently providing their customers with quality products and services.

 On average, these organizations:

• Charge  10% -15% more for their products and services.
• Continually experience growth in their market share.
• Are more efficient and profitable than their competitors.
• Tend to be the leading innovators within their industry groups.

There have been slow downs for many of these companies but no recession.  The one factor that many of these organizations have in common is that they adopted "quality" and "service" as  a foundation for their business strategy - and have never looked back.

Boosting Practice Productivity

Attempting to manage a dental practice by the numbers alone is an exercise in futility.  The productivity of a dental practice is directly related to:

• How well the systems of a practice are defined.
• How well systems are followed.
• Training of staff members.

Enhancing practice productivity and stimulating growth requires a focus on improving the systems of a practice as well as investing into the training and development of staff members in order for results to be achieved and sustained over the long term.

It is impossible to enhance the productivity of a practice and sustain growth without a focused approach on improving systems.  Swings in practice productivity typically result from focusing on strategies that drive production without focusing on improving practice systems. 

Production driven strategies are typically short lived and do not compare with gains that are sustained over the long term by focusing on improving systems.

Setting and Monitoring Production Goals

Setting and monitoring production goals is an important component of any effective practice management system.  At the same time, production is only one of several measurements that is used to determine how well a practice is performing.

It is important to keep in perspective that production represents an outcome of how well a team is utilizing their systems in providing treatment, service and care to patients and not the focus for providing treatment, service, and care to patients. 

It is often assumed that attempting to achieve high levels of productivity necessitates compromising the standards of treatment, service and care provided to patients.  However, from a systems perspective, the opposite is true.   It is important to keep in mind that the implementation of systems enables dental teams to more efficiently and effectively deliver service and care to patients.  This directly results in increased levels of practice productivity along with decreased levels of inefficiency and stress.

Production goals can be used as guidelines to help team members understand how well their systems are performing.    They play an important role in the  monitoring of the effectiveness of practice systems and preventing slippage from occurring.

Team Spirit

In order for a team to be truly successful, it is important for team members to be committed to the success of their team in addition to their own success.  Successful teams understand that individual aspirations for success and team goals are interdependent and not mutually exclusive.

It takes the individual commitment of a group of people towards a common goal to function and accomplish as a team.  It takes the individual commitment to the success of a team superseding ones individual success, to excel as a team.

From this viewpoint, every team member shares the responsibility of either serving patients (external customers) or providing service to someone who is serving patients (internal customers).

“When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.”

                                                                                         Joe Paterno