Culture is important in any business—dental practice or not. It’s what makes your business sustainable; it’s how you build your team and how you keep your clients coming back.
Without culture, your team won’t stay with you—good luck depending on staff coming into work with a smile on their face and offering their optimal level of performance. Likewise, you’ll sabotage your chances of building a patient base that consistently sends their friends and family your way.
Needless to say, avoiding toxic work environments and building a healthy dental practice culture is crucial for the success of your practice. Work is work, but it doesn’t need to be an environment that no one is looking forward to coming into—you can have a fun office with a team who is excited to come into work. But that takes building a good culture, and it’s not something that’s easy to do. That’s why, for this week’s article, I want to give you three pointers for building a healthy culture in your dental practice.
1. Realize that culture doesn’t scale easily—focusing too much on growth can bite you in the butt.
Young dental entrepreneurs often get a splash of water in the face during their first couple of years of practice ownership. They’re so passionate about their dental practice and everyone around them is passionate but, then all the sudden, they try to scale. They want to grow and welcome more team members or bring on more doctors and they suddenly realize the culture isn’t scaling. The culture was contingent upon them but now they’re stretched too thin and it becomes a very unhappy day-to-day practice. This is especially challenging when considering dental practice partnerships.
The relationship between the office manager and the doctor and how strong of leaders they are—what their values are, how they get along, and how they relate to the rest of the team—is a practice’s “culture” in a nutshell. However, scaling leadership and integrity from office to office is so difficult—transplanting those values from one office to the next is one of the biggest challenges any dental entrepreneur will run into. If you focus too much on growing your practice or building some sort of dental empire, just know that the strong culture you’ve worked so hard to build is going to require some lag time to catch up.
2. Put your mission and dental practice core values physically “front and center” in your office.
As I said, the more people you bring on, the more your mission will get diluted—new perspectives start getting into the mix and different takes on your values start to cause disarray.
It sounds simple, but just putting your core values front and center in your office can be super effective at building culture. When your hygienist or assistant or front desk team member has to walk by those values everyday, and they’re in front of everyone’s faces, they’re bound to start remembering them.
All too often, a mission or core values will get written on something somewhere in the back room, be buried in some document about who you are, or just get placed on your website’s “About Us” page. You may discuss them during onboarding, but then they’re never brought up again. Putting them front and center is putting your money where your mouth is; it’s saying, “This is what we’re all about and we’re living it, it’s right in front of us, and we can’t get away from it.”
This approach reinforces dental practice team values and helps create a cohesive work environment, and it’s also part of effective hiring practices for dental teams—it helps new hires understand and align with your practice’s values from day one.
3. Going above and beyond in making your team members feel valued will reduce staff turnover in your dental practice.
A good practice culture is going to be one of the big differentiators when they’re choosing an employer. It’s important to remember that you aren’t the only practice around, and other practices may be offering better pay. If you can offer an environment they’re happy to come into, you can count on experiencing less turnover overall.
But having a good culture goes beyond being friendly or—to repeat myself—taking measures like putting your mission and values loud and proud in your office. Having a good culture often boils down to having a team that feels passionate about being there and as though they’re a valued member of your practice—that they’re important. And the best way to make your team feel important is by not only getting to know them on a personal level but rewarding them in thoughtful ways once you get to know them more personally. When you know all about someones hobbies outside of work or what how they spend their weekends, you’ll be able to come up with thoughtful gestures that could potentially mean a lot to them.
For example, maybe you know one of your team members has always fantasized about seeing the catacombs in Paris. In that case, for a Christmas bonus, instead of doing a lump sum payment, you could buy them and their spouse tickets to Paris. Alternatively, if you know a staff member has just had a kid, maybe you can give them some extra PTO or let them leave earlier so they can take care of their child.
Creative gifts like these will go a long way and help your team to important, and it might make the difference between them leaving your practice or staying along for the ride. It goes beyond reducing turnover, however: the happier an employee is, the better their work (and productivity) will be. These efforts significantly improve dental practice environment and foster loyalty among your team.
A healthy culture starts with a healthy mindset.
Don’t forget that no one can pour from an empty cup. When it comes to building a healthy dental practice culture, it starts with you. Before you focus on making your team full of healthy mindsets, you must first build a healthy mindset for yourself. This mindset is crucial for success in entrepreneurship in dentistry.
I run a community full of dental professionals who can give you some nuggets of wisdom about building a healthy culture in a dental practice. So, join the Nifty Thrifty Dentists Facebook group and reach out! People from all across the globe will be happy to let you in on their two cents about how to improve your dental practice environment and reinforce dental practice team values.
