Archive for Benefits for Dental Team
Dental Benefits for the Team
Posted by: | CommentsThis is one of the most confusing systems in our profession. Many offices spell out vague guidelines for their team to use. Many stipulate that they can have dental coverage for “immediate” family members. The definition of “immediate” family needs to be spelled out so misunderstandings are limited.
Many offices provide dental care for the entire dental team. This system can cause problems within the team if one team member has had some significant neglect. A team member who is not at a very high level of oral health will receive a lot of care and a large benefit. While a team member who has taken great care of their mouth may only require minimal dental treatment and not use this benefit.
Consider providing the same amount of benefit for all of the employees. You can provide a consistent dollar amount each year to be used by your team. For example, you could stipulate that you will provide them with $2000.00 of dental treatment each year. They can use those dollars for their care or for their immediate family. Once they use up the thousand dollars, they will be responsible for paying the remaining portion in cash.
Part time employees are typically not entitled to any benefits. You will need to determine what you would like to provide for them, if anything.
Please know that we are not discouraging benefits to your team. In fact, we encourage them! We simply encourage you to put systems and structures in place that are equitable for all of your team members.
Don’t forget the compensation benefits that don’t show up on your employee’s paycheck. These items are called “Hidden Paycheck” items and your dental care benefits are only one example of this.
Employees may overlook the benefits provided to them by their employers. By incorporating these items into your compensation review, it allows the employee to see the whole compensation picture for what it really is. Many times the hidden paycheck items can add up to 35 percent of their earnings, and most of it is tax-free.
Example of a Compensation Review – Preliminary Offer
Annual Base Salary Offered $__________________
Employer Matching FICA $__________________
Profitability Pay when Available $___________________
Medical Premium Contribution $ ___________________
Pension Plan Contribution $ ___________________
Total Salary $___________________
The items listed below will not show up on your paycheck. But they are additional benefits provided to you by the doctor.
Uniform Allowance $ ___________________
Dental Care Allowance $ ___________________
Jury Duty – Bereavement Pay $ ___________________
Parking Garage Fees $ ___________________
Continuing Education $ ___________________
Total Compensation $____________________________
Pension Participation Date ___________________
Coaching Department; The Schuster Center
The Blessed Dental Staff Meeting
Posted by: | Comments
Part 1 of 2
Several years ago Mike and I were discussing staff meetings and he suggested to me that if possible he would take the staff to lunch weekly. At the time I thought that it would be too often, and my attempt at weekly was not received as I anticipated. I am writing here to share my experience with this pearl of an idea with you as to the untold benefits that it can bring you and your practice.
After trying for weekly I asked my receptionist to schedule it as often as possible. Four years later we are now consistently doing this twice a month. We go to breakfast or lunch with each meal having a different advantage. We allow an hour for breakfast and one and a half hours for lunch. Lunch needs more time as we may not consistently be able to leave on time due to patient treatment.
Breakfast has distinct advantages over lunch that are important. We have our staff huddle for the day before we leave the office for this meal to be ready for the day. The major advantage of this meal time is that for the most part no member of the staff has had to receive any stress from a patient. This is a very important fact. The breakfast meeting allows for exchange that is not tainted with patient stress and their behavior. The breakfast time allows for personal exchange that is most important. These meals do not have an agenda related to business. For the most part we do not talk business as this is a time for socializing.
Occasionally, I will bring issues that affect our team dynamics. Whenever you have group dynamics, you will have friction. It is inevitable that this occurs, and it is the handling of this problem that is important to your practice. You may have considerable different ages with your staff, and the problems at home do differ with age. Some of your staff may have teenagers at home, and some may have adult children who have left the nest only to return with their children and different stresses. It is good to become a supportive, interactive group with a concern for the mental and physical health of each member of the staff. The breakfast meeting facilitates this interaction if it is laced with honesty from each member. This is the essence of handling interpersonal friction. Life is hard and it is suffering as the first great truth of Buddha states to his followers. Keeping this fact in mind with the group dynamic is invaluable.
Sharing must be honest for this meeting to be of help to your group, and it may take some time before everyone feels safe to be honest. You will have to allow time for this process to happen, and it will. Do not try to force this issue; it will only make things worse and stress staff members.
See Part 2 Coming Soon!
Maximize Weekly Staff Meetings
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the goals of the Schuster Management Program is to teach your team to better define your practice systems, thereby enabling you to work in unison toward a common goal of success. Staff meetings not only allow opportunities for enhancing communication within your practice but they give your employees an environment of predictability and stability. A common comment we hear from our graduates is that after they have completed the Management Program, they are not certain what they should be working on during staff meeting times. The purpose of this article is to give you some suggestions and topics to ensure the success of your staff meetings for years to come!
1. Case Studies - Many of our clients have told us how much they have benefited by reviewing a completed case as a team. Questions such as, “What could we have done better relative to the patient’s treatment”, and “Clinically, what could we have done to improve the outcome?” are great customer service questions.
2. Recare Review - Once a month, the hygienist should report on the patients who were due for hygiene this month, who is accounted for and who is now missing in action. What is their strategy for contacting those patients and more importantly, why did they not respond to the retention efforts?
3. Structured Messages - This should be an ongoing project. You created a number of messages during your Management Program but your practice has an enormous opportunity to refine and create more as a team. Many offices only use structured messages for phone conversations but you can use these for virtually any face-to-face interaction. The format can be used to help with your pre-clinical interviews, chair-side education, and financial arrangement conversations.
4. Communication – Your ability to communicate your thoughts, feelings, ideas, values and beliefs are determined by how well your practice runs. We often limit ourselves by only thinking about how we communicate person to person. However, you might consider reviewing all of your printed materials to check for the consistency of the appearance and the message you are sending. Your web site, yellow page ad, signage, phone messages, collection calls, etc. should be evaluated on a consistent interval.
5. Career Development - The best practices hire and retain the best people as employees and are responding quickly to changing market conditions. The doctors are not satisfied with the status quo. They continually upgrade facilities, processes, and the skill of their employees. Many of my doctors lament about not having enough time to get trained on power point or digital photography. Why not send a team member?? Don’t forget to invest in talent and keep them intellectually challenged. Many of my best clients have mismanaged very talented team members by not investing in their development. Take time to plan out your employee’s career path so they continue to be renewed and recommitted to your practice.
The opportunities for creating the practice of your dreams are unprecedented. But so are the difficulties, for competition is more intense than ever. The critical success factor for your practice is the quality of your team. Authentic team members who are mature and committed will make your vision become a reality. However without meaningful staff meetings in place, your opportunities for success will be limited.
Dental Practice Followership
Posted by: | CommentsDentist – Being a good leader requires good followers!
At first glance, Followership seems to be the antithesis of Leadership. In sharp contrast to leadership, there is a dearth of writing on the art of following. The superhighway is replaced by the dirt track. While some authors make reference to it in their writings on leadership, relatively few have focused on the follower as a key player in successful leadership.
Developing an adequate definition of a “follower” is made difficult because the concept is seen as trivial, obvious and lacking substance. The words “minion”, “subjection”, “underling”, may come to mind when conceptualizing followership. The following definition draws on the thoughts of R. Kelley (not to be confused with the singer), a major contributor to the literature on the role of the follower.
“A follower is one who pursues a course of action in common with a leader to achieve an organizational goal. Effective followers make an active decision to contribute towards the achievement of the goals and demonstrate enthusiasm, intelligence, self-reliance and the ability to work with others in pursuit of the goal. Effective followers recognize the authority of the leader and limitations this imposes on their own actions, consider all issues on their merits, make their own decisions, hold their own values, speak their minds and hold themselves accountable for the consequences for their actions.”
In other words, effective followers, given the necessary information and room to move, can be trusted to take independent action to achieve a specific objective, subject to their receiving ongoing assistance and support to resolve issues beyond their spheres of competence and influence and to their receiving recognition for the work they are doing. It is important to note that while the behavior of the followers may be seen to be simply doing as they are told, their actions are the result of independent thought and decision making and would have been seen the same in the absence of the direction from the leader.
Followers actively evaluate their leaders and in many cases find their performance below par. Often it is the limitations imposed by a leader that stops the follower from performing at their best. From the follower’s viewpoint, effective leaders embrace them as partners and are influenced by their words and actions. Effective followers choose to follow a good leader (regardless of whether their participation in the team is a matter of choice) and accept all the consequences of that decision. In exchange, followers want their leaders to share information, involve them in decision making and create working environments in which the efforts of the followers are recognized, respected and rewarded.
Principles of ideal followership include:
*Demonstrating respect
*Thinking win/win
*Working within the system
*Acting proactively to fulfill or exceed expectations
*Appreciating differences
*Striving for a common goal (one shared with leaders)
*Recognizing authority leaders possess
*Being enthusiastic about organizational goals without complete reliance on the leader
*Recognizing the hierarchy of leadership while becoming a self-motivated mini-leader
Followers must have the confidence to speak out. They understand the necessity of the discomfort they may feel while communicating concisely with the leader, and they realize their role in helping the leader to make better decisions. Having the fortitude to speak candidly with the leader also comprises a leadership trait. Followers, according to this point of view, must regard silence as unacceptable. Becoming an “effective” follower within the leader/follower conceptual universe takes just as much work as becoming an “effective” leader.
–For more information on effective dental practice management and team development, go to www.SchusterCenter.com or simply call 1-800-288-9393.
Golden Dental Team Meetings
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the goals of the Schuster Management Program is to teach your dental team to better define your practice systems, thereby enabling you to work in unison toward a common goal of success. Team meetings not only allow opportunities for enhancing communication within your dental practice, but they give your employees an environment of predictability and stability. A common comment we hear from our graduates is that after they have completed the Management Program they are not certain what they should be you some suggestions and topics to ensure the success of your staff meetings for years to come.
- Case Studies – Many of our clients have told us how much they have benefited by reviewing a completed case as a team. Questions such as “what could we have done better relative to the patient’s treatment”, and “clinically, what could we have done to imworking on during staff meeting times. The purpose of this article is to give prove the outcome” are great customer service questions.
- Recare review – Once a month the hygienist (or whoever works the recare system) should report on the patients who were due for hygiene this month, who is accounted for and who is now missing in action. What is the strategy for contacting those patients and more importantly why did they not respond to the retention efforts?
- Structured Messages – This should be an on-going project. You created a number of messages during your practice management training, but your practice has an enormous opportunity to refine and create more together as a team. Many offices only use structured messages for phone conversations. But you can use these for virtually any face-to-face interaction. The format can be used to help with your pre-clinical interviews, chair side education, and financial arrangement conversations.
- Communication – Your ability to communicate your thoughts, feelings, ideas, values and beliefs are determined by how well your practice runs. We often limit ourselves by only thinking about how we communicate person to person. However, you might review all of your printed materials to check for the consistency of the appearance and the message you are sending. Your web site, yellow page ad, signage, phone messages, collection calls, etc. should be evaluated on a consistent basis.
- Career Development – The best dental practices hire and retain the best people as employees and are responding quickly to changing market conditions. The doctors are not satisfied with the status quo. They continually upgrade facilities, processes, and the skill of their employees. Many of our doctors lament about not having enough time to get trained on power point or digital photography. Why not send a team member?? Don’t forget to invest in talent and keep them intellectually challenged. Many of our best clients have mismanaged very talented team members by not investing in their development. Take time to plan out your employee’s career path so they continue to be renewed and recommitted to your practice.
The opportunities for creating the dental practice of your dreams are unprecedented. But so are the difficulties, for competition is more intense than ever. The critical success factor for your practice is the quality of your team. Authentic team members who are mature and committed will make your vision become a reality. However without effective staff meetings in place, your opportunities to tap into the goldmine called YOUR TEAM will be limited.
—Article submitted by the Coaching Department at The Schuster Center. Feel free to comment here or contact us at www.schustercenter.com
Practice Listening in your Practice
Posted by: | Comments“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They are either speaking or preparing to speak.” –Stephen Covey
The fact that we have two ears and only one mouth should clue us in to how important listening is as a skill. But we often fall short in this area, especially in the dental practice.
Listening is an active process which has three basic steps:
1. Hearing. Just listening enough to catch what the speaker is saying.
2. Understanding. The next part of listening happens when you take what you have heard and understand it in your own way.
3. Judging. After you are sure you understand what the speaker has said, think about whether it makes sense. Do you believe what you heard?
As is indicated by the quote at the beginning of this article, even the best of listeners sometimes make this mistake: they hear a few sentences, assume that they know where the speaker is going, jump to a conclusion that may well be incorrect. Such erroneous assumptions can breed unhappy consequences; misunderstandings, lost insights, frustration—even anger. When this happens at the organizational level, results can be disastrous says the editor of Sssh! Listen Up! (The newsletter of HighGain Inc. a company dedicated to better listening in business). The fact that there are companies whose primary focus is to help create better listeners in the business arena speaks to how important this skill is.
We all believe we are good listeners. And most people won’t tell you that you are a poor listener. So we have to monitor ourselves. The ability to listen effectively is not something we are born with. Listening is actually as complicated a communication skill as reading, writing and speaking.
Active listening was selected as the most critical managerial skill by 282 members of the Academy of Certified Administrative managers. In another survey, 170 business people were asked to select 1) the most important communication skill they were presently engaged in at work and 2) the communication skill they wished they had studied more. Listening was the number one answer to both questions.
There is a big difference between listening and LISTENING. Most people practice the former, paying little attention to what is being said by others while busily planning their own reply. The latter, however, is an art and a skill—and the effective application of it can and will improve your work life and the dental practice.
For instance, if you carefully listen to what patients have to say—paying particular attention to what they want—they’ll end up trusting and buying from you because they feel that you understand and care about their needs.
Lee Iacocca, former chairman of Chrysler, claims that “Listening is the single skill that makes the difference between a mediocre and a great company.”
Another positive way in which listening works in business: when you listen to the people who work for you, their productivity and quality of work tends to improve. Why? Because in an open and accepting LISTENING environment, honest opinions and new ideas arise, are heard and discussed, and when appropriate, acted upon. This in turn, helps to decrease and even dissolve team conflicts.
You probably spend more time using your listening skills than any other kind of skill. Like other skills, listening takes practice. You cannot be passive in the process of listening. You must decide to make it an active process. Plan to listen more each day—consciously attempting to listen more will accustom you to the process of listening and provide you with valuable practice.
Remember: time is on your side! Thoughts move about four times as fast as speech. With practice, while you are listening you will also be able to think about what you are hearing, really understand it and give feedback to the dental team member or dental patient.
References: FactMonster.com
Sssh! Listen Up! (From HighGain Inc)
Dental Benefits for the Team
Posted by: | CommentsThis is one of the most confusing systems in our profession. Many offices spell out vague guidelines for their team to use. Many stipulate that they can have dental coverage for “immediate” family members. The definition of “immediate” family needs to be spelled out so misunderstandings are limited.
Many offices provide dental care for the entire dental team. This system can cause problems within the team if one team member has had some significant neglect. A team member who is not at a very high level of oral health will receive a lot of care and a large benefit. While a team member who has taken great care of their mouth may only require minimal dental treatment and not use this benefit.
Consider providing the same amount of benefit for all of the employees. You can provide a consistent dollar amount each year to be used by your team. For example, you could stipulate that you will provide them with $2000.00 of dental treatment each year. They can use those dollars for their care or for their immediate family. Once they use up the thousand dollars, they will be responsible for paying the remaining portion in cash.
Part time employees are typically not entitled to any benefits. You will need to determine what you would like to provide for them, if anything.
Please know that we are not discouraging benefits to your team. In fact, we encourage them! We simply encourage you to put systems and structures in place that are equitable for all of your team members.
Don’t forget the compensation benefits that don’t show up on your employee’s paycheck. These items are called “Hidden Paycheck” items and your dental care benefits are only one example of this.
Employees may overlook the benefits provided to them by their employers. By incorporating these items into your compensation review, it allows the employee to see the whole compensation picture for what it really is. Many times the hidden paycheck items can add up to 35 percent of their earnings, and most of it is tax-free.
Example of a Compensation Review – Preliminary Offer
Annual Base Salary Offered
$__________________
Employer Matching FICA
$ __________________
Profitability Pay when Available
$___________________
Medical Premium Contribution
$ ___________________
Pension Plan Contribution
$ ___________________
Total Salary
$___________________
The items listed below will not show up on your paycheck. But they are additional benefits provided to you by the doctor.
Uniform Allowance
$ ___________________
Dental Care Allowance
$ ___________________
Jury Duty – Bereavement Pay
$ ___________________
Parking Garage Fees
$ ___________________
Continuing Education
$ ___________________
Total Compensation $____________________________
Pension Participation Date ___________________
Coaching Department; The Schuster Center
