Keeping Your Dental Staff Motivated & Excited to Work
Following up on last week’s blog How to Keep Dental Patients Coming Back, this week we will be discussing the importance that employee satisfaction and motivation plays on a dental practice. As well as five key tips and tricks to help with maintaining happy and motivated dental staff, so you can keep your employees excited to come to work.
Research shows that employee satisfaction and dental team performance can be used as a metric to determine the health and success of a company. This makes it essential for dental practices to maintain a happy and motivated work environment and a strong team. The next five tips will go over ways to keep your team members engaged and excited about the work that is being done at your dental practice.
5 Tips to Improve Dental Team Performance
1. Having a Great Office
One of the easiest ways to keep your dental practice employees excited to come to work every day is by maintaining a clean and inviting office. With a majority of the week spent at work, no one wants to be stuck in an outdated, bleak office with little sunshine or excitement.
Employees want to work for a company that they are proud to represent, and the state of the office plays a role in this. Fortunately, sprucing things up can be as simple as a fresh coat of paint or adding new furniture. Adding a routine cleaning or the occasional deep cleaning service can be the cherry on top of working for an awesome dentist.
2. Great Technology and Equipment
Having an outlet for fast and easy communication makes things simpler for the team and makes it harder to have miscommunications. Some companies opt for using Microsoft Teams or Slack for office communication, but there should be a sure way of reaching each other whenever needed. This helps ease any issues with someone not being able to be reached, even when they are out of the office.
With this, another way to keep employee satisfaction high is by ensuring that all dental and office equipment is high quality and fully functional. This also helps with employee engagement and can help keep things fun around the office by using new modern equipment. This allows dental staff to focus on more important things than trying to get technology or a machine to work, which takes away any unnecessary stress.
3. Strong Company Culture
An additional aspect of having high employee satisfaction is to keep employees engaged on a more personal level with each other and the company. This can be done by creating a strong company culture and various team-building events or activities. Through this, employees can start to learn more about each other, which is beneficial for the practice overall by creating a strong team bond among them.
Having a strong team component helps practices run smoother and makes it easier to tackle any issues that might come up. Plus, by learning the dental practice’s story and history, employees are more likely to be involved with the practice’s success and be better prepared to speak about the company when asked by patients or other inquirers.
4. Employee Satisfaction Surveys
Another great idea for maintaining high employee satisfaction among dental practice employees is by allowing them to communicate anything that they are not happy with. This can be done by occasionally giving employee satisfaction surveys. There are many online survey forms to choose from, or you can even design your own. Offering these surveys gives people a chance to anonymously speak their minds about what they are not happy with, without fear getting in the way of them voicing their concerns.
This also allows practice owners to see what is and isn’t working for the team and make necessary changes as they come up. As well as what is working for your particular team, so you can find ways to continue highlighting those aspects. Allowing for open communication, without fear of retribution, adds a level of trust and respect among the team which abundantly benefits the practice.
5. Encouraging Education
Encouraging your staff to continue with their education offers many benefits for your dental practice. One way education can help is by keeping everyone engaged and excited to keep learning. Employees are more likely to be satisfied with the work they are doing if they are encouraged to use new skills and technology that continue advancing their industry knowledge.
This could be done by investing your team in various seminars or training opportunities, doubling as a team bonding experience. Research also shows that encouraging further education increases employee satisfaction and reduces turnover rates, which subsequently decreases recruiting and onboarding expenses.
Use these 5 tips to increase your employee satisfaction and dental team performance!
