If you have a staff problem, it turns into a system problem. And vise versa. If you have a training problem there’s a good chance it will turn into a staff problem. Now, you have two things you have to handle. And very often, you have three things to handle— The Staff Infection, because people get upset and the problem gets bigger.
DON’T MISTAKENLY SOLVE THE WRONG PROBLEM
I have had hundreds of participants come for training and workshops for office administration, scheduling, accounts receivable and office manager training.
When we ask dentists and their staff members what they think their number one problem is they nearly always say it is getting good staff. This is a vast misconception. I have been teaching this for over twenty five years. After “preaching” this for over 25 years it is finally being proposed by many others. This misconception can be deadly and often is.
The problem is threefold but the number one problem is the lack of training of staff members. Another major problem is a lack of systems that are staff and patient user friendly. We must have and implement systems that mechanize practically everything in the office and adopt these systems as standard procedures and expect everyone to follow them. Then thirdly comes finding the right staff members.
We often get these three major problems mixed up and fail to see where our problems really lie. We need the correct number of staff, workable systems and the training of those staff on the systems. If we think of these three things in terms of circles, we also need to be aware that all the circles need to be in focus. If any one circle is out of focus with another we will never be in control enough to accomplish any goal. Knowing this one principle greatly simplifies how we manage a practice.