Ep. 33: Four Steps for Reducing Office Drama
We’ve all seen or experienced inter-office drama before. It’s tempting to just ignore it and hope it’ll “work itself out,” but letting it fester can destroy team morale and productivity. So in this episode, Jeff shares his tips for addressing office drama smoothly and quickly so the team can get back to working together productively and caring for patients.
Topics:
2:26 – 4 steps to resolve and prevent drama between staff
11:47 – What do you do if a patient is creating drama?
Links:
Learn more about MGE – https://www.mgeonline.com
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Questions From This Episode
What actually counts as office drama, and what doesn't?
Office drama covers bickering, disagreements, nagging, and unprofessional communication that distracts from overall productivity and team cohesion. Serious issues like OSHA violations, sexual harassment, or discrimination are a different category entirely and belong with an employment attorney or HR company, handled quickly and separately from the everyday friction this episode covers.
What's the first thing every practice needs in place before drama even happens?
An actual written procedure: who a staff member reports a conflict to, by what method, and where that report goes. Without one, unresolved tension between two people usually just gets vented to other coworkers instead, which spreads the problem rather than solving it and does nothing to actually fix anything.
Why does it matter that the reporting process feel genuinely safe?
Staff need to feel safe both raising a concern and defending themselves if a concern is raised about them. If a report leads straight to discipline without ever investigating both sides of the story, that just creates a new safety problem for whoever got reported on without a fair hearing.
Why shouldn't a conflict just be left alone to work itself out?
Office tension doesn't tend to improve on its own any more than a cavity does. Left unaddressed, it typically gets worse over time, and eventually it costs the practice one of the people involved, sometimes someone genuinely valuable, unless the two people happen to sort it out themselves.
What's the most important thing to weigh before disciplining anyone involved in a conflict?
The actual value each person brings to the practice, not simply who complained first or who's been there longest. A genuinely non-productive employee can manufacture conflict to get a more productive coworker pushed out or forced to quit, and only a full investigation into the real facts, including each person's actual statistics, reveals which side of the story is accurate.
Episode Transcript
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You walk up front and notice your financial coordinator and receptionist don't look all that happy. There's almost a thickness hanging in the air, and they're avoiding looking at one another. You make a mental note, decide you don't want to get involved, and go about your day. A couple days later, you walk into the break room and overhear your lead assistant and treatment coordinator talking poorly about your hygienist, which quickly tails off the moment you get further into the room. The following week, you notice your two assistants don't seem to be getting along either, communication is short, and you hear a drawer or two slammed in sterilization. Office drama. We've all seen it, and it's not good for your practice. Left unchecked, it can create a toxic work environment, kill productivity, and cost you good staff. That's what I want to talk about in this week's episode of Dental Business Rx: four steps to reducing office drama and creating a more positive, productive office environment. I'm Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host.
I want to start by being clear about what I mean by office drama. I mean bickering, disagreements, nagging, upsets, poor or unprofessional communication, and anything else that distracts from overall office productivity, team cohesiveness, and the actual business of running the practice. What I'm not talking about here are serious issues, OSHA violations, sexual harassment, discrimination, and things of that nature. Serious issues like those belong with your employment attorney or a regular attorney, and you'll want them resolved quickly and properly. As an aside, you should genuinely have an employment attorney or HR company you can turn to, it's one of those things that saves real money in the long run and gives you certainty about how you're handling things. I'm not an attorney myself, so nothing in this episode should be taken as legal advice, and anything here that raises a real legal question for your specific situation is exactly what that employment attorney is for.
With that out of the way, let's look at drama itself, because ideally you want your team getting along well most of the time, it makes the practice more productive and makes work a lot more enjoyable for everyone. So here's what you can do to stay on top of it.
Step one: you need an actual procedure in place for when something like this comes up, including who it gets communicated to and by what method, an email, a memo, whatever makes sense for your office. If I'm the receptionist and I end up in a real disagreement with the hygienist that good communication between the two of us can't resolve on its own, there has to be a clear path for me to escalate it, likely to the office manager. You don't want me walking up to you in the middle of a busy day to vent about the hygienist with no structure around it, you want a defined way for that information to reach you.
Having a real procedure accomplishes a couple of things. First, it puts the issue in the right place. The last thing you want is for me, upset with the hygienist, to start venting to the financial coordinator instead. Now I've dragged a third person into it, they may start forming a negative opinion of the hygienist based purely on my side of the story, and the financial coordinator isn't in any position to actually do anything about it anyway, that's simply not their role. A clear procedure keeps that from happening. And here's a useful side effect: if there's a well known policy in place for how to report something like this, and instead of following it I go complain to five other staff members about it, that tells you something about me too. At that point I'm not actually trying to resolve anything, I'm just stirring up the rest of the team. So you need an actual procedure, who to communicate to, how, and through what channel. In some cases, once someone sits down to actually write up an email or a report, they'll realize the issue is minor enough to just go talk to the other person directly first, and that's fine too, but the procedure still needs to exist for when that's not enough.
Step two: you need to create an environment where it's genuinely safe to communicate these things. If I see an issue between myself and another team member that I can't resolve on my own, I need to be able to raise it without being made to feel wrong for raising it, and without it just disappearing into silence with no response and no visible action. It also has to be safe for me to defend myself. Say I'm the receptionist and I file a complaint about the hygienist, and you don't investigate it at all, you don't look into it, you don't talk to both sides, and the hygienist just gets disciplined with no further discussion. That creates a genuinely unsafe environment for the hygienist, since they never had a chance to tell their side. So it has to be safe both to raise a concern and to respond to one.
Which leads directly into this: whenever a drama situation or a possible policy violation comes up, you need to actually look into it fully and get to the real facts of the matter. That may mean talking to both people involved and digging a little deeper than the surface complaint. There are recurring patterns behind this kind of conflict that we actually cover in a couple of our MGE training courses, I won't get into all of that here, but the key point is: don't let these situations sit uninvestigated, and don't assume the first version of the story you hear is the complete one.
Step three: once you're aware of a situation like this, two people not getting along, ongoing tension, some kind of policy violation, don't let it sit for any length of time. Think about it the way you would a dental problem. If a patient told you, doc, I figure if I just ignore this and don't do anything, it'll get better on its own, you'd know that's not true, dental problems don't improve by being ignored. Office tension works the same way. It generally doesn't get better with time, it gets worse, and you may have situations brewing that you're either not seeing at all, or that you're seeing and simply avoiding. If it's already showing up visibly, bickering at the front desk, people treating each other rudely, that's squarely your responsibility to address. The longer it sits, the worse it gets, and if both people involved happen to be genuinely valuable to the practice, you're at real risk of eventually losing one of them, unless they happen to work it out entirely on their own.
Which brings us to step four, probably the most important one. When you're evaluating a situation like this, weigh two things: what was the actual infraction or problem, and what is the real value of each person involved to the practice. Here's an example. Say you have a receptionist and a financial coordinator who are arguing and not getting along, and the receptionist complains that the financial coordinator is mean, rude, whatever the specifics are. You should absolutely investigate that thoroughly rather than reacting immediately. But say you skip that step and simply decide to reprimand the financial coordinator. Now say the receptionist has only been with you two months, and the financial coordinator has been there ten years. If you don't actually investigate and it turns out this financial coordinator is genuinely excellent and the new receptionist has actually been slacking off, quietly forcing the financial coordinator to pick up the slack, you might be disciplining exactly the wrong person, and the receptionist may simply not be a great fit for your practice, a real possibility worth taking seriously.
This is exactly why digging into these situations matters, and why weighing each person's actual value to the business matters just as much. I've personally visited well over a thousand dental practices across the country in a consulting capacity, and I've seen some wild situations play out. I remember one practice specifically where the doctor had three employees, I'll call them A, B, and C. When I got involved, as is usually the case when I get called in, things weren't going well, the practice's statistics were struggling. As a side note on management by statistics, graphing your numbers is better than not graphing them at all, but the whole point of a statistic is that when it moves in the wrong direction, you're actually supposed to do something about it, not just watch the graph. Anyway, this particular doctor had been graphing overall practice statistics but hadn't kept individual statistics broken out by employee. By the time I arrived, employees A and B were already gone, and only C remained, and the practice was crashing. We went back and reconstructed individual statistics for all three retroactively, and found that A and B's areas had actually been growing steadily before they left the practice, while C's numbers had never grown at all, and had actually been declining sharply the entire time.
Digging further, it turned out that things C had been telling the doctor about A and B, rumors that later proved untrue or heavily exaggerated, were exactly what prompted the doctor to want A and B gone, or to unintentionally make the environment unpleasant enough that they eventually quit on their own. So C, who wasn't actually productive, had made the environment miserable for two genuinely productive employees and had gotten the doctor on board with pushing them out, entirely through unverified claims. The doctor ended up losing two valuable employees over it. The broader point here: if you have a non-productive or problematic employee, someone not following policy or not doing their job, situations exactly like this can happen. A troublemaker on staff can use reporting infractions, real or invented, as a tool to get productive coworkers into trouble. Which is exactly why you need to look at the whole picture rather than reacting to one isolated complaint, because a troublemaker's own lack of productivity, and any exaggeration or dishonesty in what they're reporting, will show up clearly once you actually dig into the full situation rather than taking a single complaint at face value.
One more point worth adding, sort of a bonus step. Think about the ratio here: however many staff members you have, five, twenty, forty, you almost certainly have far more patients than staff, likely thousands of them. A percentage of those patients are going to be, for lack of a better word, somewhat toxic, the type who comes into the practice and runs roughshod over your team, lowering morale and making people genuinely dread coming to work. You know the feeling, you glance at tomorrow's schedule, see that patient's name, and briefly consider whether your back might conveniently go out overnight. If patients like that are allowed to run roughshod over your team unchecked, think about the toll that actually takes, and just because of sheer numbers, patients present far more opportunity for this kind of behavior than staff do.
So you want to protect your team not just from internal bickering, but from genuinely toxic patients too. Rudeness, dismissiveness, outright nastiness, that's simply not a natural baseline for how people behave. Everyone has an off day occasionally, but if a patient is rude to your receptionist, gives her the evil eye, is short with your assistant, and then turns around and is perfectly pleasant to the doctor, and yes, that pattern absolutely happens, that's not a bad day, that's a choice. The vast majority of patients don't behave that way, and the ones who do shouldn't be allowed to continue unchecked. Say a patient is rude to your receptionist, and the office manager or doctor addresses it directly, and the patient's response is essentially, I'm the customer, you do what I want, maybe your receptionist should have been nicer to me. After genuinely gathering all the facts, that may simply be a patient you don't want in your practice, and dismissing them is a legitimate option worth considering. It's a small fraction of your overall patient base, but if left unaddressed, it quietly poisons the work environment just the same as internal staff conflict does, and given the sheer number of patients relative to staff, there's simply more opportunity for it to happen.
The same basic principle applies here as with staff: have an actual procedure in place. If I'm the receptionist and a patient is being nasty or rude to me, I should know exactly what to do about it, whether that's filing a report or going directly to the office manager. You don't want me trying to handle that myself, since managing the occasional difficult patient isn't really my job, my job is serving the vast majority of patients who come in and behave perfectly reasonably. So build a procedure you're genuinely comfortable with that keeps this kind of situation off the rest of your team's plate.
That's a shorter episode this week, but an important one. Keep in mind, you're in the service business, and your team is one of the most valuable assets in it, protect that by building a drama free, positive, productive, and genuinely enjoyable place to work. I hope this helps. If you want to learn more about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com, or call us at (800) 640-1140. And if you enjoy this podcast and want to hear more episodes like this one, don't forget to follow or subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on. Otherwise, folks, that's all I have for you this week. I'll see you at the next episode.