We all know that we should be doing team training…but it can be tough to find the time, create good training materials, and get everyone on board with it. So this week, Jeff discusses the four biggest barriers to team training and how to make it happen efficiently and productively.
Topics:
1:19 – Someone needs to be responsible for staff training
4:03 – Making time for team training
9:48 – Individualized training and team training
12:39 – What materials are you using to train your staff?
21:24 – The right attitude
Links:
DDS Success - https://ddssuccess.com
Learn more about MGE - https://www.mgeonline.com
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Questions From This Episode
Why does Jeff say staff turnover is a strong reason to take training seriously, even for productive employees?
Losing a genuinely good employee, like a treatment coordinator who relocates after eight or nine years, means losing years of accumulated experience and problem-solving, not something a manual alone can replace. Jeff says without real training and apprenticeship systems in place, bringing in a replacement smoothly becomes much harder than it needs to be.
Why does Jeff say "I don't have time to train my staff" usually isn't really about time?
He points to clients working six days a week who cut back to three or four days after implementing real training, and still increase their collections, in one example, going from $95,000 to nearly $200,000 a month while working one less day. His point: productivity comes from how effectively time is used, not from simply spending more of it in the office.
What sequence does Jeff recommend for training any position in a dental practice?
First, general knowledge of what it means to be a team member at that specific practice, things like community representation and customer service philosophy. Second, the actual skills and procedures needed to do the assigned job. Third, additional skills, like communication or sales training, that make someone increasingly effective once the basics are covered.
What does Jeff recommend for practices that don't have written policies or position manuals yet?
He says some policy is always better than no policy, and manuals don't need to be polished, just simple, written instructions. His suggested starting point: pick one thing that's been genuinely irritating in the practice, like poorly handled financial arrangements, write a basic policy for it, and keep building from there.
Why does Jeff say a candidate who claims to "already know it all" is a red flag in hiring?
He says someone who believes they have nothing left to learn tends to respond to correction in one of two unproductive ways: insisting they were right anyway, or rejecting the feedback outright and never changing. Because performance improves through learning new skills, he looks for candidates who genuinely want to keep developing, and makes clear during hiring that ongoing training is part of the job.
Episode Transcript
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If I were to say that team training, educating your staff, is important, I don't think I'd run into much pushback. Beyond improving somebody's individual job performance, increased productivity, efficiency, and morale, a trained team, as an aggregate, improves overall practice productivity, efficiency, and profitability. So if we all agree this is extremely important, why is it such a huge problem across the dental industry? That's what I want to talk about in this week's episode of Dental Business Rx, and more importantly, what you can do to fix it, how to actually implement effective training in your practice.
My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host. Every practice is going to have its own individualized reasons that might be sabotaging its training program, but what we've found is there are four major problems offices run into that prevent them from implementing effective team training. I'm going to keep this episode brief and to the point, run through these four things, and what to do about each one.
Let's start with the first: no one's responsible, or it's just not taken very seriously. If you go to a larger corporation, the idea of training and onboarding, ways to bring staff up to speed and get them productive, is taken very seriously, they'll have whole departments allocated for it. How do you transpose that into a smaller business? You might think, well, I'm not a big corporation, I'm not Google, how am I supposed to train my staff? That's not really the point. Someone ultimately has to be responsible for it, and someone has to take it seriously.
Here's the main reason why, beyond increasing productivity: staff turnover is something everybody's going to face at some point. Look around at your staff meeting, if you're going to be practicing for the next 20 years, I doubt you'll be looking at those exact same faces two decades from now. That's not a knock on your staff, people's lives just change, they move to other states, they decide to do something else. If you're not planning for that potential turnover, you're going to get yourself into trouble.
Look at the real damage turnover causes, and I don't mean turning over someone who isn't productive, I mean losing a genuinely good, productive treatment coordinator because they and their spouse decide to relocate to another state after eight or nine years with you. When you lose that person, even once you bring someone new in to fill the role, you lose all of that experiential knowledge, the time they've spent in your practice, all the little problems they've already solved, being on the same page as you about how to solve them, plus all the work it took them to get good at the job in the first place. Just handing the new hire a treatment coordinator manual doesn't solve that. There's always going to be some degree of drop-off when someone leaves, but if you're not planning for it, you won't be able to smoothly bring the next person in through real training and apprenticeship, and you'll run into real problems.
You might say, look, I'm busy, especially now when it's tougher to stay fully staffed, I don't have time for this. I hate to sound cliché, but this is something you have to make time for, and I'll get into how in my next point. Training has to be treated the same way other essential functions of your practice are, scheduling, collecting money, it has to be represented as a real function in your business. That's problem number one.
The second issue I see mentioned constantly is: I don't have the time, I can't allocate the time, when would they even train, they're working all the time here. This whole idea of time is actually pretty funny to me. We'll get a new client who's working six days a week, collecting maybe $55,000 a month, working four evenings a week too, and a lot of that time in the practice isn't especially productive. But in their mind, maybe the practice is only three or four years old, and the belief is, this is just what I have to do, I have to be there all the time to be productive. We know that's not true, especially once you see someone working 30 or 32 hours a week doing just as well. It's an attitude, the idea that you have to sit and wait by the phone for things to happen in order to be productive, and it's actually not making anyone more productive. It's not uncommon to see a client working six days a week move down to three or four days a week and do just fine.
I could rattle off examples all day. I can think of one client in particular working four days a week, collecting around $95,000 a month, and after a year of doing their training, they were collecting close to $200,000 a month working three days a week. The question we get asked constantly is, how am I supposed to allocate all this time to come do my training at MGE? It ends up working itself out, because it's really not about time, it's about how effective you are with the time you already have.
Think about how you'd structure your own schedule as a dentist. I could schedule you linearly, one crown every hour or every hour and a half, or I could double-book you with an assistant. The same number of hours pass either way, but you generate more productivity in less time. It's how you use that time. Here's a slightly silly example: say the outlet on my wall isn't working, there's some wiring problem behind it. I'm not an electrician, I can maybe put a cover plate back on a switch, that's about it. If you told me to fix that outlet myself, it'd take me hours, and there's a real chance I'd electrocute myself trying. Or you could bring in a licensed electrician and it's fixed in 20 minutes, assuming the fuse wasn't tripped. Knowledge, knowing how to do something correctly, makes you both more efficient and more effective. It's not the amount of time you spend, it's how you spend it.
One more example. I remember talking to a client about six years ago whose practice hours were 40 patient hours a week, a bigger practice. Obviously no single employee was working all 40 of those hours, since people need time before and after too, so they ran a kind of shift system, with certain employees there at certain times to cover everything going on. The first thing I noticed was that the way the schedule was structured, they had enough operatories that they didn't need to be open five days, they could get it all done in four. In my view, the most important thing is having the entire team there at the same time, because that's how a team actually works, it doesn't function well if someone's there at one time and someone else is there at another and they're never actually together. So I had them cut down to four days a week, with everyone properly staffed across all four, and they ended up more productive working one day less per week, since there was no real reason to be open five days with the chair space they had.
So say I'm your treatment coordinator, and you train me on how to handle patient objections around paying for treatment. It's not just a matter of reading a manual or watching a video, I have to actually practice it. But say I do, and I get confident with it. Before that training, let's say I could only close about 50 percent of the patients you sent me because I couldn't handle their objections. Now that I've learned what to do, assuming the training is actually effective, I can close 80 percent of them. That's a real recovery on the 30 percent I was losing before. Say it took four or five hours of training, and you paid me $25 an hour while I did it, so you spent $100 to $150 total. But the very first case I close afterward might bring in an additional $2,000, and that improved performance continues from there. You could sit there thinking everybody's too busy, there's no time for this, or you could actually invest the time and come out with someone genuinely more effective on the other side.
You have to make time for this, and it might feel like a bit of a leap at first, carving out time to train staff and seeing what happens. Assuming what you're training people on actually produces a result, and that's the key part, what are you actually training them on, you'll see the benefit. What we usually recommend is splitting training into two types: individualized training and team training.
For individualized training, say someone's studying on an online platform, we have our own, DDS Success, which includes positional training. If I'm your schedule coordinator, there's a whole schedule coordinator course. So you might say, Jeff, you're the schedule coordinator, you're going to spend an hour and a half or three hours a week training, and you pick the time of day I should do it, maybe during a slower part of the day, and you pay me for that time. I come in, study for an hour, get a little better, then study the next piece the following session, and so on. You carve that time out of my schedule, and whoever's responsible for training in the practice, probably your office manager, the best place to put that responsibility, makes sure I actually show up and do it. Ideally I'm not doing it with my phone in hand at the front desk during patient hours, I'd send front desk staff somewhere else, like a break room, with their tablet or book, to actually focus.
Team training is different, you carve out time for the whole group at once. Maybe Tuesday mornings, patients start at 10, but training starts at 8, everybody's there, you bring in some muffins, and then you run whatever training session you've planned. Beyond building camaraderie, and you won't know if this works for you until you try it, team training gets everyone thinking the same way. Say you're running a session on how to handle a new patient in the practice. If I'm the treatment coordinator watching what you expect the hygienist to do during a new patient visit, I now know what their role looks like, and once you cover what I'm supposed to do as the treatment coordinator, they know my role too. That's part of being a team, we're all on the same page, I know what outcome they're supposed to create, they know what outcome I'm supposed to create, and it binds the team together that much more.
So point one was nobody's responsible, someone has to be. Point two is you have to allocate time, it doesn't have to be a ton, but it has to be real.
Point three is what are you actually training staff on, what's the methodology, what material, what sequence. Here's a general guideline. Take any position in your practice, and look at the general areas of knowledge that person needs. First, they need general knowledge about what it means to be an employee at your practice. I might have a specific job you've assigned me, treatment coordinator, financial coordinator, whatever it is, but I also have the job of being a team member of your practice generally. There are things worth knowing beyond the basics like pay schedules and vacation policy, how you want the team represented in the community, since I'm an ambassador for the practice, or your overall philosophy on customer service. These are policies that shape how every staff member conducts themselves, regardless of position.
The second area of knowledge is how to actually do the job itself. If I'm a financial coordinator, I need to understand insurance, your software, your procedures, your financial policy, when statements go out, and so on, so I can actually perform the duties of the role. That includes not just the skills of the job, but how you want the job managed so it performs the way it's supposed to.
Assuming someone has those two things down, what does what it means to be a staff member and how to do their assigned job, what would you train them on next? Additional skills related to their role. Say I'm a treatment coordinator who already knows what it means to be an employee here and knows the basics of the job. What skills would improve my overall performance? Better communication, better customer service, and honestly, how to sell. A treatment coordinator should know how to sell well, I don't need to be an expertly trained salesperson to do the basics of the job, but the more you train me on selling, the better I'll perform in the role. You can apply this same framework to any position. A dental assistant might already meet the basic requirements for the job, but there could be additional courses or certifications worth pursuing so they can take on more in the practice.
That's the general training sequence for any employee: turn them into a team member, turn them into that specific job, then build additional skills that make them better and better at it. It doesn't take long to lay this out once you start working with it and putting people through it.
The one thing I'll mention, because it's usually the point people get stuck on, is "I don't have a good employee manual, I don't have good position manuals." This is genuinely a case where something is better than nothing. When it comes to training, even a basic job description beats no job description at all. When I bring up generating policy for a practice, I tend to get the same blank look you'd get from a patient if you mentioned a problem on the distal surface of their tooth without explaining it, you can tell they have no idea what you just said, even if they nod along. People picture having to write some kind of formal manual, and they're not sure they're good writers, so it feels overwhelming. It's really not that bad. It doesn't need to be high-end literature, it's just instructions, and they should be simple. Some policy is always better than no policy.
Here's an experiment you can try yourself: take something that's been genuinely irritating you in your practice, say financial arrangements are being handled poorly. Ask yourself, do I have any actual written policy on how I want financial arrangements made? If the answer's no, generate one. It doesn't need to be fancy, just written down and printed off. Keep everything in one centralized place, like your server, so it's easy to find, have people read it, maybe discuss it at a staff meeting, and start having people follow it. You'd be surprised, once that's handled, you don't have to think about that particular problem anymore, it's done. Write another policy the following week, and by the end of the year, you'll have 50 policies in place.
One important caveat: anyone can suggest a policy, your office manager, a dental assistant, anyone, and that's completely fine. But policy approval has to rest with the owner. If your dental assistant wants to propose a policy for organizing the sterilization area, great, they can write it, but you have to review and approve it. Otherwise you'll end up with all kinds of people writing all kinds of policy you may not even agree with, which creates conflict instead of a smoother-running practice.
So that's the basic training methodology: how to be a staff member, how to do a specific job, then additional skills to keep improving in that job, and don't let the lack of a formal manual stop you from starting.
Then there's team training, which I touched on earlier, training everyone together at the same time. One approach is running a mock experience, say your new patient conversion rate isn't where it should be, patients come in and very few of them sign up for the treatment plan you're proposing, and it's falling apart somewhere in the process. Run through the entire patient journey as a demonstration, have one of your dental assistants play the new patient and walk through the whole line while the rest of the staff watches, and you'll see exactly where things drop off. I remember one office, back before everything was digital, where a new patient would see the doctor, get brought back for a consultation, and the treatment plan was supposed to get sent up front to be entered into the system, except it never got entered, nobody estimated insurance, and the patient sat waiting ten minutes for the treatment plan to even get generated. These are the kinds of small, silly gaps you find when you actually walk through the process as a team. You could do the same thing with phone calls, if five or six people answer the phone in your practice and you want to improve new patient conversion, run a staff meeting covering how new patient calls should be handled, then have everyone role-play it.
That's point three. There's a lot more we could get into here, like I mentioned, DDS Success is a resource for this, and it's not uncommon for an MGE client to bring a lot of staff to our seminars, or have staff stream the seminar remotely, so everyone stays on the same page.
Point four has to do with attitude. Obviously, the doctor can't make training unimportant, the doctor has to believe it matters, the office manager has to believe it matters. But say training genuinely is a big deal in your office, and you still have one particular team member who just doesn't think it's worth their time, who doesn't want to train. If I'm interviewing a prospective employee, nothing scares me more than someone who already knows it all. You're interviewing someone for collections and they tell you, oh yeah, I already know all about that, I know all about this, meaning there's nothing left for them to learn. That's frightening, because when you eventually point out something they don't actually know, one of two things happens: they insist they were right anyway, or they reject the correction and never implement it. As part of our own hiring process, we make sure a candidate understands that training is genuinely part of the job, and that they actually want to improve their skills and keep learning.
When it comes to grading an employee, performance is the most important thing, that's why we talk so much about statistic management. You track a statistic not to assign someone a number, but to measure how effectively they're doing their job, whether their area is expanding and getting more efficient, or declining. And how do you improve performance? You learn new skills. So ideally, you want someone who wants to learn new skills, assuming those skills are genuinely useful. I'm not sure why someone wouldn't want that, but if someone treats it as a drag or a problem, that may just not be someone who's going to grow with the practice. I'm not an employment attorney, and questions about requiring training as a condition of employment are worth running by yours, but to me, it's part of the agreement when I bring someone on: what's expected of them is spelled out up front. You don't want to bring someone on and then spring a mandatory course on them later, they should know going in that ongoing training is part of the job.
Generally, most people will be fine with this, but attitude is something that tends to trip up training programs. What's funny is that one person pushing back on training can make it feel like your entire staff feels that way, when it's really just that one person. Don't let a single bad experience alter your outlook or wreck your ability to keep training your team going forward.
So those are the four main points that tend to cause problems with training: nobody's responsible, not enough time allocated, unclear methodology on what to actually train people on, and attitude, both the doctor's commitment to it and how you screen for it in hiring. Something is always better than nothing. If you're doing some training, that's better than none, and if you're doing decent training, that's something you can keep improving. If you look at our most productive, most efficient clients, they consistently have a well-educated, well-trained team.
One last thing worth mentioning: recording audio or video is easier than ever these days, and that's another way to build training materials for your practice. If you've got a mission statement or a way you want to communicate your practice's values to the team, record it. A basic tripod for your phone off Amazon, maybe a separate microphone attachment for better audio, and you can save that recording and play it for every new employee going forward without ever having to record it again. Just make sure you're keeping all of these materials in one centralized place, so you're not spending half an hour hunting for that recording when a new hire actually needs to see it.
That's about all I have for you this week. I hope this helps. We're coming up on a new year here, so if you're thinking about a resolution for your business, improving your ability to train new staff, or the staff you already have, is a good one to have, it contributes directly to your long-term profitability and productivity. If you want to find out more about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. I'll put a link to DDS Success too if you want to learn more about it as a way to train your staff on the basics efficiently.
Other than that, that's all I have. Have a great week, and we'll see you at the next episode.