If you are just joining us for the first time, this is one more segment of a concept I call “forced change”. Forced change is some action or strategy that, if implemented, has the ability to affect all of your systems, protocols, culture, and results. It is not a specific change is one small area, but an overall strategy that creates a ripple effect in every corner of your business. A watershed of change that creates such a demand for your services that every person and system will experience changes generated by is use.
The next area I would like to touch on will affect how team members embrace accountability in each of their perspective jobs in the office. The benefits of employing this particular “forced change” is that each and every person in your office will own their performance and results every day. If done correctly, it creates phantom pressure for each member of the team to perform at their highest level. This strategy will also eliminate micro-managing and confrontation. The simplicity of the profound change you will see in your team is amazing once you institute this strategy. You literally will shake your head as you ask yourself why you haven’t done this before. It takes a little preparation, again, no cost, and it pay dividends for the rest of your career. For the first time ever, each member of your team will not only know, but will embrace the most important thing they need to do to excel at their job. It is this loss of excuses while taking on the accountability of everything they do regardless of the noise and confusion going on around them that will help everyone find their results.
This strategy encompasses two distinct but linked actions. First, you will need to take the time to work with your team and fine tune their job descriptions. When I say fine tune, I mean they are so complete that they could be used to train another employee in the particular job. This action has several benefits. Far too often I see the doctor(s) and individual team member(s) at odds because the doctor is upset at a team member because they are not doing their job and the team member is upset because she thinks you are mad about something that is not her job. I’m willing to bet about any amount of money that if I had you, the doctor, write the job description for your assistant, and I had the assistant write their own job description and I read each one and compared them, they wouldn’t even be close to being the same thing. It is this lack of communication and onboarding with a competent, complete job description that will sabotage your efforts at building a functional team. So, to remedy this I want you to take your current written job descriptions for each employee and ask them to add to or even modify them to make sure that we have a complete formal job description for each position. You will reread the job description and modify and update it with the help of that team member until the task is done and everyone agrees that this truly reflects the job they do. You now know it, they know it, and you both agree that it is fair and complete and that she can fulfill this written job description. To finish this, I want you to close by asking a question of this team member: “If, in the unlikely event that you cannot or will note fulfill the job requirements, what do you think I should do about it?” Then don’t speak until they say that they should be fired. The completed job description is placed in the HR file for that employee, and you go through the entire process for the office until everyone is done.
The second step in creating the needed changes is to take the job descriptions and decide what is the one or two most important items on their list of things they do. For example, for a hygienist it is the production on a weekly basis, the number of scaling and root planings they do on a weekly basis, and the number of crowns they present to the patients they work on each week. Even though their job descriptions could take pages to outline, if they were knocking these three areas out of the park, you are going to see huge differences in production and profitability. A front desk “main thing” could be the number of cancellations and no-shows not filled, collection rates, scheduling dollar amounts, etc. Hopefully you could think of a couple of things for every specific job description in the office. The “forced change” comes when me measure what we want to manage.
In this case, we would create graphs for each position that would be posted where everyone can see them. A staff area or kitchen is ideal. The idea is that these graphs are supplied by you but kept updated by each individual. There is phantom pressure created by keeping and posting these so everyone can see if someone is falling behind and no one wants to be the person that is letting the rest of the office down. On the graph, you can follow more than one thing. On a hygienist’s graph, we did all three of the items listed above on the same graph. If these graphs are not kept up to date, that person would not be paid their bonus or salary until it is filled in. Below, I added a photo of the graphs in my main office.
The “forced change” will be the accountability the graphs and agreed upon job descriptions create. The big payoff is how measuring their performance increases their engagement, while helping them to own their performance. When the graph shows a decrease in what they need to measure, they will automatically correct what they are doing to turn the poor trend around.
Forced changes never stop with the few examples I have given you. It is possible to dissect every aspect of your practice to utilize this strategy and combat confrontation, non-assertiveness, procrastination, and poor systems and culture. Choosing the best strategy in the most strategic areas of your practice ensures consistent rapid improvement without having to micromanage any individual or system.
Michael Abernathy DDS
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