Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
Rethinking Rewards and Bonuses for Engagement
What if monetary incentives are not the secret to inspiring your team? Join me, Dr. Paul Etchison, as we uncover the hidden power of intrinsic motivation and the compelling reasons why bonuses might actually hinder long-term engagement. By examining the over-justification effect through a fascinating study on blood donation, we'll explore how financial rewards can sometimes transform meaningful work into mere transactions. Instead, let's delve into the art of rallying your team around a shared mission and values, especially in the dental field, where emphasizing the vital role of dental health can ignite a sense of purpose and commitment.
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Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
I help dentists create thriving practices that make more money, require less of their time, and empower their teams to run the office seamlessly—so they can focus on what matters most.
Join the DPH Hero Collective and get the tools, training, and support you need to transform your practice:
- Comprehensive Training: Boost profit, efficiency, and team engagement.
- Live Monthly Webinars: Learn proven strategies for scaling your practice.
- Live Q&A Sessions: Get personalized help when you need it most.
- Supportive Community: Connect with practice owners on the same journey.
- Editable Systems & Protocols: Standardize your operations effortlessly.
Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DPHPod.com to learn more.
Have you ever had a salary discussion with an employee and been hesitant about offering a raise because you really, deep down, just feel like they could already be doing way more at the practice. You mull it over, you think about it and eventually you give in. But you attach what you want from them to the conversation. You tell them I need you to do more of this, I want you to do more of this, and they say, of course, I would be happy to do that. And then all of a sudden, they are the employee you always dreamed about for a few weeks, or maybe even a few months, and then it's back to normal. You see, money can spark a short-term boost in effort, but it's not the key to lasting performance or fulfillment in a job. In this episode, I'm going to teach you what truly inspires teams to do their best work, and it's not about money. I'm going to show you what's possible and I'm going to teach you exactly how to do it with your team. You are listening to Dental Practice Heroes, where we help you create and scale your dental practice so that you are no longer tied to the chair. Hi, I'm Dr Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach and owner of a $6 million group practice in the suburbs of Chicago. I want to teach you how to grow and systematize your dental practice so you can spend less time practicing and more time enjoying a life that you love. Let's get started. Welcome back to Dental Practice Heroes. I am your host, dr Paul Edgison, and I am so glad you are here with me today, because I wanna talk to you about something that is very near and dear to my heart, and that is getting your team to be all in on your mission.
Paul Etchison:Now, we often think that if we could just pay people more or just bonus them more, we could get the result we want, but it really doesn't work that way, so let me share an example with you. In 2008, some researchers performed a test to see if paying people to donate blood would increase donations. Now let's think about that for a second. This is something that people already do for free and there is no monetary incentive. People just do it because it feels good and they want to donate blood, and I've actually wondered this sometimes myself when I've donated blood, like, hey, I'm doing this for free. What if they paid people for it? Sometimes I'm sitting there getting poked and I'm like man, I think I should get paid for this.
Paul Etchison:I remember talking to one of my friends in college dude, let's go donate plasma, let's go donate you know, other stuff. I remember I mean he even went as far as to find out about donating other stuff. But I think he found out it was a lot more complicated than he thought. He thought he could just show up with like an old crusty sock and get paid for it, but that's not how it works Anyway. So maybe that's going too deep into it, but you get the idea.
Paul Etchison:Does paying for this get more blood, you know? So the researchers had three groups in their study to see if they could increase blood donations by paying the donors. The first group was no compensation, as usual, as it's always been. The second group was they were paying them for the contribution. And then the third group was that they would pay them for the contribution but the donor would get the option to donate that to a children's cancer charity. Okay, so here is what they found out when and this was all women in this study when they didn't pay anyone, it was about 52% of women donated blood with zero compensation. Now for the group that was compensated, it dropped to 30%. So almost like nearly half of the success of having no compensation, which is like wait a second, that doesn't really make sense. But when they allowed the donors to then take that payment and then donate it to a children's cancer charity, it was nearly identical to the same amount of people as the no compensation group.
Paul Etchison:So what gives? What does that mean? Why is it? When you take that altruistic motive away, people don't want to do it anymore. This was what a sociologist named Richard Trismas called the over-justification effect, which basically means that when you offer external rewards to things that are completed because of intrinsic motivations, the desire to perform that behavior decreases. So think about our teams, bonuses and just throwing money at things to influence behavior. It usually results in a short-term increase of that behavior, but long-term it's detrimental because it just turns it all into a transaction, and I know you have seen this at your practice. Money is a fuel for a sprint, it is not for a marathon. Now don't get me wrong. I do believe there is a place for bonuses. I do believe there's places for incentivizing certain behaviors, but I think our job as the leader is to communicate with the team and help them understand and see how everything we do is part of a bigger and larger mission.
Paul Etchison:Now you can accomplish this in three ways. First, you have to convince the team that dental health is important to overall health as well as emotional health. You have to share stories about how people feel when they have dental disease. Share evidence of cardiovascular risks associated with all dental disease periodontal disease. Make sure your team understands that we don't just fix teeth. We help people become healthy and live their best lives possible. This needs to be part of your mission and your team needs to understand it. Two, they need to believe that everything they do at the office, every single touch point, every single behavior, either it helps the patient say yes or it helps the patient say no to treatment, and if they say yes to more, they get more healthy. If they say yes to less, they don't get as healthy as they could. So this is something that's explained very well to your team in our patient experience masterclass that is part of the DPH Hero Collective, dentalpracticeheroescom. Check that out Now. Three, the last thing you need to communicate with the team and get them aligned in the mission. You need to ask each department or even maybe each individual team member, what is their goal of their position, and you need to help them understand how that fits into the overall mission of the practice of helping people get healthier. You need to create these discussions. They are not going to happen unless you bring them out. So let me give you an example.
Paul Etchison:Often, the front desk has the goal of presenting treatment. They have the goal of filling the schedule, the goal of getting the new patient scheduled when they call. They have the goal of taking the insurance payments and verifying insurance and all things claims and insurance related, and these are often separate tasks with separate goals and sometimes, due to lack of time or sometimes even energy, some of these areas suffer at the expense of completing the other things. Now, what about your hygienist? They have the goal of getting all the diagnostics for the new patients. They're evaluating their periodontal health, they're talking to them about their diet and showing them what the condition of their mouth is, and they're explaining it in a way that makes sense and the patient understands and then, hopefully, is motivated to get treatment. Now, in all of these, these are competing goals, because there is only so much time that we have to be with a patient, or only so much time that we can devote to those things.
Paul Etchison:And when our team members operate locally, just within their department, it's easy to get the mindset of little silos Like this is my job, but that is not my job, that is your job, that is the front's job, this is the back's job, vice versa. You get the idea. But what your team is often missing unless you are talking about this is how interdependent they are, how their individual goals are really all in alignment with the overall mission of the practice, which is to help people get healthy. So you need to explain this, you need to have them understand that, and though every department has different goals, they are all aligned in one single mission, which is to help patients get healthy. So when your team member is having a bad day, they're drained, they're overworked, they're tired and sometimes they're just not feeling like they want to give the most enthusiasm and they don't want to give 100% energy to all the daily things they have to do, no matter how much you pay them, they're just not going to be motivated to do it. But if they understand that what they are doing is making a difference in people's lives, then that behavior follows, because people want to do good and they want to do good work and do good things for our patients. You see, when the motivation is altruistic, for the right reasons, you get better behavior than if you're just throwing money at things.
Paul Etchison:Think about the team members coming in late. What do you think would generate more people showing up on time for their shift? Do you think maybe one punishing them for being late, calling them out and making them feel bad about it. Or two, if they really believe in their heart that when they show up late they're letting down their teammates. I think it's the second one. Obviously, they are going to show up more on time if they feel like they're letting other people down if they don't get there on time. So I think you get the idea. It's about the feelings inside and the reasons and for our motivations why we're doing this stuff.
Paul Etchison:So have those discussions with your team. Talk about your mission constantly. Talk about how every touch point matters and talk about how each person's individual goals are all in alignment with the overall mission and you really can't over-talk this stuff. Talk about it so much that it's freaking, annoying and they're like would you just shut up about it. But I want you to understand that I want to recognize it. I don't care if you think I'm weird, I want to talk about it some more. Don't be worried about talking about it too much. You just can't over talk it. And if you notice somebody doing something special on your team that is aligned with all of that, recognize it.
Paul Etchison:Post your five star reviews on like a team Slack page or discuss some of the amazing lives that you've changed at the team meeting. And these don't always have to be like that big cosmetic case where somebody wouldn't even leave their house and now they're confident and they can smile and stuff. It's as simple as somebody who's been scared of the dentist for their whole entire life or anxious when going to the dentist their whole entire life and all of a sudden they're like, wow, I didn't know a dental experience could be so good. I want to tell everybody about it. That is making a difference in someone's life.
Paul Etchison:So if you're looking for a way to change the culture of your practice so that you can become more efficient, produce more and work less clinical days, check out our coaching and training options at dphpodcom. Thank you all so much for listening and if you liked this episode. It helps the podcast grow and my mission is to reach as many dental teams as possible and change what it means to work and own a dental practice. Next episode we're going to be talking about how to handle, raise requests and discuss pay with your team members. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.
