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
What's Wrong with Your Onboarding Process with the DPH Coaches
Most new hire issues can be traced back to one thing: onboarding. In this episode, the hosts and their expert guests share proven strategies to effectively train, support, and integrate your new team members right from the beginning. You'll learn how to create a clear onboarding process that reduces turnover, minimizes training stress, and helps you build a culture where employees feel confident, prepared, and excited to grow in your practice.
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Why onboarding is important in a dental practice
- Key elements of an effective onboarding process
- Onboarding challenges and solutions
- Growth and career development
- An exercise to transform your onboarding process
Text us your feedback! (please note: we cannot respond through this channel))
Check out www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com if you want to get the same great marketing results as Dr. Etch. Mention DPH and get your first month FREE!
Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
I help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Join the DPH Hero Collective and get the tools, training, and support you need to transform your practice:
- Team and Doctor Training for every aspect of Practice Management
- Comprehensive Training: Boost profit, efficiency, and team engagement.
- 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.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
Now, I know you have some all-star employees Everybody does but wouldn't it be great if you could have even more of them? Well, it all starts on day one and the way in which we bring on new employees onto our teams. We need to know how to onboard, and if we don't, even the very best hires are going to struggle at our practices. Today, the DPH coaches and I are going to share with you the best ways to train, support and integrate new employees right from the start and when you start getting intentional about your onboarding, training new employees is going to become so incredibly easy and you're going to have so much less turnover, which makes life so much easier even more so. So your future self will thank you for listening to this episode. Let's get to it. 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.
Speaker 1:I'm Dr Paul Etcheson, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach and owner of a $6 million group practice in the suburbs of Chicago. I wanna 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. Thank you so much for spending your day with us. We are so happy to have you here.
Speaker 1:I am joined by my DPH coaches, dr Henry Ernst and Dr Stephen Markowitz, and we're picking apart something that I think is super important for any dental practice owner. I mean, we wonder we've got these employees. They come in and we say, gosh, I can't find the right people. I just don't know what's going on. Everybody is struggling hiring, but how much do we look inward and look at our processes for onboarding? Because I have to say that you know, the employees that I poured training and training and training into somehow just magically always end up to be fantastic employees, and the ones that I just kind of stick in my practice and say I hope this is going to be okay, more times than not it's not okay. So, henry, I'll go to you first. Man, why is it important for us as dental practice owners to even have a system for this?
Speaker 2:It sets the stage for success and that beginning phase of the relationship employee and business is critical and sometimes they can get a good feel for the practice, they can get a negative feel, they can get inappropriate feelings and like man, this place is just a crapshoot. Here. We've really looked at it over the years as wanting consistency. We want consistency and if you look at it, a lot of practices throw you in the mix, like here you're going to be working with Jane today and the way that I've looked at it and learned over the years Jane may not be having a good day, maybe Jane is really good employee, but she's not really good at teaching somebody else. Maybe that's not her forte. He's not really good at teaching somebody else. Maybe that's not her forte. So one of the things that we really learned is how important this is and putting the value on it. And I'll skip ahead.
Speaker 2:The thing that we do is we have videos. So we have a video library like our own private YouTube channel, and all of our team members have done little and some of these videos are like less than five minutes long. How do we seat a patient in our office? What's our expectation? How do you clean the autoclave. How do you do like all these little things? And when an employee comes in, they get a series of videos. Maybe they're given like five or six, and then we know that the videos are because we've seen them ourselves, we've known they're good, we know the content is appropriate and we know it's accurate.
Speaker 2:Not saying they're perfect, but if you look at fast food companies like McDonald's, they put somebody to work, they watch a 15 minute video on how to make the fries and 15 minutes boom, they're working, they're being productive. That's the same philosophy that we have and if you look at our video library, we have tons of them as somebody gets more advanced. There's ones on making temporaries, there's ones on all these items that people can learn from. But the premise of your question is it's super important to setting the stage and in our practice we want consistency and that's where we've done the YouTube video thing. And if you're going to implement this into your practice, it doesn't have to be Steven Spielberg. It's literally somebody gets bullet points in their head of what they want to accomplish and you grab that phone and just go. It doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it's accurate and it's done well, where somebody can hear it. The content and the audio is good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've had clients do this too with the clinical stuff, and what's funny is that it's one of those things that we'll talk about it one month and the next month we're still talking about. Is that what is keeping you from doing this? Oh, I just got to sit down and record. I just got to sit down and do it. And the fact of the matter is is when they do it, when they actually sit down and record it, they write down the things that they want to teach, and you don't want to get too deep in it, you don't want to do every little detail, but you want to do the big stuff. And when you write it down and you go record it, like every one of my clients that have done this, they're like huh, like that really didn't take that long at all, and it just doesn't because, like you said, henry, you're not editing, you're not doing anything like that.
Speaker 1:To touch on your point, henry, is we used to have everyone at the front desk and they just wander around and they ask questions when they need and they don't want. Some people don't want to ask questions and some people really don't want to answer questions. And what we've noticed through that process of really looking at like why is our onboarding sucking? Why are we not training new front house employees? Is we realized there's some people on our team that don't want to train people and there are some people on our team that are sweet as pie and would just love to help, and all we had to do is ask and find out who it was, and then we could decide you know who is the right person to do this and then give that to them. Steve, have you had any times in your career where you've noticed that your onboarding might be failing a little bit?
Speaker 3:Most times, but I think it starts even before the training. A lot of us will jump ahead to training this person and putting them next to this employee Just watch over her shoulder which, as you guys just shared, may not be the most effective way to train someone. But I think onboarding starts with what makes us special. There are literally in the state of Massachusetts there are thousands of dental practices. Why the heck would you want to work here? And starting them to understand like this place is a little different. We feel like it's special in how we take care of our patients and how we take care of one another, and this is how we're going to behave and this is why we're doing the things we do. And the onboarding starts with them understanding a way bigger picture of why we're doing things, as opposed to how we're doing things.
Speaker 3:I think one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made is hiring someone with a 20 years experience. They're going to come in and they're going to show us how to do it and then within a month, I'm like the way you do it sucks. That's literally everything I don't want to happen here. So we need to understand when we bring people in. We can't just throw them into the office. And I know this is challenging because a lot of times we're hiring and recruiting reactively because Sally put her notice in. Now we have two weeks to fill that spot or whatever the heck it is. So I think the onboarding process ties into the recruiting and the entire HR cycle, but we need to provide context of why we're doing things, so the how makes sense, and then we can train the tasks and the little things that make our offices hum better and work more efficiently.
Speaker 1:The why is so important? For, like the cultural thing, like why are we special? And I think dental practice owners don't spend enough time even talking about that at all, and that's something that I've always been big on Like, hey, this is what we're about. This is that mission, vision, core values, brand promises, sort of stuff that people make the document and then they don't ever do anything with it. We've got to give our team members a reason to perform at a higher level, and that's part of the onboarding too. You know. That made me think of when we onboard.
Speaker 1:We have a series of 12 videos that they watch. They're on every single person, every position, and these are just cultural videos. This is about, like, our cultures. We talk about grace over guilt. We talk about our history. We talk about how you know psychological safety and forgiveness and like not criticizing and blaming and finding solutions and having compassion and empathy. There's all these things that I want to instill into my team members that are very soft skills and aren't task-focused, so I think that's a great part of it. I love that you broke that up.
Speaker 3:That reminds me just last week we had a sister that's been with us for about a month and there was a new patient that was in the doctor's column and I was in the office and I heard her come up to the doctor. The doctor's been with us for about two and a half years and the assistant said this patient is a little crazy. She only wants to see someone who has eight years experience. I don't think it's going to be a good fit and I was like how the hell does like eight years? Where did that come from? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. How, like you must've pulled that out of her. Like let's talk about that.
Speaker 3:And it got me right back to like we haven't onboarded this person fully yet. They don't understand. Like when someone is asking saying things that don't make sense, it's because they don't know what to say, so they're just looking for things that they know. And so I was like you know what? Is it okay if I go in? I have a little bit more than eight years experience, but we'll see if this works. So I walk in and I was like welcome to the practice. I'd love to hear about what brought you in here.
Speaker 3:And she told me about this cantilever bridge that lasted her 30 years. She went to this new dentist and he told her that cantilever bridges don't work. And I just didn't believe him because it lasted me so long and I was like I'm so sorry that you had that experience. But I just started to explain to her who we are and our types of experience and she was perfectly fine, she didn't care, she just wanted to be heard.
Speaker 3:So I think that was just another example of when we bring people on, we need to train them, not just in how do you put things into open dental or Dentrix or how do you take this or do you make it temporary, but how do we communicate with one another and when we have objections, how do we deal with those objections? Because we are in a place where people stinking hate. No one loves coming to the dentist, so they're going to say weird things and act uncomfortably and do things that may not we might not like, but it's our reaction to that that's going to allow us to create the experience that is going to make people feel good, and that is the part that I find is missing most when we train and onboard our team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's more than just skills. It's that attitude, it's the character traits, it's the ability to probe and ask, because you might have found out, matt, well, cantilever bridges they only last eight years, and if you haven't been doing this for eight years, you wouldn't know that. Maybe that's what it was.
Speaker 3:By the way, the Kellyer bridge was failed. I saw an x-ray. She came to me and was already out. I think the person handled their previous status perfectly, but it was just the communication that needed some improvement.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly so, henry, how do you guys work at your office I mean, we're talking about the soft skills and like the attitude and stuff like that but what kind of like standards do you set, like maybe checking in with people? How do you make sure that you're training them in a way that's intentional, rather than just throwing them in the mix?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, like we said before, making sure they're put in with the right knowledge and it's small knowledge at a time, not giving them everything at once. Give them the small items, like we talk about the videos, giving them certain videos, not all of them, just a handful of them. Let them become an expert at that. Let them be comfortable, personality-wise, with everybody in the office. Let them get to know each other one-on-one and I will put this while it's in my mind here, putting it in the mind of a dentist who's trying to grow multi-doctor practice Very important.
Speaker 2:I love this phrase, I heard it and it always runs through. Dentists are such perfectionists, like to a fault. So I always remember this phrase when it comes to doing the videos. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. People will do like you said, paul I can't, I'm not ready, I'm not the here. Here's the phone press record go. You know how do we see the patient? And just I'm telling you they come out natural and they come out really good that way. So don't let perfect be the enemy of good and then be unselfish. Again, coming from the mindset of a practice owner trying to grow multi-doctor practice is put the newer team member with an experienced doctor right. Don't let the experienced doctor hog all the experienced assistants. You come up better that way and you kind of all bring each other up. Rising tide, you know, lifts up all ships.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. You know, something popped in my head was a recent coaching client of mine and I'm sure some people can relate to this has a front desk employee in which this is the person that does everything, this is the person that knows everything, and sometimes that person is so busy because they're the only person that knows everything, they can't train the new people. So then there's nobody experienced training the new people and you can get yourself in this cycle of getting short-staffed but then trying to bring people in to resolve the problem, but not having anyone to train that new person. And this is why I think it's important, personally, that you've got to come up with some kind of 30, 60, 90 training list. Okay, Doesn't?
Speaker 1:I mean, I like the 30, 60, 90, but I mean if you just have one global list that lists all the skills, so that you can sit down with this new hire every so many weeks, maybe once a month, and say, hey, what did we learn this month and what can we work on? It's about getting intentional about it, because I can't tell you how many times where we haven't done this with an employee and they've been there for a year, and then you'll have an instance with them and you're just like how do you not know how to do this? You've been here for a year and the fact of the matter was is we never looked at the list, we never went back and we never made sure that everything was complete. But if you can get all of your teammates and all of everyone on your team to know everything on that list, you're not going to get shackled by one employee that knows everything and I know everybody's had that happen to some extent at their practice at one point or another.
Speaker 3:A hundred percent. As the CEO of our business, it is our responsibility to make sure we put every single person in a position to be successful. So when someone's coming on early on in their tenure with us, they may not know everything. We need to make sure we live by that. 30, 60, 90 or whatever checklist protocol. Put that together and then those are the expectations.
Speaker 3:It would be great if you could learn these things. But the first 30 days we're going to focus on this, or the first 30 days, we're going to focus on this, or the first three weeks, we're going to focus on this. By the end of three days, I want you to focus on this. And the smaller that we can make those goals or the more attainable they are, the more success that person will have. And then, when we put them into positions, the team will see that they're adding value and they'll be more welcoming of that person because it's actually adding value to the day, to the patient experience. It's taking things off their plate and we're not just saying here front desk business team, babysit this person, have them take care of things. And when they mess up, here's a little bit of work for you because you're going to clean it up.
Speaker 1:Well, it's an inconvenience for the team and I think we need to reframe that to the team and let them know that, yes, this is an inconvenience only if you treat it as such, and if you treat it as such, it will continue to be an inconvenience the whole time. This person's here.
Speaker 3:Can we change that word? Can we change that to investment Inconvenience, because that's truly what it is Investments cost, but then there's a return on that investment Inconvenience or just a pain in the ass. Yeah, love that I'm going to share with my team. This is going to be an investment on everyone and the return on that is going to be we're going to have someone who's going to help us with the things that are causing us challenges. We're going to be able to take better care of our patients. We're to take better care of our patients and we're going to have less stress in our day. That is the goal, but we need to invest in this person. Is everyone on board with that? We good, we good, let's go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the thing that my team members always tell me with a new person on board here, they love the fact that when they walk into our really big waiting room, every single person's locker has a vision board. We have all of our employees do vision boards on their lockers so we all can get to know what their life goals are, what their professional goals are, and we have the pictures of our staff going to cruises and stuff, so it almost looks like a family room instead of just a break room. And the thing that we've got comments on too, is the I mentioned before how our practice is for everybody. Same thing with employees, right? We have an office manager in our practice who started as an entry-level dental assistant, worked her way up.
Speaker 2:We have experienced DA2s that started as entry-level dental assistants. We have admin team members that started as assistants and we have somebody who left our practice for good because she got trained so well she became an HR person. So we're career focused. We're not just like a point where you're going to work and you got a ceiling, because that happens a lot in dentistry. You see dental assistants and they hit that ceiling and they get so bored and they get stagnant. There's no, we should all aspire to do something more, and that's another thing that people should see in your practice. If it's there, is that there's an aspiration here. We're not just going to keep you at this level and keep you there because people like that.
Speaker 1:It's so easy to have that ceiling because for the most part there's a lack of positions. In our personal dental office it's like, yeah, you can climb the ranks and you can go be an office manager, but we've already got one of those. How do you project that to your team without kind of pointing out that fact that there's really no open positions?
Speaker 2:Well, we've done it. For example, my office manager started as an entry-level dental assistant and grew into an experienced dental assistant and then eventually I think it was around COVID time she left our office for a little bit and then she came back and at some point and this comes with a practice that's growing and a big practice. I mean, I won't say we came up with positions, but we needed certain positions, as we were in leadership teams and office manager said you know what? I'm just spending way too much time on dealing with patient complaints and this and that, and then I'm also dealing with employee problems. So you know what. You're going to be director of operations. You're going to be director of people and this is what this entails.
Speaker 2:And now everybody's happy. We needed it and we internally just created that. So your leadership team can tell you what the problems are, because the problem as a dentist is we're not the boots on the ground. We're in the back fixing teeth and doing hybrids at break or here and there. No, but we don't see the boots on the ground. That happens. We don't know the problems that each position entails. So by having this intricate knowledge, you can create more things as you grow to make their jobs better.
Speaker 3:Growth comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It doesn't necessarily mean growth is more money or a bigger job title. Growth could be like I want to learn a new skill or I want to answer the phone better. Like there are so many ways, even in a small practice, that we can grow without creating a new title or whatever that means. And also, if I really build someone up and develop them and I don't have the opportunity that they need for their like what a great thing I did for that person, they can go off and be. You know, maybe they want to be the CEO of a demo group. I would love that for them. That's so cool, and if I had anything to do with that, that's awesome. So to finish this, what I was thinking when you guys both were talking was, like most demo offices don't have onboarding, don't have an onboarding process. Where the heck would I even start? If I wanted to start an onboarding process, what does that look like for you?
Speaker 1:A good spot to start, just to kind of summarize everything that we said, was just to sit down and write out the skills that we want our team members to learn. What are the cultural things we want them to know, what are the characteristics we want them to express core values and then, starting with what are the important skills that we need to teach them with, and then, while at the same time talking to our whole entire team and making sure the mindset is in the correct place and I love what you said about investment versus inconvenience. I mean, it is a team effort. It's like the village raises the child. Everybody has to be all in.
Speaker 1:And coming back to what you ended on, henry, is just having an attitude of abundance instead of scarcity, that this person's going to get too good for you and leave you. We want to make them the best they can and, like you said, steve, if they get so good that they go on to a better opportunity, good for them. What a great thing we did for them. So we'll end it at that. If you're thinking about working with a coach and growing your practice, dr Steve, dr Henry and myself are willing to work with you. Check out our website at dentalpractice.
