The Real Reason Your New Hires Fall Short

Your new hire isn’t “bad” after three days, they’re lost in your system. When we throw someone into a busy dental office with a login, a quick tour, and a vague “just ask questions,” we create office survival training. That is not onboarding, and it is one of the fastest paths to turnover, resentment, and the feeling that you can never keep a solid dental team.

I break down why dental experience doesn’t automatically translate into performance in your practice. Every office has a different pace, different expectations, different practice management software, and a different way of communicating with patients. Even talented, experienced people can struggle more when they feel pressure to prove themselves and don’t feel safe admitting what they don’t know. We talk about how inflated expectations and low psychological safety quietly destroy trust, and what to do instead if you want real employee retention.

Then we get practical: assign one trainer, not a whole department, and build an onboarding system that does not live in the brain of your best employee. I share how to create a simple training framework by role, set standards without scaring good people away, and use a 30-60-90 day onboarding plan so learning happens in the right order. The goal is a practice that runs smoother, trains faster, and keeps great people because the environment makes it safe to ask questions and grow.

If you want more structure like this in your dental practice management and leadership, subscribe, share this with a practice owner friend, and leave a five-star review so more dentists can find the show. What is the first change you will make to your onboarding this week?

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Transcript

The New Hire Honeymoon Ends

Paul Etchison 0:01

All right. So you hire someone new and you are so excited about it. And you feel so good that you finally found that diamond in the rough. You are nailing it. You can just sniff these people out. You know exactly how they are going to be before they even step in for the first day because you got such a knack for people. Do you feel me? Yeah, I know you do. But then about three days later, yeah, they suck too. They just sucked. So it didn't work out. But it's not your fault because you know exactly what to do, but you just got unlucky again. You thought this was going to be the assistant that was going to help you finally move through your schedule, the front desk person that was going to know everything about the insurance and was going to clean up your AR, or the hygienist that was just going to tee up treatment like you wouldn't believe, make your life so much easier. And then it didn't happen again and you're frustrated. So why do you keep making hires like this? Why does this keep happening in your practice? And let me tell you why. Most of the time, it's not the new hire failing because they're incapable. It's because you've thrown them into this completely unorganized chaos of a mess, and you would hope that they would magically figure it out. And you train them like you've always trained people in the past, which is the way that you've been trained, which is the way that we've always thought we were supposed to be trained. Throw them into the fire, let them figure it out. And let's face it, this is what nearly every dental office does. We all do this, I've done it, you've done it. We hire them, we give them a login, we show them where the gloves are, we say go. Sometimes it turns out great, and the other times it doesn't work out at all. And I would go as far as to say, even when it does work out great, it could have done so much better if we did it differently, if we actually provided training, real training, structured training instead of what I like to call office survival training. And the frustrating part is that we really, really want our team to succeed. We want them to do well. But let's face it, your office, it's already busy. So everything that you do as far as training becomes reactive instead of intentional. So the new hire spends their first month feeling super overwhelmed, underprepared, and eventually scared to ask questions. And it they'll reach this certain point where you look at them, you say, you know what? I don't think they were a very good fit. And we got to ask ourselves, were they not a good fit or was it us? So that's what we're gonna be talking about today.

Chaos Is Not Training

Paul Etchison 2:32

I'm gonna walk you through why most onboarding systems fail and why you need to put some focus into this because this is a big part of the office. It's often skipped. This is something that I have so many clients that they want to delay and put off because it's not fun to set up. But I promise you, when you do, this will help you in so many other areas of your office. It'll help so many things down the line, and you're not even realizing how much it's costing you. So that's what we're gonna dive into today. Now, you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach dentists how to be the CEOs of their practice, empower their team, and build a practice that runs without them. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Etchison. I'm a dental practice owner, I'm a coach, I'm a two-time author, and I'm someone slightly maybe a little bit obsessed with helping owners build practices that are just incredibly awesome. So if you want a practice like that, you have come to the right place. You are here, I am here. Let's party together. Let's go. So I'm gonna start off by poking a hole in something I think is a big fallacy and a big belief that we just should not believe in, but we do as dental practice

Experience Does Not Mean Ready

Paul Etchison 3:40

owners. Do you ever think that it's a requirement for you to find somebody with dental experience? Because when you find this person with dental experience, they already know what they're doing. And you can just throw them in and they will know what to do right at the get-go because they've done this before. They've worked in a dental office. But here's the problem every office, completely different. Every office has different systems, you got different expectations, different personalities, a different pace. Man, a different pace. I feel like my office is a completely different pace that anyone has ever seen when they come to my office. They mention that all the time. Different doctors, different treatment philosophy. Everything's different, you know, different communication styles, different ways of taking care of the patients. And in my experience, I've seen this over and over again. So many people, it doesn't matter how much experience they have, they still suck when they come to my office. When I put them on my standards, they suck. And that's okay because them sucking is expected. And I let them know that at the beginning. I don't use those exact words, but I do let them know that at the beginning. And I hold them to a higher standard. And that's the thing. And you might say to yourself, well, I don't want to scare them off by holding them to a higher standard. And I would beg you to try to think outside the box here a little bit to say maybe you don't know what you don't know, because people love to be held to a higher standard. As long as there's safety, there is forgiveness, and there is grace, that higher standard, people appreciate it. They want to be part of something amazing. They want to work at a place that delivers amazing care. So don't be afraid to hold your standards too high, but it's the way that you enforce them that matters. So, no matter how much experience somebody has, they are going to feel lost at first. And that's just the way it's going to be. And let's face it, sometimes experienced employees struggle more because they don't want to admit that they don't know or that they're struggling and they don't feel comfortable letting us in on just how much they don't know.

When High Expectations Kill Trust

Paul Etchison 5:33

I remember working with the clients and she had lost her office manager. Now, she didn't train up her bench. She had this one office manager that was awesome. And this person did everything, and that person had to move because their husband got a new job. And she was screwed. She was in big trouble. Nobody else knew how to do anything. I remember my office manager working with her front desk team on a weekly basis, trying to get dig them out of this hole, trying to train them on how to do insurance and stuff. So she was in a pickle. So, what did she do? She went, she put an ad out for a new office manager, and she found this new office manager, somebody with experience, somebody with a great attitude, and somebody who is just going to come and save the day. And when this person came in, team started noticing things were slightly off, that she would talk very confidently about things, but sometimes what she would say didn't really match up. Sometimes it was like, huh, I don't think what she just said was true. I don't think that's the way it is. And the fact of the matter was that my clients started telling me, I don't think they're gonna work out. They're making a lot of dumb mistakes, and the team is seeing this and they're losing trust in this person. So I started asking questions to their team, asking questions, trying to be curious, trying to figure everything out. And here's what we discovered is that this person had come in with such a high expectation. They had the high expectation, which I think the my dental client didn't help with it either. I mean, she was talking this person up to the team. But this person came in with the expectation from the entire team that this person knew their stuff and they knew what they were going to be doing. And they may have. But the fact of the matter was that the practice management system was different, everything was different. And this person just didn't feel like it was safe to ask questions to get help or to even admit that she needed help with anything. So it was like a failure from the start. This person just couldn't meet the expectations that they had come into, and there was no level of safety there for them to ask questions to learn. So, what should have happened is that we should have made it safe and acknowledged that they're going to need to learn a lot of things. There's going to be a lot that they don't know, and that we want to make sure that they feel comfortable asking questions. We should have been checking in with this person, but that's not what happened. This person didn't work out. She eventually quit. I don't blame her. She was frustrated. The team was frustrated. It was just a bad onboarding experience. So just a great example of how we could totally screw this up. Now, this person may not have worked out. We will never know. But all we know is that she didn't. She may have worked out if we would have onboarded differently. And I think that is the truth. I think she would have had a chance at least. So when you are sitting there and you're looking at a potential employee, you're looking at hiring somebody. I want you to look across that desk at that person and realize that no matter how much experience they have, you are never going to hire a fully finished employee. You are hiring the potential. You're hiring an attitude, you're hiring character, you're hiring enthusiasm. You are not hiring your fully finished product. That is something that you will develop. And when you start developing it, you will start to have a full team of all-stars. And what I always tell clients when they start working with us is when we start systematizing everything, you start keeping all of your people, especially when we systematize the communication components at the office, which is just one small part of our complete seven phase omnipractice program that we teach all of our clients with. So if that's something that you may want to know more about, please set up a strategy call with me at dentalpracticeherals.com/slash strategy. All right, let's talk about the next part that makes it hard for us to onboard employees. Your

Hiring While Drowning In Work

Paul Etchison 9:10

office is busy. I know your office is busy because the fact of the matter is, is the reason you're hiring somebody is because you guys are busy, right? We're filling a spot. It's rare that we are hiring somebody and things are chill and we're not understaffed. And this market, most of the time, we're understaffed anyway. So it's just becoming more of the normal. So what does this mean when our office is busy and how does that play into us hiring? Well, we really need to try to hire ahead of time. We need to always have somebody on deck just in case. Like I've got my office into numerous occasions, just you know, things outside my control. It happens where we get to the point where we lose a few people, and all of a sudden we're trying to hire and train new people while we're drowning. And it never works. And the fact of the matter is that when you're drowning, you're more likely to burn out and lose another person, which makes it even more difficult to stay afloat. So we don't want to get to those points when we're actually drowning because here's what happens when the office is understaffed when you hire. You hire somebody, you throw them in with no onboarding, and you say, hey, just sit up there, ask questions when you need it. So this person sits up there, they ask questions when they need it, and they're gonna ask somebody a question, and that person's gonna be in the middle of something else. And that person is going to give them one of the, uh, I don't know, just do something. I don't know. I can't, I'm busy, you know? They're gonna give them a really crappy answer, or they're gonna just send that slight undertone of, hey, I'm busy, or hey, you're asking me way too many questions, or hey, I thought you had experience. Why do you not know anything? That person who is your new employee then learns, uh, I don't want to be bothersome. I don't want to be a problem. I need to stop asking questions to so many people. I'm really starting to piss off my new coworkers. They're not gonna like me. And then what happens? They don't ask questions, they don't get the training they need. And eventually they're now at your office for maybe a month or two. And now they're at a point where they should probably know how to do a lot of things, but they don't want to ask at this point because people are gonna be like, How do you not know this? You've been here two months already. So at the beginning, it's like they don't feel comfortable asking questions because the team has thrown the vibe that they're stressed and they're they're frustrated. And then later it turns into they don't want to ask questions because they don't want to let everybody know that they didn't learn, they weren't properly trained. So it's it's setting us up for failure.

Assign One Trainer And Protect Questions

Paul Etchison 11:35

And that brings me to another point that's really important about onboarding is like I said before, we're hiring the potential, but two, we never want to just throw somebody in and have them just shadow an entire department. We never just want to throw somebody in and say, ask questions from somebody around you when you need it. We want them to be assigned one person that will be their trainer, that that is the person that they're gonna follow around. Only that person, they're gonna work with that person side by side. And that person is designated to help them with everything they need help with so that there is no level of frustration. Other people are not getting mad at this person, and we're not creating an environment that's unsafe to ask questions because we need to ask questions for our team to learn, for our team to be properly trained. So give that person a single trainer. That is super important. It just has to be that way. I know that this person that is the trainer is gonna say, I barely have enough time to do my things. How am I gonna do this? They just have to. You just have to do it. And hopefully you didn't get yourself into a situation where you're completely drowning already, but it's going to happen. So just acknowledge that person. Hey, I know you're busy. I know it's stressful, but hey, hang in there for me. We need you. I'm counting on you to get this person trained up. So now you've hired this potential, you've assigned them to one single trainer. So what's next? What do they do? And we could follow the typical dentist playbook, which is they they just learn it. What do you mean they just learn it? Well, they just learn everything. What's most important? It's all important, of course. I mean, come on, like they just learn it and they learn everything and it's all important, they learn it all, and it just works, right? No, that doesn't work at all. That works horribly. That is learning by osmosis. Like they're supposed to just magically absorb everything they need to know. There's no structure, there's no roadmap, there's no training timeline, there's no expectations. They'll just pick it up somehow magically. And man, we're crossing our fingers and hoping that it works out. It doesn't work out. And you might be saying, Well, hey, it works out for me. Well, I'm telling you, it may work out to some extent, but it could work out so much better if you had a plan. So this brings us to something very important. Your

Build A Training System And Timeline

Paul Etchison 13:50

onboarding system, it cannot live inside the brain of your best employee because that person might be busy, you might lose that person, as what happened in my one client's situation, or because the second that that person gets frustrated or calls off, I mean, the training is gone. The system is gone, it just disappears. So we need to create a system. We need to create what is the skills that we want people to know, what is necessary, and what is the order that we want to do it in. I remember we had this hygienist, and her name was Kayla. And she had just graduated hygiene school. She had a great personality, she was great with the patients, super outgoing, seemed super smart. I mean, she was really cool. Like we really enjoyed having her on the team. And I remember coming into the break room, and this is maybe her fourth day, and she's crying. And I thought, like, somebody died. Obviously, somebody died. I walk in and I was, oh my gosh, like, what's going on? I just felt so horrible. Like I didn't know it. It was like me as Dr. Owner Paul guy and walks into a room and employees crying. I kind of just want to turn around and like slowly back out. Like, ooh, nobody saw me, get out of here. But I could not back out. She had spotted me, so I had to see what was going on. So I asked her what was going on, and she kind of didn't really want to tell me. She said, I'm just, you know what? I'm just really overwhelmed. I'm embarrassed that I am, but I'm overwhelmed. And I'm like, from what? She's like, there's just so much going on at this office. It's, it's just out of control. It's just like, I feel like I need to start at like an office that's slower, that doesn't run as well as your office. And I just thought that was like the most ridiculous thing that somebody could ever say. But there is some truth into that. And I learned something there. I said, you know what? This was before we had a true onboarding program. And I think we just we didn't really see that perspective that we might be throwing too many things at once at this person. So that's why you've got to have a plan. You've got to decide what are the things you want each position to know. And let's face it, come on, dude. There's not that many positions at your office. There's hygienists, there's assistants, and there's admin team. So there's really three positions. So deciding what you want each of those positions to know, and then what is a reasonable training timeline? What are the things they need to know after 30 days? What are the things they need to know after 60 days? And what are the things they need to know after 90 days? And I'll give you a quick example with our dental assistants. Our dental assistants will not do a single procedure by themselves until they're past 30 days. And the only procedure they're going to do by themselves at 30 days is going to be composites. They're not going to do endo, they're not going to do anything like surgical, grafting, anything complicated. They're going to do very simple composites. And then after 60 days, they're going to start doing other procedures. But they will have a shadow working behind them all the way up till 90 days. And that's the way we do it with our assistants. So the thing is, is you've got to create this plan. And what the worst plan you can possibly have is no plan. So create a plan. And I'll tell you, I see so many of my clients get stuck here and I tell them the same thing. I say, hey, just create something. Start with something because once you have something, you can make it better. You can pivot, but you don't need to nail it perfectly on the first try. You don't need to be super detailed. I mean, there's going to be some filling in of the blanks of the spaces in between. And people are going to learn a lot by just being on the job. But you need to have some sort of structure to start with. We want happy new hires. We want new hires that are excited to be part of this team. We don't want new hires that are spending their whole day trying to hold in their tears, going to cry in the bathroom, and trying not to ask any questions and upset everybody. If you're wondering what happened with that hygienist that was overwhelmed, well, she did quit. And we've got a little desperate maybe two years later, and we reached out to her again and she was coming in for an interview and she didn't show up. So she was awesome. We're really thankful for you, Kayla, if you're listening, which I know you're not, because why would you listen to this? This would make you better at your job. That's not who you are. Is it, Kayla? Is it? That's not who you are. Anyway, no, but wishing Kayla the best. I'm sure she figured it out. I'm sure she found an office that was really slow and sloppy that was just a perfect fit for her. Yeah.

The Onboarding Rules To Remember

Paul Etchison 18:11

So we need to work on our onboarding. That is the main point of this episode. So if you remember nothing else from today, remember these few things. Stop assuming experience equals readiness. Every office is different. Nobody is ready. No employee is good out of the box. And if they are, they are the exception. Know that you're buying the potential and that you're going to have to pour into this person. The next thing is you need to slow down. You need to slow down enough to train intentionally. Make sure that that person gets one trainer, that they're not trained by an entire department, and make sure it's safe for them to ask questions. Otherwise, you're going to provide the worst training experience possible and you're going to create what I call the quiet place. You're going to create that place that's unsafe to ask questions and admit your shortcomings. We don't want that. Part of a DPH culture is having psychological safety. That's something that we teach in all of our programs. We teach it to all of our offices because it's such a critical piece of culture. The next thing, do not expect people to magically absorb the systems. You need a framework, you need structure, you need a timeline, you need a map. What are we teaching people? When are we teaching them? What are the standards we're going to hold them to? And somebody, that trainer, needs to be responsible for those things. They need to sit down and say, okay, let's go through this list. Which ones did we hit that we did really well on? Which ones did we not do so well on that we need to spend some extra time making sure that you get the training you deserve? And lastly, the most important thing, make an environment where questions are safe. If you can just do that in your office, so many other things just magically work themselves out. Safety is so critical at an office. Make it okay to make mistakes, make it okay to ask questions. And if you're listening to this thinking, well, that would be nice to pour into employees. I can't keep any of my employees because my practice is constantly feeling overwhelmed because of the amount of turnover, all the onboarding problems, and the rather inconsistent team that I have.

Strategy Call And Five Star Reviews

Paul Etchison 20:12

If that's you, that is the exact type of thing we help dentists out with when creating the structure in their business and creating the systems that make your office run so much smoother, but also make it a lot more fun for your team to work at your office so that they stay and you retain trained quality employees. If you want to book a strategy call and talk to me about that, talk about what is possible, go to dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy. I will set up a no pressure call with you. I'll give you some tips, I'll give you some direction. And if I think we can help you with our coaching programs, I will share with you what that looks like. There will be zero pressure for you to commit to anything. And if you feel this episode helped you look at leadership or onboarding differently, please take the time to post a five-star review for this podcast. It really helps me grow this podcast. And I've been kind of excited to see that you guys have been doing this. I've been asking you guys for reviews for the past two months, and we've been doing good, guys. I'm gonna be honest, we've been doing very well. We can do better. Okay. So I want to see us do better, but I'm so thankful for those of you who have taken the time to write the five star review. So thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to spend it with me on your drive to work, drive home from the office, whatever it is. But I hope you have a great week this week, and we will talk to you next time.