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Few people look forward to their dental visits. Making your practice a warm and inviting place can go a long way towards relieving the stress many patients feel about visiting your office. And how your staff gets along sets the tone for your office and the level of comfort your patients will feel.
If you’ve recently filled a few new dental associate to the staff, here are a few ways you can strengthen your relationship with your new hire and improve the atmosphere of your practice overall.
- Help them get started: Even if they did incredibly well in their residency or fellowship, your new dental associate or other new hire are coming into a new environment where they might not necessarily know how everything works. Even little things like a different organizational system, or practice management software can throw off a new dental associate. If you can, take a little extra time to help your new hire who is just starting out his or her dental associate career; they’ll notice, and it will help build a good relationship early on.
- Make introductions: While this might seem like common sense, a dental practice can be incredibly busy, and not all dental position will interact with every other position in the office on a regular basis, especially in a larger office. Take the time to introduce your new hire and to show them around the office, and introduce them to their new coworkers or ask another employee to introduce them. Give employees a chance to get to know one another and facilitate good relationships within the office.
- Be open and honest: Employees need a boss they can trust and talk to , and this is just as true in dentistry as it is in any other industry. Communicating openly and honestly with your dental associate shows your trust in them, and encourages them to come to you directly if any problems ever come up that need to be discussed.
- Set expectations: Make sure that you and the new dental associate are on the same page from the very beginning. Have a written job description and review it together. Outline practice rules, procedures and expectations, both yours and your new associate’s. This can help avoid misunderstandings that can lead to problems and disagreements down the road. Be clear on where their patients will come from (e.g., are they seeing some existing practice patients?, Which procedures will they handle?, Do they need to bring in their own patients?, Who pays for their marketing? Hopefully much of this was covered during the interview process and is in a written agreement, but it cannot hurt to review it in more detail in terms of day to day procedures and processes.
And finally, enjoy your newly expanded team.
For more advice on staffing dental associates for success, contact Henry Schein Nationwide Dental Opportunities (ndo@henryschein.com) or 1-866-409-3001 today.