Best Practices from Colleagues and Consultants
Improve your office efficiency with these strategies.
Tap into the best practices of office managers, coaches, and consultants from across the country to help improve your systems, processes, communication, practice culture, team communications, the patient experience, and more!
Beverly Wilburn, DAADOM Office Manager,
Karl A. Smith, DDS, LLC Periodontics and Implants
Never elevate yourself above the work you expect from others. If you expect someone else to do it, do it very well yourself first. Work through the challenges of the task, so that you can create a written system of super successful actions.
Roger P. Levin, DDS CEO, Levin Group Inc
Create a checklist every day of what you want to get done and then prioritize that checklist as A, B, or C. As must be done today. Bs should be done if you complete the A list. Cs never need to be done. Over time, you will learn to not even put Cs on your checklist, as they are nothing more than a distraction. You then take each A and prioritize it such as A-1, A-2, etc. You follow the same exercise for the B items. Then you start with A-1. At the end of the day, you analyze your checklist, move incomplete tasks to the next day, and reprioritize. If you do this day after day, you will accomplish the most important things and advance your productivity exponentially.
Debbie Evans, DAADOM Association of Dental Office Management’s 2020 Practice Administrator of the Year
Recently, I spoke to the dental assisting students at Wake Tech Community College. I shared about our office culture and what we were doing to grow our practice. We invited the students to take a tour of our office firsthand. We also handed out cards featuring our team picture with an invitation to join our team. The idea for the card came from Jennifer Steadman’s B.E.S.T. hiring method. This is a great strategy to hire new dental assistants as I received a tremendous response from that visit.
Jennifer Steadman, BSDH, RDH, DAADOM, Director of Operations, Inspired Hygiene
I use a meeting notebook to keep all of my notes organized. I take written notes in meetings and then transfer them into an electronic version using my Rocketbook Beacons, which keeps everything organized nicely! It turns any document, wall, etc, into a digital image that saves to Google Drive, Microsoft, DropBox, and many others.
Carrie Webber, Owner and President, Jameson Management
SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS. Have clear processes in place for each step of your practice or business and make sure all members of your team are appropriately and clearly trained on how to execute those processes. Onboard new employees intentionally so that cracks don’t start to form in your day-to-day workflow. If you are basing your measurement of team performance on assumption, not clear communication of expectations and training, this is an unfair work environment for both you and your employees. Clearly trained processes help to ensure that customer/patient service is consistently delivered and that chaos is reduced to a minimum. These allow you to delegate responsibilities successfully, thus reducing the stress on your shoulders.
Christian Perez, Managing Partner and Executive Coach, Fortune Management
Set ongoing, consistent appointments for team training. A lot of training and educational resources are available – and many of them are free. For example, you should leverage your practice vendors. Many provide training videos and online courses for front office teams. For example, CareCredit offers a variety of training options to help the team engage in positive money conversations (carecredit.com/training). Patient communication systems have training videos and your practice management software has in-person and virtual training available, so you can utilize functionality that can deliver both efficiency and effectiveness.
From Front Office Magazine. August 2023; 1(8):13.
