https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uk4UTqlHXs

Ask the Right Questions, Make the Big Decisions, and Achieve Your Practice Vision

Below, we’ve compiled the key points discussed in the Jameson Files Episode 137. To enjoy the full episode with our very own Carrie Webber you can watch on YouTube or listen to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify.

Carrie Webber:

Hello and welcome to the Jameson Files. I'm your host, Carrie Webber, and I'm flying solo for this episode about getting through the financial slump, the employee crisis, COVID and all its far-reaching impact. We all, as leaders, can get through this. We can embrace our practice vision; we can ask ourselves how to renew, revise, revisit, and reorient in ways that can make our dreams happen. So thank you so much for joining me.

I want to take some time to address the moment in time we are in right now and what's happening in the dental profession as we’ve been hearing it from practices all across the country. Practices are facing a continued struggle to hire, to find the right team, to get back to continuing growth, and to get back to their ideal vision for their practice. We continue to find ourselves faced with unheard of issues regarding the season of COVID, and it’s important that those of you in leadership positions in your practices feel empowered to continue the good fight and make progress.

And that leads us to today's topic—pushing through questions you need to ask, the decisions you need to make, and the actions you need to take for your practices’ progress as well as your personal sanity.

ADA Stats on Impact of COVID on Dental Practices

So where are we now? ADA's Health Policy Institute in its most recent update monitoring the COVID pandemic impact stated that half of those that completed their survey were definitely planning or currently searching to add team members to their practices. So that tells us there's a great many out there looking to hire now or in the very near future. 

In addition, our friends at Cedar Solution, in a recent online presentation by Paul Edwards of Cedar, stated that it's taking three to four months to hire a new team member. So the ongoing search is still in full force across the country. 

We talk to clients all the time about what to do in this moment. How do we push through this and overcome the strain of working with a limited team? How do we continue to work on the things that are the priority while dealing with the ongoing urgency that we're faced with day in and day out?

Make communication with your team a priority.

First, I’ll say it’s especially important to prioritize time to connect with teammates, co-leaders, and partners. Because if you're not connecting and communicating, there are a lot of things that are probably continuing to stay stuck.

In order to keep working towards your practice vision, you need to stay united and aligned, whether you're understaffed or whether you are growing and struggling to fulfill all of the demand that you have from the patients in your practice. Those team meetings are going to be important in order to address where you are now, where you want to be, and how you can work together as a team to continue to move forward toward your ideal goal.

So focus on your vision and communicate with your team. If you're looking for positions in your practice and coming up dry, it might be time to review what your job posts look like; rally together as a team and brainstorm this together so that you can refine it, go back to the drawing board, and keep the search going. And you can elevate your efforts by determining a creative approach to how you're going to run the practice in the interim. 

Team unity, team creativity, and team training are vitally important!

So what kind of meetings are you having? Are you having your daily huddles? Are you having weekly team meetings, monthly team meetings? Are you having team meetings at all? In my opinion,