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This transcript with our Jameson Files host Carrie Webber has been lightly edited for flow. To enjoy the audio, you can watch on YouTube or listen to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify.

Setting our Team up for Success Regarding New Team Members

Welcome to the Jameson Files. I'm your host, Carrie Webber, and I'm so glad to be with you once again for another episode. As we roll into the end of 2023, something that we're finding in the seasons of our dental practices is perhaps some of you are overcoming that challenge of finding new employees and getting people hired. Today I want to talk about setting your team up for success when you are bringing a new employee or a new member of your team on board whether that is now or in the very near future. We're going to talk about things to consider and ways to successfully and effectively onboard new employees. And then the big question that is often asked is, how do we retain superstar team members? 

I recently did a presentation on recruiting, onboarding, and retaining new employees, rockstar dental team members. When we asked the group what the most important pieces of this topic were that they were hoping that we would cover, the large majority of the requests and the goals and objectives for our time together were how do I retain, how do I build accountability, how do I build engagement in my team? So it really has come full circle to not finding team, but now that I've found somebody great, how do I keep them? So again, today on the Jameson files, we're going to talk about how to set our team up for success, especially when we're talking about hiring, onboarding, and those new employees that are so valuable. Of course all of our team members are valuable, but how do we keep these valuable team members onboard and have them be as successful as possible in their new role? So let's get started.

Have a Clear Structure in Place When Onboarding a New Employee

When I think about the successful onboarding process of a new employee, it's important that we have clear structure and intention in place on that onboarding process and timeframe. We're looking at those 30, 60, 90 days of how to make this successful. We're measuring from all of that time as we're training, is this person the right fit? Can this person do the job that I have hired them to do? Am I training them successfully and clearly? Am I giving clear expectations of the role so that the person that's coming on board fully understands their responsibilities in this position in my practice? And do they have the desire and the willingness to do the job to the level of expectation that I have clearly set? So this is the thing that we want our pro training programs in our dental practices to do. We want them to help a new team member get fully invested into the practice and into your practice's culture, get fully productive in their role so they are as productive as possible and meeting or exceeding the expectations that you have set for that employee, and get interested in being successful.

We want them to be bought in and interested in experiencing full success and excellence in their role in our practice. So remember, we want our new team members to get fully invested, fully productive, and get interested in being successful. That's what a great onboarding and training program is going to do in your practice. So when you think about effective training, I want you to start thinking about what the plan is that we have in place to help this person be successful. We want clarity and consistency in training and onboarding. So as you are preparing for this new employee that's coming on board in your practice or that will be in the future, think about these things and make sure that we have all of these items in place in that training and onboarding window of time. 

Have Clear Roles and Responsibilities Lined Out For the New Team Member

Number one, have clear roles and responsibilities lined out for that team member for whatever role they're coming in on. Something that I find, especially if you have multiple business team members, is that we're hiring a lot of people to fulfill specific elements of the business systems of the practice, but often there is confusion in practices about who's ultimately responsible for what. So bringing on a new employee is probably a great opportunity for you and your practice to review the roles and responsibilities of the team you have in place, get those streamlined and clear, and then make sure that the roles and responsibilities are lined out clearly for this new person that's stepping into this new role. So make sure clear roles and responsibilities are lined out and that we are able to review that with that team member so they truly know, understand, and are up for the job they're stepping into.

Have a Clear Documentation Process

We need to make sure we have a way of documenting all of the things that person gets trained in, and that we're checking those boxes when those items are completed. We do that when we have that documentation process, and we can check the boxes and say, we've trained on this, we've trained on that, we've trained on that. That prevents things falling through the cracks and those accidental executions of systems. So what we want to do is protect the systems you've worked so hard to create in your practice. We want to protect that which is working really well for you. The only way we can do that is make sure we're training up successfully the person that's stepping in to help execute those systems now. So document the items that need to be done, and make sure we're keeping track of that.

Have a Schedule in Place for the Training Process

We want to schedule training. We don't want to just throw them out off the cliff and say, good luck. You said you had dental experience, so let's see what you're made of.

We want to have a schedule in place. We want to have a training plan so that that person knows when to expect this training to occur and you have a clear process to follow. That makes it much less stressful and a much clearer line toward the end result, which is a fully trained, fully engaged new employee. 

Delegate Different Aspects of the Training Plan to Appropriate Team Members

We want to delegate to appropriate team members different pieces of the training plan. It doesn't have to be one person training a new employee on all the elements of their role in a practice. In fact, I want the person training that employee on different elements to be the one that does that step the most or has the most experience or understanding of what “right” looks like in that process. So if you are hiring a clinical assistant, I'd love to have another assistant leading them through some of the training. If you are hiring a hygienist, if possible, have another hygienist do some training. If it's a business team member, I want to be sharing that training process with any other business team.

Doctors, you can delegate this out to different members of your team. Office managers, you can do the same. In fact, the more people that are involved, the more likely we have cohesiveness across the board, and the more invested everyone's going to be in making sure this team member is successful. 

Block Time for Progress Review

So delegate to appropriate team members, the different aspects of that training plan, and then make sure you're blocking time for progress review. If you are an office manager that's ultimately responsible for the training of a new team member, or if you, as a doctor, are the one that's leading this process along, we want to make sure we're blocking time regularly in those first 30, 60, 90 days to sit with that new employee, review what has been trained up to this point, give time for questions and for review, and answer those questions or do some continuous training or course correction.

That's going to be important, especially if early on you're getting lots and lots of questions from new employees. We want to give them time to batch those questions and ask those questions so that we build up their confidence and their competence in their role. So again, make sure you have clear roles and responsibilities lined out and that we're clearly setting expectations of what “right" looks like in this position. We wanna make sure we have some kind of document in a sheet where we can do documentation of training progress. 

We want to have a training plan and schedule in place. We're going to work on X, Y, and Z this week, and next week we're gonna work on A, B and C and so on. We want to delegate to appropriate team members different elements of that training process and training plan so that we're all sharing the responsibility of helping this new employee, new teammate be successful.

And we want to block time for progress review so that we can reduce the amount of distractions that those of you that are in the training positions may be experiencing and you can fully support that employee in their work and their training and their progress. So remember, clarity and consistency is important. 

Train to the Standards that you Want to See Executed

We need to train to what “right" looks like. A lot of you that listen to the podcast or have seen me speak, ask this question all the time. In your processes, in your ideal dental days, what does “right" look like? So we need to make sure we're training these new employees on the answer to that question. Something that we always put ourselves at risk at when we hire someone, especially when we hire someone with dental experience, we're so relieved to have someone in that position that we just assume they know how to do things the way we would want them done.

Do not assume that they're going to do things the way you prefer them to be done or the way that works great for your practice.