Within the dental industry, keeping your employees is an opportunity to improve your practice, but retention can be a challenge. High turnover adds costs and disruption for your patients as you hire and train over and over. This creates more work for everyone else, suppressing your practice growth. Beyond the adverse effects to your performance and profitability, low retention can also damage your marketability.
How do you encourage your employees to invest and take ownership of the business’s success? Here are four strategies to implement.
First, begin by having conversations with your team members to ask why they’re loyal. In order to give them what they need and want, it’s necessary to have the right information. You can then begin to create plans for how to integrate new processes based on these responses.
Second, offer professional development opportunities. Those who show the best success rates have dedicated their dental practices to mentorship, training, and advancement. This can set your practice apart in a field that is widely perceived as being physically demanding with limited upward mobility.
Third, show your team members you care about what’s important to them! Consider offering flexible work schedules, additional insurance options like for their pets, and financial incentives. Don’t be afraid to start small with buying a team lunch once a week or small gift cards. Recognition of their work anniversaries and regular praise for their efforts will tell them you notice and appreciate their contributions.
And lastly, a new and increasingly popular trend, which shows very positive results, includes retention bonuses. Think about combining this with small annual bonuses and regular salary increases. As the cost of living rises, normal expenses take a larger chunk out of budgets. To keep employees from chasing a higher pay rate elsewhere, and to encourage their ongoing commitment to your practice, look into cost-of-living increases. Having multiple levels of financial incentives should operate as a cascading program where they overlap so team members continually see a monetary reason to stay.
All put together, your retention program will transform your brand, your patient interactions, and your team culture. These things, in turn, organically benefit your profitability and ongoing performance.
Interested in learning more about how you can retain your staff? Full Pocket Coaching has recently developed a 10-week guided retention program visit: www.RetainMyStaff.com for more information today.
