Your dental team performance can depend on many factors, but clear communication is often at the heart of it. If you want your team members to be productive and successful, you must encourage effective communication at your dental practice. 

Using a solution like Dental Intelligence's dental office communication software is an easy way to improve your team’s communication. Implementing this and other essential steps, such as morning huddles, regular staff meetings, active listening, and more, will help boost your team’s performance. 

1. Make Communication a Priority 

Before you begin implementing any communication strategies with your dental team, you should make it clear that proper communication is a priority in your office.

When you lead by example and explain how better communication leads to better dental team performance, you show your team that communication is a focus. You can even reward and incentivize good communication on your team by including communication goals in performance reviews and employee recognition programs. 

2. Hold Morning Huddles

Taking 15 minutes at the start of each workday to huddle with your team is essential to improving your practice’s performance because it sets the tone for the day. During this time, you can discuss daily expectations, schedules, patient and team member needs, and any special situations you anticipate. Ending this brief meeting with a cheer, words of encouragement, or employee recognition will also help you kick off the day on a positive note.

3. Plan Regular Staff Meetings

Beyond your daily huddles, longer staff meetings are essential to your dental team’s communication. These meetings should be mandatory, have set agendas, and allow some room for open discussion of needs, wants, expectations, and concerns between staff and departments. 

All staff should attend, from those who do dental assisting to front-desk workers, office managers, and dentists. To make attending easy for your staff, you should hold staff meetings at a time when you usually wouldn’t have any patients or you’re able to clear your patient schedule. 

Whatever frequency you choose for these meetings—monthly, bimonthly, every six weeks, etc.—be sure to get these meetings on the calendar as far in advance as possible. This will allow all team members to plan accordingly and ensure full-team participation. 

4. Provide Spaces for Written Communication

Providing spaces where employees can record, store, and access meeting notes, instructions, and other written resources is another element of effective communication in your practice. This communication hub can be a physical space, like a notebook or binder, or it can be a digital space, like a shared electronic folder, shared document, or group chat. 

Dental office staff should have a way to note non-urgent matters as they arise so the team can address them in the future. It can also be helpful to have a way for employees to raise issues or voice their concerns in writing between huddles and meetings. Before meetings, leaders can review these lists to help create meeting agendas. 

5. Practice Active Listening

You can encourage your staff to practice active listening with customers, dental team members, and anyone they encounter in your practice. Active listening means giving your full attention to what someone is saying and their non-verbal cues, such as body language and facial expression. 

To be an effective active listener, you should also let the person who’s talking know that you’re paying attention and that you understand what they’re saying. You can actively listen by making eye contact, nodding, repeating what they said in your own words, and asking clarifying questions if needed. 

You can explain active listening to your dental team and offer them opportunities to practice it together during your staff meetings.

6. Use a Dental Practice Communication System

Dental office communication systems are software tools that can help your team communicate better and feel more connected. For example, at Dental Intelligence, we offer Team Chat—an internal communication system that works similarly to group texts and other digital chat services. This tool, which we designed specifically for dental practices, allows your team to communicate anywhere, anytime, through desktop computers or mobile devices. 

At Dental Intelligence, we also offer an all-in-one solution that includes tools for more efficient practice management, patient communication, scheduling, payments, loyalty programs, and more. This solution combines analytic and engagement tools to help you work smarter, not harder, to improve dental team performance. 

Contact our team at Dental Intelligence today to schedule a demo and find out what we can do for your team. We’re committed to making communication in your dental office as efficient as possible.