Every successful dental practice has one thing in common: a team that feels valued. Team members need to sense that their day-to-day work matters and contributes to the greater goal of providing quality patient care. However, knowing how to make your staff feel valued can be challenging.

If you’re struggling to improve your working environment, you’re not alone. Many dental professionals have difficulty creating a place where every individual feels valued and vital to the team. Here, we cover six tips to help you boost employee satisfaction and company culture.

1. Offer Employee Benefits

One of the best ways to make your staff feel valued has to do with employee benefits. Offering an employment package that doesn’t include extra benefits can turn away prospective employees and cause your current staff to leave sooner. On the other hand, you can offer incentives with attractive employment packages that include the following:

• Paid time off
• Healthcare benefits
• Flexible work schedules
• Retirement plans

An attractive employment package offer shows that you care about your staff and keep their best interests in mind. You’re willing to invest in their lives because they’re worth it.

2. Keep in Touch

Dental practices have more technology at their fingertips than ever before, and yet workplace communication is still a common problem. Failing to communicate clearly and efficiently can wreak havoc in any business and can also cause your staff to feel isolated and unimportant.

If you're wondering how to make your staff feel valued, then stay in touch with them. Check in regularly with your team members, ask them how they’re doing or if they need adjustments to their work-life balance, and let them know you’re always available to talk. It takes work, but that’s why we offer tools like Team Chat, which allows for an easy way for your team members to communicate.

3. Provide Well-Rounded Feedback

Providing feedback is essential to helping your team know what they’re doing well and how they can improve. However, you’ll want to avoid a few pitfalls when it comes to giving feedback:

• Too little feedback: Giving too little feedback doesn’t help your team members grow. Not only that, it sends the message that you aren’t really paying attention to their work.

• Too much negative feedback: Giving too much negative feedback can make your staff feel like failures. You’ll want to balance every bit of constructive criticism with some compliments and praise.

4. Celebrate Milestones and Achievements

When you accomplish something big, you want to celebrate. Celebrating lifetime achievements and milestones helps you feel successful and motivates you to keep going. The same holds true in the workplace.

Don’t just set goals for your dental practice — celebrate when you reach those goals. It’s a great way to show that every activity and run-of-the-mill task leads to something far more important. By scheduling a celebration, you can help your team feel like their hard work has paid off.

5. Plan Out-of-the-Office Events

Job satisfaction is critical to maintaining a productive, healthy work environment. You want your team members to love what they do and feel energized at the start of every workday. That’s where company-wide events and social opportunities come in.

Knowing how to make your staff feel valued and actually doing it are two different things. Usually, though, it doesn’t take much. Even a simple plan, like going out as a group for dinner, can do a lot for building relationships and team chemistry. 

6. Give Pay Bonuses and Raises

Are you offering bonuses for staff members who perform at a certain level? Are you offering pay raises to incentivize consistent, high-quality work? If not, it could lead to a lack of motivation and lower-quality patient care.

Bonuses and raises don’t have to be astronomical. A bonus could be as simple as a gift card or an extra vacation day — something tangible to let your employee know, “You’ve earned this.” With this type of reward, your team members will feel special and see their jobs as worthwhile.

Dental Intelligence: Solutions to Boost Your Dental Practice

While many dental practices have excellent work environments, employees can still feel underappreciated and unmotivated. That spells disaster for your business and can significantly impact your service quality, customer satisfaction, and overall success in the industry. However, you can rest easy by knowing how to make your staff feel valued at your dental practice.

At Dental Intelligence, we are here to help improve your work environment for you and your team. Schedule a demo today to get started.