You’ve heard that dental staff training can help you improve your practice. You’d like to finally implement it, but you don’t really know where to start.

Train your staff and increase dental production with Dental Intelligence! We can offer tips and tricks on how best to improve your practice.

Why Is Ongoing Training Important?

You have skilled staff. They provide outstanding patient care — so why do they need additional dental staff training?

To start with: continued teaching can improve staff satisfaction. Most professionals want to learn more and get better at their jobs. Regular education can help your team members learn new skills and improve. This, in turn, means they’ll be more likely to stick with your practice rather than leave for what they consider better opportunities.

But training doesn’t just improve staff satisfaction; it can improve customer care, too. The more your staff knows the better care they can provide. This can boost client satisfaction and bring more patients to your dental office.

How to Effectively Train Your Staff

Understanding that continued instruction is important is one thing; understanding how to handle it is another¹. You’ll need to consider what’s most important for your employees, your practice, and your clients.

Thankfully, there are a few simple places you can start.

Pay for Continuing Education

The dental world changes constantly. New techniques and equipment come out regularly — and your team should know about them.

That’s not all, of course. You may have a skilled team, but there’s always more to learn. Certain staff members may not be familiar with different procedures, even if they want to learn about them.

Continuing education can help your staff members learn new skills and offer better patient care. Further education, however, is expensive. As such, it can be beneficial for dental offices to cover the costs of additional education. This way, you’ll get more effective team members, and your staff won’t have to worry about expensive bills.

Review Standard Operating Procedures

Most employers believe that only new staff members need to go over Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). While you do need to teach new staff, they aren’t the only ones that can benefit from an overview.

Reviewing SOPs with older staff members can:

• Give them a chance to brush up on their skills
• Allow them to identify flaws in an SOP
• Give you a chance to make sure everyone’s following SOPs correctly

To avoid making these sessions feel redundant, ask staff members to submit ideas for what they’d like reviewed. This will give you a better idea of what you actually need to address and make training more effective.

Train Your Office Staff Too

Your assistants and hygienists aren’t the only staff members you’ll want to train. If you want to run an effective practice, offer office training too.

Your office staff are key team members. Providing them with education opportunities can make things run more smoothly, increase both patient and staff satisfaction, and provide other benefits.

Some types of office training include:

• Teaching office staff about any new software
• Going over HIPAA compliance
• Making sure your staff knows how to input insurance information
• Teaching your staff about different dental forms

Consider Cross-Training

Most team members will likely only be familiar with their areas of expertise. This means that they may be relatively clueless about what their coworkers’ jobs are like.

Cross-training can be an excellent idea if you really want to improve your employees’ skills. It can:

• Help employees learn skills they wouldn’t have otherwise
• Reduce miscommunications in the workplace
• Allow employees to assist with other needs should someone need help

Cross-training can be especially helpful for smaller practices since they likely won’t have extra staff to spare. That said, bigger practices can benefit from it, too — and your employees will likely thank you in the long run. Learning new skills, after all, can make them much more effective in the workplace.

Help Your Staff Stay Up to Date

Proper dental staff training can help you improve patient care, increase staff satisfaction, and more. By using the right methods, you can provide effective guidance to your team, attract more clients, and otherwise elevate your dental practice.

At Dental Intelligence, we can help you lead an effective Morning Huddle. Schedule a demo today to see how we can help you intelligently shape the future of your practice.

Resources

¹ HealthIT