Business owners put a lot of money, time, and effort into recruiting and onboarding top-tier talent, so naturally you want them to stick around. If you’re dealing with high staff turnover, it can be a bad look as patients begin to speculate what goes on behind the scenes. Not to mention the costs and ROI associated with high turnover…
Google actually conducted a study on how to improve staff retention and reduce turnover, and had some very interesting findings. Here are research-backed principles to reduce staff turnover, that you can implement starting today.
Hire fewer people, but pay more
Instead of filling up and overstaffing your practice, be more strategic in your hires and really take an analytical look at your organisation chart. What skill gaps do you have? What roles are essential to your mission?
You want a highly skilled and streamlined team, who you then reward with a competitive salary. If you’re more deliberate in your hires and pay more, then you become an employer of choice and don’t have staff shopping around for higher wages or struggling to make ends meet.
Give recognition and show appreciation
People who feel negatively about their employer, workplace, or team culture don’t tend to stick around very long. A lot of workplaces face high turnover because staff simply feel unappreciated or worked to the bone
I’m sure you can cast your mind back to times where you felt frustrated and overlooked by an employer and thought to yourself “what am I breaking my back for?”. By showing genuine gratitude, empathy, and appreciation for your staff, you show them that their hard work isn’t for nothing. You can improve your working relationships, foster a positive culture, and increase their workplace satisfaction.
Set clear expectations
Right from the outset of your job description, through to the onboarding process, and performance measurement throughout the role, you should be explicitly communicating what your staff need to do in order to meet your expectations for the role, and what success within the role should look like
Keeping clear KPI’s and having visibility around how they’re tracking is also a fantastic way to ensure you both know and understand where their performance is. If you go in with wishy washy, out of context guidelines and don’t check in until your staff is halfway out the door, you’re setting yourselves both up to fail.
Another element of this is to set those expectations in the context of your mission and vision for the practise. People are more motivated and happier when they’re contributing to something that matters. Communicate how their role and daily tasks are actually bringing about real change in the bigger picture – you’ll find that instead of working for a paycheck or counting the hours, they’re really invested in doing a good job.
Play to their strengths
When your team are working on projects they enjoy and are good at, they’re going to be a lot more satisfied in their role and contribute to a really positive environment. Obviously, we all have to do tasks that we might not enjoy or are sometimes really difficult, but also allow your staff to really play to their strengths and natural talents in order to increase both happiness and efficiency.
Get to know your team, what their interests are, their career goals, area’s they’d like to upskill in, and then incorporate that into their work lives as much as possible. This is really a win-win-win for both you, your team, and your practice.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:
1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”
The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here
2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too
It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here
3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
4. Work with me and my team privately
If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
