The following is a guest post by Jill Nesbitt of dentalpracticecoaching.com. If you are interested in guest posting for Dental Heroes, please sign up here.

In my last post, A Well-Trained Dental Manager is Priceless I discussed the importance of providing a training program for your dental office manager. In this post, I’ll discuss my specific approach for doing just that.

My Approach to Training

Dr. Charles Smith, founder of HealthPark Dentistry, and I have used this training program over the past 15 years to take a bright, positive, new hire secretary and develop them into a knowledgeable, confident dental office manager. This training program is structured into levels of achievement: level 1 – Basics of the dental secretary position, level 2 – Working confidently as a dental secretary, level 3 – Move to Treatment Coordinator, level 4/5 – Team Leader role, level 6/7 – Marketing & Business Management. There are 2 sides to each level – the professional track and the general track. The professional track contains tasks specifically related to dental secretary work, for example, how to deal with dental insurance or handle a financial arrangement. The general track includes tasks regarding coaching on handling conflict, overall computer skills that everyone must know or books to read and apply the concepts. Each level contains about 25 tasks – some tasks must be completed in the office and others should be done on the office manager’s personal time.

Once a new secretary is hired, the dentist can offer this career development opportunity. In exchange for her investing 2-3 hours/week of her personal time (far less than attending a community college class) the dentist will invest time to meet with her as she completes the required tasks. In these meetings, the dentist and secretary will review the tasks she has completed, clarify any questions and confirm they are meeting the dentist’s standards. When a level is completed – and the secretary has now proven responsible for a significant amount of new tasks and is already accomplishing them – then she receives a raise. She then starts to work on her next level.

Benefits to this approach

- The dentist knows exactly what the office manager is doing and has been trained to do.
- The dentist spends time working with staff who are developing their career and contributing to the practice, rather than to the people who are causing trouble in the practice.
- The office manager knows exactly what is required to achieve a pay increase.
- The practice improves because the OM is focused on accomplishing the goals that benefit the office.
- The dentist feels confident that he is giving raises that have truly been earned.
- The OM gets used to learning from and meeting with the dentist in order to improve the practice – this sets a precedent for a long term professional relationship.

Let’s Look at an Example Application

To give an example of how the training works for a specific task, let’s take a look at Level 1 Task #18 – Understands & Uses the Telephone Professionally. This task starts with the concept that the telephone is a tool that can be used in a professional manner that will increase the new patient lifeblood in a practice and therefore although many people take telephone skills for granted, it is key to slow down and think about how we use a telephone as a dental secretary. It also describes phone etiquette including phrases to use and not to use. It also includes a section on the practice philosophy – how we handle emergencies, what the scheduling options are for new patients, how we want vendors handled, etc. It even includes a couple sample conversations to read how to handle a ‘dental shopper’ who asks for the price of a cap and what to say to a patient calling to cancel their appointment at the last minute. This task ends with 52 telephone questions that the secretary must write what they would say (not what they would do).

To complete this task, the secretary reads through all the task material (20 pages) on her personal time. She spends about ½ hour in the office with a more senior staff person to discuss the practice philosophy. (I recommend that the dentist review this section first to customize the material to his practice style and approach.) Then, back at home, she write down her answers to the telephone questions. If there is a senior secretary in the practice, this person can review her answers and meet to discuss which ones she got wrong and how the dentist prefers these calls handled. Otherwise, this would involve a meeting with the dentist. Again, at home, she would re-write any wrong answers and then have a final meeting with either the senior secretary or dentist to finalize that this task is completed.

Jay Gaier of The Scheduling Institute has created an entire consulting organization around the concept of using the telephone as a professional tool. His courses and coaching cost in the $10k range depending on the personalization of coaching you prefer. His brilliant marketing approach for dentists is to simply call your office pretending to be a potential new patient – and then he records your secretary handling this call. He then mails you a CD so you can hear your secretary and the pretend patient – and you can hear for yourself the telephone skills your secretary possesses. By requiring that all new hire secretaries must complete the task on Understands and Uses the Telephone Professionally, before they start answering the phone – you are raising your chances that new and existing patients will be handled correctly right from the start.

Using this one example, you can see how this training program would work. The secretary will be reading and working on her tasks and when she has 6-8 tasks she feels are ready to be ‘signed off’ by the dentist, she requests a meeting. Generally this training meeting would last ½ hour and can take place during a cancellation or hole in the schedule. By the end of this meeting, the secretary will have completed some tasks to the satisfaction of the dentist and perhaps be re-working a few tasks as well. The dentist should document this training meeting in the secretary’s employee file – keeping track of the tasks completed and still to accomplish. This becomes a record of the career development for this employee. Eventually as the secretary completes level 1 and a raise is given, this also is documented in the employee file.

Your Thoughts

What do you think about the training program Jill and Dr. Smith have developed?

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