Balancing summer vacations and lost dental practice production

It’s summer and every team member wants some time off. Of course we want to say yes. Of course we want everyone to be happy. But let’s be honest. We can’t afford a bad month or more. Friends, balancing our team’s wants with our practice’s needs is challenging, but it’s essential. Let’s look at the top strategies to find that balance.

1. Plan ahead

I know this is big-picture and you’re thinking, “I’m in it now.” We’ll get to that. But the best time for us to plan for next summer is right now while we’re living the hurt summer vacations can cause us.

Time off policy: What is yours? If you have one, is it working? If it isn’t or you’ve yet to establish a policy, how long are you willing to live in survival mode?

Establish clear time-off policies that detail how far in advance vacation requests must be submitted. Personally, I like a minimum of three months—meaning, in our practice, if you bring a request to us less than three months out, there’s a strong chance it’s not happening. Remember, we teach people how to treat us, and every time we give in (even just this one time), it leads to 10 more one-times.
Establish what happens when someone asks for time off when another team member already has a yes for their time off.
Establish what happens when two team members race to ask for time off at the same time.

Master calendar: We have a master calendar in our team room that shows the entire year. It’s huge. You can’t miss it. Unless you’re trying to miss it. We also use a shared app (for more than time off but for our purposes today …). The take-home point is, it’s important for our teams to visualize what’s happening before they come to us. This will dramatically reduce team members coming to us asking for a week when another team member is already taking off. (See time-off policy.)

2. Stagger time off

I’m going to state the obvious here because although you and I know this, we let the opposite happen too often. Balance your time off. There are only two ways we can have more than one clinical or business team member off at the same time.

Doctor time off: (1) In a multidoctor practice when one of the doctors is off. (2) Or when everyone agrees to shut down the practice and take their time off together.

The first option works very well for doctor-assistant teams within the team. It also makes it easy for a hygienist to take time off as it lightens the load for the other doctor.
The second option is gold if you have strong team culture! It literally transforms your time off scheduling woes for the entire team. I highly recommend building a culture of character and making this happen. And if that seems impossible, click here. I’ll give you 15 minutes of how-to.

3. Cross-train

I want to be very clear with this. As a rule, I want everyone on our team doing what only they can do all day, every day. As an exception, when we need to dig deep as a team because we’re running short, cross-training is a powerful key to our success. The key is being prepared in advance.

Who—not how: Step one is knowing who on your team can be cross-trained to do what. Don’t break licensure rules! It’s not fair to your team or your patients. Step two is having strong clinical and standard operating procedures that are well documented, easily understood, and easily followed. (Reach out to us if you need more on how-to.) Step three is scheduling time for team members to cross-train. If you schedule it, it’ll happen. If you wing it, it won’t.

Consistently develop: In addition to the scheduled development mentioned above, if you have monthly team meetings, spend one focused on this topic.

Open the meeting with an appreciation of what all your “who’s” do.
Hot-seat one team member at a time, and then go around the room asking every team member to share one nice thing about the one in the hot seat. Rotate everyone through. Bring tissues.
Celebrate your team and remind them that there will be days the practice needs them to step into another team member’s shoes.

4. Temporary team?

I’ve seen this bring big wins, and I’ve seen it bring big losses. The keys are the culture of character and strong operating procedures I mentioned above. Those translate into your people helping your temporary team member(s), and the temporary(ies) having an easy road map of how to do it.

Per diem team: If you have the culture and the operating procedures, your next step is what we shared in No. 1 at the start: plan ahead. If summers always seem to be an issue in your practice and you haven’t built the systems to ease that (yet), there are many great per diem companies that can help. I’m not here to play favorites. If you want help, reach out to us and we’ll share several of them with you.

5. Clear communication

Call me weird, but there have been days we’ve run short in our practice that I absolutely loved. It’s given our team a chance to prove we can make incredible things happen in the face of adversity. That is incredibly invigorating … when it happens rarely.

Regular meetings: I’m a big fan of regular meetings. I won’t share all of ours, but I will share what you need to make it happen.

Daily huddles. Communicating for 10 minutes as a team every morning starts the day positively, prepares us for potential problems the day of, and gives us a jump start on tomorrow.
Monthly development. We need time to get better at what matters most in our practices. Monthly meetings are excellent skills opportunities, be it clinical or communication.
Annual vision and planning. When we build goals and empower our teams to achieve them with us, we win. I highly recommend an annual planning meeting every fall, for the following year. You can have everything you’ve dreamt.

Friends, I really hope this helps. Of course, there’s so much more we could talk about. Come on back to DentistryIQ. We’re just getting started.