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4 lessons dental practices can learn from tech startups

April 1, 2020
Tech startups have a reputation for cultivating creativity and growth. To foster that success, many of them have developed strategies that can benefit other types of businesses as well, including your dental practice.

Tech startups have a reputation for cultivating creativity and growth. To foster that success, many of them have developed strategies that can benefit other types of businesses as well, including your dental practice. Many of these tech-inspired workplace “hacks” can be adapted to help grow your team, establish a culture of productivity, and improve your business’s bottom line.

Start the day with a morning huddle 

Many tech teams start the day with a stand-up meeting, or morning huddle. This approximately 10-minute debrief is designed to share what each team member is working on, and to identify whether there are any areas that one person can help another work on more effectively.

Morning huddles provide all of your employees (particularly the quiet, reserved ones of the group) an equal opportunity to have their voices heard on a regular basis. They also give employees more clarity and nudge them into the right mindset by asking them to clarify what they hope to accomplish that day. 

Tips for kicking off your morning huddle

Schedule your morning huddles at a consistent time every day—probably before your practice’s first appointment—to avoid scheduling conflicts. 

Consider making it an actual “stand-up” by asking everyone to stand throughout the meeting. This helps everyone stay alert and keeps the daily debrief as brief as possible.

Schedule the meeting for a short time (e.g., 10-15 minutes) and stick to that duration. This ensures that the meeting is not overbearing and does not get in the way of anyone’s busy day. 

Consider randomizing the order in which people speak so that everyone stays alert. They’ll know that they will be just as likely to speak first as last.

Have fun with the huddle and consider concluding each one with a motivational quote to cultivate a sense of team spirit.

How to adapt the tech morning huddle to your dental practice

To try this, set aside about 15 minutes every morning to gather everyone in one place and ask each person to share what they accomplished the previous day, what they plan to work on today, and what stands in their way of moving forward with a particular task.

The morning huddle is also a great time to focus on common team goals, such as improving a certain metric or acquiring a certain number of new patients a month. If you are putting initiatives into action, this is a great opportunity to discuss what is working well, what can be improved, and how to proceed accordingly. The morning huddle should be a judgment-free zone, where everyone’s perspective, observations, and opinions are welcome. Ultimately, morning huddles help foster an environment that encourages open communication and collaboration, which benefits the entire workplace. 

Agile development: Respond quickly to change

Agile software development is the practice of encouraging teams to continuously develop and release new features in a collaborative environment that responds quickly and flexibly to change. This idea is a valuable mindset to promote across your dental practice. Instead of using agile processes to develop new software features in response to customer demand, your practice can use this methodology to tweak and develop solutions that improve your practice’s bottom line based on patients’ reactions.

How to adapt agile development processes to improve your practice

Let’s say that you have analyzed your key performance indicators (KPIs) and identified patient reappointment rates as an area to improve. You can launch an initiative to improve this metric by taking a page from agile software development. This means that when trying a new strategy for improving reappointment rates, you measure the results more frequently and make tweaks at a more agile pace. You can ask your front office staff and hygienists to practice various scripts, gauge what works well and what doesn’t, and tweak those scripts to respond to how your patients are responding.

Postmortems: Analyze problems to prevent them from happening again 

When a tech company experiences a user-facing issue, it usually writes up a postmortem, which is an analysis of what went wrong, potential causes, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. This means that when failure happens, instead of sticking your head in the sand and blindly hoping it won’t happen again, you can dive into an investigation of why things unfolded the way they did and brainstorm ways to prevent them from reoccurring. This turns every failure into a learning opportunity rather than an unfortunate incident that is outside of your control.

Eliminate any single points of failure: Train your employees well

Many types of technology subscribe to the idea of high availability, which means that they are designed to eliminate what is known as a single point of failure. For example, a database tends to store data in multiple locations and/or machines so that if something happens to one machine it can still access a backup copy. 

How to eliminate single points of failure in your dental practice

It’s natural for each member of your staff to specialize in a certain task, but you should encourage cross-training to ensure that more than one person knows how to conduct each task. That way, if an employee calls in sick or goes on vacation, other team members will know how to step in to complete the work, even if they don’t specialize in that task. 

To get the ball rolling, identify the people who are particularly adept with the most important tools in your practice. Then encourage them to share that knowledge with the rest of your staff. Also, automatically include that training as part of the onboarding process for any new employees. Cross-pollinating knowledge protects your entire practice and helps it recover more swiftly in the event that an employee must suddenly take a leave of absence. Though this process initially has some overhead, it will pay dividends in the long run.  

BRUCE HOGAN is cofounder and CEO of SoftwarePundit, a technology research firm that provides advice, information, and tools to help businesses successfully adopt technology. From highlighting industry-specific trends to delivering extensive software guides, SoftwarePundit helps businesses select the best software for their needs.

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