Avoiding employee burnout might not be something you think about. As orthodontic practitioners, it’s easy to focus on the patient experience and forget about the employee experience—but both are equally important. To maintain a healthy, growing practice, you must avoid employee burnout.
Why should you avoid employee burnout?
As mentioned above, it can be easy to focus mainly on the patients and forget about your employees. But your employees are a vital part of maintaining a thriving orthodontic practice. If they are feeling overworked and undervalued, your practice will start to suffer. Employees won’t want to stay long-term, leading to high levels of turnover. This means more time on your end looking for new employees and training them once hired—and this translates to less time taking care of patients and looking after the other parts of your practice. This is especially true because it is hard to find new employees.
Patients can also sense the tone of your office when they come in. If all the staff seem stressed, your patients and their parents will be able to notice this. It will impact their experience as a patient, and not in a good way. If they continually experience stress or negativity while visiting, this could lead them to look for another orthodontic practice that has a more welcoming atmosphere.
How do you prevent employee burnout?
To help prevent burnout, the most important thing is maintaining an open line of communication with your staff. Stay in touch with them and create a space where they feel comfortable sharing their concerns. Also encourage them to share their ideas on how to improve the practice so they know their knowledge and input is valued.
You should also work to cultivate a sense of community among your staff. Encourage your staff to remain kind and professional in their interactions with you, each other, and their patients. If they have concerns, they should present them in a non-accusatory way, always talking directly to the person with whom they have concerns. If this doesn’t work, then they should escalate their concerns to you or their manager.
Schedule at least a couple events a year where employees can just hang out and spend time together. Consider planning a company picnic, team-building events, or other fun outings throughout the year. Even just bringing in lunch and inviting everyone to eat together can help build camaraderie.
Keep employee workloads reasonable
Check in regularly with your staff and make sure they don’t feel overwhelmed. If they do, consider other ways to divide up the work, whether it’s hiring more staff, outsourcing, or switching to a practice management system that automates processes and allows patients to manage part of their treatment online. Greyfinch’s practice management system has many tools to help lighten the load for your staff, whether through automatic billing, patient onboarding, pre-set appointment reminders, and so much more. Greyfinch allows you to “set it and forget it” for many of your staff’s daily tasks, reducing their workload and ensuring a better experience for your patients.
If you feel ready to explore everything Greyfinch can do to improve your orthodontic practice us, contact us today for a free demo!
