Picture a team meeting where you’re reviewing spreadsheets that illustrate your practice’s rising and falling statistics. You hope this data will galvanize your team into action. Instead, as you look around the room, you notice two employees yawning, one employee fascinated with her cell phone, and the rest looking like exhausted zombies.
Your team is as interested in the practice’s numbers as Alaskans are in a sales pitch for snow. But then, your new employee timidly raises her hand and asks, “Doctor, where did these goals come from? Are they achievable? As a dental assistant, what am I supposed to do about any of this?”
That’s when you realize your team isn’t interested in statistics because they have no personal relationship with these numbers. They weren’t involved in developing the goals, so they don’t see any connection between their actions and the numbers. To them, these statistical reviews usually don’t lead anywhere.
Here I’ll explore how to develop realistic goals and how to involve your team in analyzing the statistics so that the numbers become relevant, meaningful, and lead to practice improvements.
The problems with some goals
Some dentists have a quick way to create new production goals. They take their annual production numbers and increase these by the same percentage they’ll use to increase their fees. This method contains some logic. “If I did x this year, then I can do 5% better next year.” While this approach is hopeful, it also has problems.
1. Increasing production goals without a plan for what the team will do differently to achieve the new goals can result in unachievable goals that frustrate everyone. It’s like buying smaller clothes with the assumption that somehow you’ll lose the extra belly weight without doing anything differently.
2. This generalized approach does not account for the impact of significant practice changes, such as increasing vacation days, reducing or adding hygienists, offering new services, or implementing new technology. Production goals should be fine-tuned to reflect changes and challenges.
3. Just because you increase fees doesn’t mean you can assume you’ll produce or collect more, especially if a significant portion of your patient base has PPO plans. For a variety of reasons, there can be a wide gap between what the practice produces, charges, and collects.
4. Finally, developing goals without linking them to expenses means you could achieve these goals and still have trouble paying your bills. In fact, setting new goals without accounting for your expenses is like diagnosing without x-rays. You literally do not have the full picture.
A better way to develop goals
For these reasons, the I-think-I-can approach is not the best way to develop production goals. Instead, I recommend a different philosophy. Begin with a wish list budget and develop an annual plan that incorporates every provider’s projected workdays and the practice’s historical collection percentage.
This approach means that production goals will encompass employee raises, facility improvements, new technology, and your compensation. Once the team understands that practice improvements and salary increases are contingent on achieving these goals, they immediately become more relevant.
5 ways to make numbers meaningful
Let’s return to the team meeting at the beginning of this article. How can dentists inspire employees to be more engaged when discussing statistics? Here are five ways to make numbers more meaningful.
1. Enlist the team in goal setting. Because production goals should be based on a wish list of expenses, ask your team to brainstorm things that would improve the practice for the coming year. This could include new technology, supplies, ergonomic furniture, and more. Ask them to list things that would improve their lives. Do they want raises, team outings, CE opportunities, paid lunches? Ask them to research the prices on their wish list items so that at your next meeting they can develop a budget. Then everyone can decide if the resulting production and collection goals are achievable.
2. Display a chart or graphic that shows the team’s progress toward purchasing these items to strengthen the connection between accomplishing the goals and getting their wish list items. For example, if the team wants to attend a conference, the graphic will show the amount the team needs to produce and collect by a specific date in order to register.
3. Bake the production goals into scheduling templates. Ask the front desk team and hygienists to create templates with a daily mix of procedures that correlate to their production goals. At the huddle, evaluate whether that day is scheduled to meet the goal and if not, ask the team to brainstorm ways to make up the shortfall.
4. Invite your team to become statistical dental detectives. Meetings about numbers are boring if the team passively listens to the dentist review each statistic. Assign each person to study the numbers that relate to their job as statistical clues to the practice’s systems. Ask them to speculate why the practice’s “actuals” were at, above, or below goal. What did employees do that month that impacted these statistics? Was this a one-month anomaly or a trend over several months? Make sure the team brainstorms all possible causes before transitioning into problem solving. This is essential because most people want to skip to solutions without truly investigating why something happened.
5. Meetings about numbers become invaluable when the team transform analysis into action. End each meeting by listing actions that correlate to these three questions.
- What should we continue doing because it’s working?
- What should we stop doing because it’s not working?
- What should we start doing to get a better result?
When you involve your team in creating goals based on improvements they want and you tie the achievement of those goals into their daily work, you can have more productive meetings about numbers.
To get started on this process, contact me a [email protected] to get a complimentary monthly forecast tool that will identify dentist and hygiene goals based on your practice’s monthly expenses.
Editor's note: This article appeared in the March 2025 print edition of Dental Economics magazine. Dentists in North America are eligible for a complimentary print subscription. Sign up here.
