Athena Consulting: Dental Practice Solutions

The notion of buying your teammates into better performance should have died with the dark ages. But it hasn't.

The Monthly Bonus System is a well-known concept to dentists and dental teams across America. If you've been a practice owner for any length of time, you've discovered the “bonus system” through listening to keynote management speakers, in-office dental practice management consultants and/or your friends and peers.

But there's no consistent evidence that the more you pay people the higher their motivation or performance. The idea is still in wide use and will remain so until doctor-owners and consultants alike understand that you simply cannot buy attitude and behavior on a long-term basis, if at all.

Did you buy the notion that to increase production, collections and the flow of new patients to your practice, you had to define your monthly goals in dollars? Have you tried to get teammates to change their behavior by offering a monthly bonus for compliance?

This may work well for a month or two, when everyone is motivated and jazzed up after the dental consultant’s recent rah-rah session. But what happens the first month your teammates miss bonus by a few thousand dollars? Office morale takes a nosedive, the entire team (minus you) starts verbalizing in the negative, it becomes contagious, and before you know it the entire practice is back to where it was – or worse.

Guess who is responsible for the morale in the office? You! Who approved the new bonus system? You!

It’s time for a change. If you don’t want to change, just remember the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach every holiday season.

Dentistry is a profession. All the people who make up the dental team need to start thinking, feeling, performing and acting as professionals. The first change you can make is to treat your team like the professionals they are, not subordinates or hired help. If you treat your teammates like employees, they will act like employees. Change starts with you, the doctor-owner!

Ask yourself if you have teammates who can take on “ownership” attitudes, go the extra mile and show great performance each and every day. If you don’t surround yourself with high-quality, well-trained, self-motivated achievers, no amount of bonus money will turn them into great team players.

Productivity and feelings of ownership and responsibility cannot be purchased. If they don’t believe in your practice philosophy and direction, they need to go. If your co-workers do have those qualities, you should be paying them the most you can!

That is a new concept in the dental profession, but it is past time you stopped paying the least amount you can negotiate to your practice’s most valuable assets – the people who take great care of your patients, provide great customer service and really experience a high sense of self-satisfaction at the end of every day.

Those positive traits are the result of internal choices individual team members must make for themselves, and you can’t buy it from them through a bonus system that will inevitably lower the overall office morale.

You as a professional must change the way you manage your practice, your teammates and yourselves. If you don’t change the paradigm of management, you will never achieve what you would like in your practice no matter what else you do.

Using money to manipulate behavior will only buy you trouble.