Keep Your Team Effective During Summer Vacation Downtime

As the weather heats up and schools let out, there’s one main thing on people’s minds: vacation! In this episode, Kiera talks about maximizing the slow days and weeks at your practice, including batching vacation days, production goals, and more. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:01) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera, and I just thought this would be a fun one to release ⁓ right before we're prepping for summer, ⁓ because I know a lot of you want to take some summertime off, but our practices are still running, right? ⁓ A lot of times we don't want to close it down. Sometimes we want to close it down. So I thought, let's just pop on, do a quick tactical practical of what to do to have products for our team to figure out what to do to make this tour. You can have an amazing summer vacation and a profitable practice. As always, Dental A Team is here for you. We are here for dentists and teams. We love consulting. We love working. We love making your life easy. We love helping you have the dream life that you've been looking for. And honestly, it's so magical to be able to help so many offices turn what they thought was impossible to possible. So today, let's dive in. Let's talk about, all right, I go on vacation, but my team's still working. What on earth should I have them do? Like... honest to goodness, what do I do? So I'm going to give a few ideas, but before I get into that, I think it's super important that for future, some offices will actually strategically plan when doctors are off and when the full team is off. So what I would say is let's look at this and is this something that you want to do or is this a way to like max out all the vacations that you're looking to get done? Cause team members might be wanting to take vacation too, or is there a time of year that you want to take off? that then the rest of your team could take off. So we're kind of like batching our vacations. Some offices will do that. And you can look at a projection forecaster and figure out, okay, how far do I need to go? What do we need to do? What would we need to produce? And it will help you actually set goals so that way you can be on vacation stress free. So that'd be number one. Other times offices love it. They love to where the hygienists are going to keep working pending upon your state laws. Front office is going to catch up, but what do we actually have them do? So that way they're working effectively. we're able to move this practice forward. So things that I would recommend are always an operations manual. This is a great time. People always tell me, I don't have time, I don't have time, I don't have time. Let's actually get that operations manual completed. Let's build out the protocols, let's take the pictures, let's write the pieces. And we have an operations manual, a template in our, ⁓ in our virtual academy that all of our offices get. And so like just certain things that you could do for like an office manager is leading morning huddle tracking. Like how do we track our production? How do we track our collections? How do we do our reappointments? How do we fill out our KPIs, end of day checklists, next day schedules, checking to see it? How do we fill out a scorecard of all of our metrics? What about for monthly closing the month by the fifth of every month? How do we do that? How do we set the supply budget for the next month? How do we do production and collections? Doctors, you might not even know how to do half this stuff I'm rattling off. ⁓ making projections for the years, putting in our OSHA training, our HIPAA training, who do we contact for all of that, ⁓ looking at payroll, how do we do team training. For schedulers, would be like routes look prep, new patient referral tracking, confirmation calls of all the patients, re-care calls to fill the schedule, patient check-in. Like these are the type of protocols going out to our dental assistants and hygienists. How do we set up for... breaking down a room, how do we do a bridge prep? How do we do burr blocks? How do we do the seric machine, changing traps, charting, checking insurance eligibility, cleaning the mill, co-diagnosing treatment, crown prep, crown seat, downtime. There are about a bajillion ⁓ protocols that your team could honestly do. And we have this whole beautiful checklist where you literally, who's writing it? When does it need to be done? What does it look like? And also in our template, we show exactly how these protocols should be done. So like at the beginning, what's the purpose of this? What are the steps? What are the supplies needed? And then a picture of it if applicable. So that way everybody knows how to make this template. Everybody knows what we're looking for. We have it in there. So it's like all of them should have a purpose, step-by-step, supplies if needed ...