Article published in Dental Economics, March 2025
Picture yourself at a typical team meeting reviewing spreadsheets that illustrate your practice’s rising and falling statistics. Your hope is that this data will galvanize your team into action. Instead, you notice two employees are repeatedly yawning, one employee is fascinated with the cell phone she’s palmed under the table and the rest look like they’ve been replaced by exhausted zombies who desperately need a brain infusion.
You realize that this meeting is composed of the bored, distracted and dead. Your team is as interested in the practice’s numbers as Alaskans listening to a sales pitch for snow. Then, your newest employee timidly raises her hand. She asks, “Doc, where did these goals come from in the first place? Are they even achievable? And since I’m just a dental assistant, what I’m supposed to do about any of this?”
And that’s when you realize that your team isn’t interested in statistics because they have no personal relationship with any of these numbers. They weren’t involved in developing the goals. They don’t see any connection between their actions and these numbers and finally these monthly statistical reviews usually don’t lead anywhere.
In this article we’ll explore how to develop realistic goals and how to involve your team in analyzing your statistics so that numbers become relevant, meaningful and lead to practice improvements.
Where Do Good Goals Come From?
Some dentists have a quick method to create new production goals. They take their annual production numbers and then 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 surely I can do 5% better next year! While this goal-setting approach is hopeful, it also has a few problems:
- Increasing goals without specifying what the team will do differently can result in unrealistic, unachievable goals that will frustrate everyone. It’s like buying smaller clothes under the assumption that somehow, this year, you’ll lose the extra belly weight, without doing anything differently.
- This generalized approach doesn’t account for the impact of significant practice changes like increasing vacation days, reducing or adding hygienists, offering new services or implementing new technology. Production goals should be fine-tuned to reflect your changes and challenges.
- Just because you increase fees, you can’t assume that you’ll produce or collect more especially if a significant portion of your patient base have PPO plans. Sadly, there can be a wide gap between what the practice produces, charges and collects for a variety of reasons.
- Finally, developing goals without linking them to your expenses means you could feasibly achieve these goals and still have trouble paying your bills. In fact, picking new goals without accounting for your expenses is like diagnosing without x-rays. You literally do not have the full picture.
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.
Transforming Your Team into Dental Detectives
Let’s return to the grim team meeting described at the beginning of this article. How can dentists inspire employees to be more engaged when discussing statistics? Here are 5 ways to make numbers more meaningful.
- Enlist the team in goal setting. Because production goals should be based on a wish-list of expenses, ask your team to brainstorm a list of things that would improve the practice for the coming year. This could include new technology, supplies, ergonomic furniture, etc. Ask them also to list things that would improve their lives. Do they want raises, team outings, CE opportunities, paid lunches? Ask employees to research the prices on their wish-list items so that at your next meeting, the team can develop a budget. Then everyone can decide if the resulting production and collection goals are achievable.
- Strengthen the connection between accomplishing the goals and getting their wish-list items, display a chart or graphic that shows the team’s progress towards purchasing these 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.
- Bake the production goals into your 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 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.
- Numbers meetings are boring if the team simply passively listen to the dentist reviewing each statistic one by one. Instead invite your team to become statistical dental detectives. Assign each person to study the numbers that relate to their job role as statistical clues to the practice’s systems. Ask each employee to speculate about 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 has happened.
- Numbers meetings become invaluable when they transform analysis into action. End each meeting by listing actions that correlate to these 3 questions.
- What should we continue doing because it’s working?
- What should we stop doing because it’s not working?
- What should we change so this works better?
When you involve your team in creating goals based on improvements they desire and you tie the achievement of those goals into their daily work, you can have numbers meetings which include more Sherlock Holmes and fewer zombies.
