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Thursday Troubleshooter: Should Dental Team Member Write Up Peer Who Refuses To Listen?

Thursday Troubleshooter: Should Dental Team Member Write Up Peer Who Refuses To Listen?
from Team Troubleshooter

QUESTION: Help! I have a staff member who needs to be written up. She’s instigating rumors with staff members. She is incompetent in her work. She argues with patients. I even made a checklist to help her and she threw it away. Anytime I ask her to do something she questions it. In front of patients she’s said that I have personal issues against her because I bring things to her attention and try to help her fix the mistakes she’s constantly making (due to her not following the checklist). I can never get a straight answer from her when I ask her about completing the duties that I assign to her. She needs to be written up, but should I take that step?

ANSWER FROM KEVIN HENRY, co-founder of IgniteDA:
One thing that is so important for any business is that the customers (in this case, your patients) never see any of the dysfunction that goes on behind the scenes. Your dental practice should be run as a business and that means making sure that the customers always feel that things are harmonious and in control, even if they’re not.

Think about if you walked into a restaurant and the waiter was talking badly about the chef, or the hostess decided not to sit you in a certain section of the restaurant and then told you about the issues she was having with the waiter in that section. I don’t think I’d ever go back to that restaurant again, and I’d probably mention something about my uncomfortable experience on social media.

When you are a customer somewhere, you can sense if there is tension in a business, right? Your customers are sensing that right now in your dental practice. None of that is good for a business. It must change immediately.

Read full article on Dentistry iQ.