#897: How to Cross-Train Your Positions

The Dental A Team Podcast

Kiera talks about why it’s so critical to have two people in each department who know everything backward and forwards, as well as how to train team members to become those position experts.

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Transcript:

Kiera Dent (00:00.792)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and I, you guys. I hope today is just a great day for you. hope that life is positive for you. I hope that you are choosing to find happiness. And there's a really cool quote today that I'm looking at on the day I'm recording. It's by Jim Rohn. And he said, we must all suffer one of two things, the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment. And I thought about that because they say discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs.

weighs tons. And I hope that you are disciplined in your thoughts, disciplined in what you focus on, disciplined in what you consume, discipline on the people you associate with and realizing that you're the creator of your life. You're not the manager of the circumstances that come your way and truly owning that role that we are all blessed and given to create the practice we want to be, to create the life we want to live.

to not blame people for when things are happening, maybe to us and realizing what role did we play in that and how can we better ourselves. And it's a crazy world to live in. It's a crazy space. And I think honestly, right now it's a game of mental stamina. I think that that's the world we're living in. I think we've conquered so many things. We've conquered washing our clothes and our dishes and...

Like shoot, even Instacart, like you can get groceries delivered, you can get food delivered. We've conquered so many things and we've been blessed with so much that I think now it's the game of mental resilience. And how do we become the people that we want to be? We've got so much time. We have so much time available to us. And I know we often don't think we do, but I attended a conference recently and you know, we've got 24 hours in a day. So in one week, that's going to be 168 hours. All right. So let's say we are working.

40 hour work week, but let's add in some drive time. So I'll give you 50 hours of that for a work week. All right. And then let's say that we are sleeping, eight hours a day. Okay. So every day. And I'm also going to give you, so we're going to say that's 56 hours of sleep time per week. Plus we're also saying that we've got 50 hours of work time. That's 106 hours a week. Okay. 106. That's a 50 hour work week. It's also giving you 56 hours. So eight hours of sleep a night.

Kiera Dent (02:17.838)

All right, and we have 24 hours in a day. So that's 106 hours. That means we are still left after our sleep and after our work. We are left with 62 hours in a week. Now, if I divide that by seven, that gives you 8 .8 hours of time. And I've taken out sleep and I've taken out work. And now you might say, well, Kiera, we've got two hours of this. But I just thought that's a lot of time.

That's a lot of time. have 62 hours of time. And my question is, what are we doing with that time? We have the time and how are we able, are we, are we doomsday scrolling? Are we consuming things that maybe aren't feeding our souls? Are we working out and honoring our bodies? Are we spending time in connection with friends? Are we allowing our lives to just pass us by? Are we intentionally planning them? And I just think that that's something

so interesting to think about. I had no idea, because I think I'm so into this, like, I'm so busy and I'm so exhausted and this and that. And I'm like 62 hours. That's 8 .8 hours a day beyond sleeping a full night's rest and working more than a 40 hour work week that I still have eight hours. And what am I doing with that? And so I really just think you guys like, think about that. What are we doing? How are we spending our time?

And are we truly creating our lives or are we just managing them? So thinking about that and with that, I'm excited for today's topic. I think it'll be a fun one for you. And that's on, I think to just give you guys like, again, let's tie it into our work weeks because also in our work weeks, how much time are we actually spending maybe on things that aren't moving the needle forward that are maybe just busy tasks? It's so crazy. I'm super excited. I attended an amazing time planning.

event and I'm excited because I'm starting to morph and build. I've taken some time to build something out for dentistry and I'm super freaking jazzed because I woke up one night and I said, dentistry is my platform, life is my passion. And I'm so obsessed in our consulting to give you the tips and the resources to shortcut your way to success, to give you the life that you ultimately want. And so this is going to be a piece where maybe let's look at what we're spending our time on at work.

Kiera Dent (04:39.95)

Could we chunk things together? Could we be more efficient with it? Can we chunk things in our own life? But this is going to help you too. The question was asked of how do we cross train and build a versatile and adaptable team? And I think that this is a great space to give back more time, to give you guys more resources. And I'm not like the biggest fan of cross training. I sometimes think that too many, too many, I don't know, I want to say noodles, because that's what I think of when I go into a front office, I'm like, my gosh, this is like a bowl of spaghetti and everybody's like crossed over each other.

and it's just wild and it's messy and it feels like a spaghetti bowl where everything's not clear. And I enjoy clarity. think clear is kind. think people understanding what their job is to do and not always having everything smashed together in our company. Even it's like every person can do all the different things, but then ultimately who's responsible for it. so sometimes I'm not crazy about cross training, but I also love to have my perspective has been, I want to have at least two people who know how to do everything within my team.

So for every position, so two people who can schedule insanely well and know all the protocols for it, two people within treatment coordinating, two people within office management, two people within billing, and they can be the same people. So it can be like maybe Sarah knows office management, treatment coordinating and scheduling. So in case Maggie is out, I always have a backup to every single position. So two hygienists, two dental assistants, doctors are a bit trickier. You guys are, you tend to be okay on your own, but really looking for

And so the way we cross train is sometimes what I do is I actually will, we'll shake it up for two or four hours, one day a month or one day, a quarter people switch roles and you just get a pick and roll. Obviously licenses, you have to be careful. So sometimes you have to switch positions within licenses. They're okay. But for two or four hours, that person switches and they become someone else. And what happens is you actually become very appreciative. You become very aware.

of what that person's doing in that role. And you are also able to find gaps in different things that can maybe make it easier. I'm also really big on an operations manual. That's why we have operations manuals that we've created that you can buy on TheDentalATeam .com. It's a 750 page one that's broken down into every single person's position with onboarding documents, end of day checklist, accountability agreements, 30, 60, 90 day onboarding docs, and then also what protocols I usually recommend for every single position.

Kiera Dent (07:01.996)

I purposely did not build the protocols for you. have a ton of verbiage in there, but every software is different. Every practice does it a little bit differently. so having you guys have the template of exactly how to build it and then you guys can build it. But I'm super obsessed with making sure that you guys have that. That way you're able to, if Sarah's out or Maggie's out or Tiffany's out, someone can actually go snag the manual and I've got what they do every day. And literally there's videos with

or there's other things that they can follow. So in our company, we have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual tasks. So if someone was out, we have their checklist of what do they need to do for the daily? What do they need to do for the weekly? What do they need to do for the monthly? And we are a virtual company. We're not together, so I can't have printed manuals for people, or we haven't chosen to, but we have it all hyperlinked with videos and also written protocols. So no matter what, if someone's out, they should be able to go onto the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and be able to perform that position.

I also like two people that know how to do everything. So two people know how to do payroll. Two people know how to do our commission reports for our consultants, of like doctors getting paid on production. We have two people that know how to hire. We have two people that know how to place the ads. We have two people that know how to do everything. So no matter what, people also have the freedom to leave. And I know some team members can get protective of their position. like, I don't want people to know because I don't want them to ever replace me. And for me,

What I do is I just believe that that way people can go on vacations. People can have time off. People can do the things that they want to do. And there's multiple people trained to do their position. So I think cross training and building a versatile team. If you really want to dial it in, would do number one, I would have your operations manual completed and like, let's at least get that done. And at least the daily tasks for every position and the weekly tasks. So people at least know what to do and let's have those in a readily available spot. So everybody can use that. Number two, what I would do is I would definitely

whether it's weekly, monthly or quarterly, whatever you choose, I would definitely cross train. And so I would have certain skillsets where we train and not just having people passively watch, but actively engage. if we're going to cross train everybody to be able to schedule, we do a relay races or we have everybody up there, or we have people call in that are our team members calling and they have to schedule it appropriately. but whatever you can do to get them to role plan. know role playing is I did a podcast, gosh, years ago. And I was like, you think role playing is dumb.

Kiera Dent (09:22.178)

Role -playing allows you to practice. So when we're put into that position, we actually don't have to think about it. It can become automatic. And that's what we do. Think about firefighters. They practice fire. So when a fire comes, they actually know how to do it. Think about back in elementary school, and it was like fire drills or earthquake drills. And now they're shooting drills. And people, like, we want you to become automatic. And that's why we do the drills and the role -play. It's what becomes automatic. It becomes automatic of what I say when I answer in schedule. It becomes automatic of how I present a treatment plan.

Not that everything is automatic, but I don't have to think about it. And takes a thinking out of it and allows it to be a little more coast mode for your brain because you've practiced it so many times. So practicing that and training and I'm training the whole team. I used to rotate because there's three departments really, and there's three months and a quarter. And you can have each department actually train on something that would be super helpful if everybody in the whole team knew how to do it. So for example, if your state allows teaching your team to be able to do a sterilization.

And so it's like simple sero or being able to break a room down, obviously up to standard and up to code. but we had our clinical team train our whole team on it and everybody practiced and everybody did it and everybody got passed off. So that way, if we were running behind, people could help each other out. The front office, they really needed help getting recare and reactivation. So for that month, we had a reactivation and recare challenge where everybody was making the phone calls

We're every single day or every single week talking about who is doing the best and what things people were doing and making it into a fun game and who was the goat and who, who did the best and who was the sizzle champion. Those types of things can be super, super fun to get your team on board, to be able to, just help each other out into cross train. Because again, I'm big and sticky that I want two people for every single position to know what to do. Then I'm never afraid.

People are allowed to take vacations, if we're not scared and stressed out, and then to have that daily, weekly, monthly checklist. That way nothing ever goes and gets missed. Have the videos, it's very fast, you guys. have Loom is my favorite. You can also use, there's so many different softwares out there. Take quick videos of things. They don't have to be perfect, and I think done is better than perfect in this scenario. And then have people rotate positions, have people try out the different roles, have people that are not in that position.

Kiera Dent (11:37.774)

try it out and see if can they, can they follow the protocol and get the same results? And if not, let's fix it. Let's update it. But those are really great ways for you guys to cross train and build that versatile train. But with that said, make sure that there's very strong specifics. Who does what? So it's not getting crossed. It's not getting lapsed. It's not getting confusing. Let's make sure that's super clear for them. That way everybody has clear expectations. People feel like they can win and they can succeed. We also can help each other out because we've been cross -trained.

If we can help you guys in any way, I'm obsessed with doing this. I'm obsessed with helping teams get ops manuals done, helping you guys have that success.

Kiera Dent (12:25.484)

you

Kiera Dent (12:32.992)

If we can help in any way we're always here to help you guys and as always thanks for listening I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team podcast