Team collaboration is vital in building a successful dental practice. When your dental staff members work together, they can provide efficient, high-quality experiences to patients so your practice can enjoy improved scheduling rates, higher revenue figures, and excellent company culture. Learning how to foster collaboration among your team isn’t always easy, though.

Dental Intelligence provides dental office communication software that unifies teams for success. Below, we discuss the best practices you can integrate into your dental practice to cultivate team collaboration.

Why Team Collaboration Matters

One employee cannot run your practice independently. Each employee performs critical job functions. Your team must work together so your practice can run as efficiently as possible.

Team collaboration affects the following:

• Patient care: Patient care involves everything from the initial check-in to treatment. Your front desk staff and providers must communicate effectively to provide patients with an accurate, streamlined level of care. Without team collaboration, patients may receive incorrect treatment options, delays, and more.
• Internal efficiency: Team collaboration directly impacts how efficiently your practice runs. Employees working together can speed up processes like patient scheduling, claims, payment submissions and more. 
• Job satisfaction: Employees want to feel like their job matters. Team collaboration can help employees feel more connected to a greater purpose at work. High levels of satisfaction reduce employee burnout and turnover rates.
• Practice success: A unified team helps your practice bring in patients by delivering more efficient, successful experiences. Team collaboration ensures each employee works toward the common goal of helping the practice succeed. 

Fostering Collaboration with Open Communication

Collaboration cannot happen without communication. Your team must have the tools, comfort, and mechanisms to communicate effectively. We recommend adopting the following policies and strategies:

• Active listening: Active listening should be a pillar of your practice. Ensure your team understands that active listening means focusing on the speaker and giving them a space to speak their opinions, thoughts, or concerns.
• Feedback collection: Feedback collection allows you to gauge how your team feels about all different topics, ranging from compensation and hours to company policies and more. You can send anonymous surveys, so employees have a safe space to voice their opinions.
• Team-building strategies: Team-building activities help your employees bond so they can feel more encouraged to collaborate when at work. You can foster team building with social outings or fun workplace events.
• Conflict resolution: Conflict resolution strategies are important in all workplaces. You should have methods in place for any issues between employees to resolve the concern before it escalates.
• Group objectives: Creating group objectives is a great way to unite employees with a like-minded goal. For example, you could aim to increase hygiene appointment scheduling rates by 10% this month.
• Regular meetings: Regular staff meetings are an excellent opportunity for employees to ask questions, voice their opinions, and collaborate. You can start each day with a brief morning huddle, then host more in-depth weekly or monthly meetings.
• Cross-training: Cross-training allows two team members who may not typically interact to learn from each other. Doing so enables these employees to communicate better in the future. 
• Mistake responses: Team collaboration also involves responding to employees when they make a mistake. Be sure to address the situation carefully, explaining how the mistake impacts the practice.
• ‍Effective communication channels: The biggest culprit behind your team’s miscommunication may simply be a lack of convenient tools. Effective communication channels ensure your employees can easily collaborate during busy hours. We’ll discuss ideas for communication tools below.

Integrating Communication Tools to Improve Collaboration

Employees won’t always be in the same place at the same time when they need each other most. The right communication tools help team members collaborate. We recommend integrating the following communication tools:

• A team chat platform
• A dashboard for viewing upcoming appointments
• Electronic health record software
• Automated reminder tools

Ideally, you need a system that combines the above features into one platform. For example, at Dental Intelligence, our software combines a Team Chat feature with a simple Morning Huddle so your employees can quickly view everything they need in one spot.  

Boost Team Unity with Dental Intelligence 

Team collaboration is necessary for your practice’s success. At Dental Intelligence, we want to help you learn how to make your staff feel valued through comprehensive guides and our advanced software. Schedule a Dental Intelligence demo today to see how our collaboration tools can bring your staff together.