Running a dental practice can be challenging. Days can get hectic fast, and patients need care. If an employee makes a mistake, no matter how big or small, berating that person isn’t the best way to help them correct the mistake and improve.

Knowing how to give constructive feedback to your employees ensures that people learn and improve at their jobs. Effective feedback will also help to make your dental practice run smoothly and be a pleasant experience for everyone, patients included.

What Is Constructive Feedback?

Positivity is a central tenet of constructive feedback. Make sure to be clear, honest, and calm when you’re reviewing an employee’s work or discussing a task. Then provide actionable advice so your employees can make improvements to their work and behavior.

Highlight what people are doing properly instead of focusing on what they’re doing wrong. Then see if you can take a benefit from what they did the right way and use it to fix other problems they’re having.

How to Give Constructive Feedback

Providing positive feedback can help your dental practice in several ways. Still stuck on how to give constructive feedback? Here are a few tips on offering actionable advice:

1. Don’t be negative: It’s counterproductive and doesn’t inspire your employees.

2. Focus on inspiring and motivating your employees.

3. Don’t just focus on the problem; provide positive ideas for solutions.

4. Show the issue in a calm, positive, and professional manner: “You did x, and y happened. You were on the right track, but here’s a way to do it better.”

Keep in mind that constructive criticism is all about building up someone, not beating or breaking them down.

Try the Sandwich Technique for Constructive Feedback

This method of giving feedback “sandwiches” the problem or criticism between two compliments. Let’s say you notice one of your dental hygienists is using too much floss, increasing your expenses.

You could say something like, “Your patients love and request you, but I noticed you’re going through a lot of floss. It adds up, so please try to use just what’s necessary. Besides that, you’re doing a great job.”

When offering praise, be honest, specific, and genuine. Don’t patronize or offer unnecessary flattery.

How Does Constructive Feedback Help Your Practice?

Some of the benefits of providing constructive feedback include:

• Employees will learn and contribute to a better working environment.
• Performance, professional development, and working relationships will improve.
• Positive feedback is inspiring, and negativity doesn’t help anyone or any workplace.

With Team Chat, your staff can easily chat and share information with each other, and you can seamlessly provide constructive feedback as needed. 

Avoid Toxicity and Negative Feedback

If you’re negative or unprofessional with your staff, it could have a detrimental effect on your practice.

Employees won’t enjoy coming to work if they know they’ll be disciplined for every little mistake. This could lead to resignations and turnover, and then you’ll have to go through the process of finding new dental assistants, hygienists, and receptionists.

You might also experience bad reviews online, develop a poor reputation, and lose patients, which is bad for revenue.

Other problems with negative feedback include:

• Employees could get frustrated, and their performance might get worse.
• Colleagues will be unenthusiastic about performance reviews and might get angry or resentful.
• Constant negativity doesn’t help any situation and only makes the issue worse.
• Employees won’t be inspired to take the initiative on new projects, processes, etc.

The last thing you want to do is create a situation where the mistake is less harmful than the negative feedback delivered to your employee. Besides people losing the desire to take on new initiatives, you could also be destroying their confidence.

Positive Feedback Is Effective Feedback

When it’s time to critique your employees, don’t be negative. Stay positive and provide actionable advice they can use to learn from and improve performance. This will not only improve employee morale and build a team mentality at your practice, but it can also create a more productive and profitable working environment.

Still wondering how to give constructive feedback? Dental Intelligence is dedicated to improving dental team performance and helping your practice grow. Schedule a demo to see how you can boost productivity and streamline patient care in your practice.

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