Motivating your team

Communication is key

In my 22 years of experience working with companies and teams as a trainer and coach, I have often heard from employees leaving the company that a lack of (clear) communication is one of their top three reasons for doing so.

Be clear in communicating your expectations and obtain a commitment to these from your employees. Ensure communication is a two-way process by involving your team in making decisions about the future direction of the dental practice.

Establishing clear communication includes creating an open feedback culture. How has that been rolled out in your practice? Are there regular feedback moments during the day/week/month with your staff? Does feedback include good points, compliments as well as points of improvements? This feedback can be given in an informal way, in between patients, for example, or at the start or end of the working day, as well as in a formal way individually or in a group during meetings.

Regarding meetings, do you have a clearly set-out meeting structure? The other day I was working on team communication with a practice in Belgium, and one of the major takeaways for management was that they had no structured meeting culture, so feedback was given sometimes and sometimes not. Decisions were shared sometimes and sometimes not. Half of the staff were aware of certain information, decisions and changes, and the other half not.

The staff thus decided to establish different meeting structures with different time frames: meetings in smaller groups, depending on roles and responsibilities, on a more regular basis, and then entire staff meetings on a monthly basis. They decided not to book patients during the timings of these meetings in order to be completely focused. The encouraging thing about that team communication day was that it was the team members who asked to set up more meetings, and the orthodontists and management staff listened.

How you motivate your team matters

How do you motivate your team? This question is one I love to ask during training and coaching sessions. I ask people to write down all the things they do, or their clinic does, to motivate their team. Actually, you might want to do this exercise as well quickly. The answers we normally get—and maybe you will give similar ones—are things like:

• offering good working hours;
• providing an adequate salary;
• respecting employees;
• listening to employees;
• giving employees the flexibility to choose their holiday dates;
• giving employees nice work clothing;
• arranging team-building activities;
• celebrating birthdays and big holidays, such as with the giving of Christmas gifts;
• communicating a clear vision of the direction the clinic is evolving in;
• being open to feedback;
• empowering employees by giving them responsibilities and autonomy; and
• offering employees training.

As you can see—and I suggest you do this exercise with your list of what you believe are motivators—what we all thought were motivators are only partly motivators, and often the majority are hygienic factors.

I remember a client who owned a wonderful restaurant telling me in a training session that every year she invested in new work uniforms for her staff. She would select the best materials and have the staff’s names embroidered on the uniforms. She spent quite a large amount on doing this and was upset that the staff did not appear to be grateful and more motivated when they received their new uniforms. I asked her why she felt they should be more motivated in their work because of these new uniforms and who wanted to have these nice uniforms in the first place. She wanted the staff to have these uniforms and thought it was important. For her staff, these were just an outfit they needed to wear every day at work but not something that made them feel appreciated or offered them additional value in the workplace.

In another example, employees had to park their cars in an unlit parking area, so when it was dark in the mornings or the evenings, they felt quite unsafe. This influenced their energy and motivation negatively. Therefore, management decided to install large light fixtures to illuminate the parking area and thus create a feeling of safety for the employees. Management was then disappointed that the team’s motivation was not improved by this.

Why was this so? When hygienic factors are not fulfilled, this is always a source of demotivation. Because employees expect these factors to be in place, when a lack in this regard is addressed, employees take it for granted. If the baseline represents zero, then a lack in hygienic factors will reduce motivation to below zero. Solving this lack will just bring motivation back to zero. If you want to go above zero, you need to employ motivators, such as providing growth opportunities, celebrating achievements, offering team-building activities, giving recognition and creating unexpected moments.

Do you need to make some changes to how you approach motivating your team? I hope that you will now be able to reflect on whether you are solving hygienic factor issues or adding motivators. I wish you all the best in this journey of moving towards true motivators, and both are important but have a different approach and different outcome.