Andy McLachlan, Business Coach, shares his thoughts on how to deal with making difficult decisions to help your business survive during COVID-19…
Who would have thought that becoming a ‘leader’ would become such a stressful role in a dental practice? The impact of COVID-19 across the business world has been as shocking as it has been awe-inspiring. However, the impact on running a dental practice is more like a stressful bomb blast.
The cream rises to the top
On top of this stress, frustration and fear, we now have additional concerns around the commercial survival of our dental surgeries. This fear reaches the four corners of our beautiful nation. With practices running on vastly reduced patient numbers, we are seeing the profitability and sustainability of a significant number of practices being impacted upon.
Dental practices are more at risk of closure than ever before (with some owners even deciding not to reopen their doors again). To this end, the requirement for practice managers and principal dentists to work in unison for the survival of their business is greatly inflated. Taking positive action without being frozen by the fear of the unknown is critical.
I have been on the receiving end of stressful times in business as a business owner myself. So, hats off to practice managers and dentists who are navigating their ships through the tumultuous waters of this COVID-19 storm. Ten years ago, as a Business Coach, I started working with small, forward-thinking companies to help them shift their culture and adopt a growth mindset internally. More recently, I have been training management teams to quench their thirst to achieve greater things in dental practices too.
It is evident that practice managers hold the award for the broadest skill set I’ve ever seen in business. However, that skill set is not always leveraged to its full potential because of the lack of practical training and support. This puts increased pressure on these individuals who have a very stressful workload to manage, particularly when it comes to handling HR issues.
In these times of increased stress and reduced profits, we find ourselves needing to become more ‘commercial’ than ever before. No longer can we accept second best from team members who are not playing their part in the battle to survive the great viral war of 2020. Everyone must play their part. Everyone must take responsibility and be accountable for not only doing a good job, but a GREAT JOB! In this economic climate, we need to be ‘wowing’ our patients with a service that exceeds their expectations.
They say, ‘the cream rises to the top’, well, we need to be the ‘cream’ to stand out in the marketplace and survive these turbulent times.
The Paradigm Shift
It is not unusual for me to visit a business at the request of the directors to run a comprehensive ‘fact find’ over a full day.
I look at the finer detail of how the business runs and basically what systems work and what do not. This is a really broad snapshot ranging from how team members interact through to how a staff member may sell an additional service or product.
The findings from such fact finds are really fascinating and surprisingly similar. Regardless of whether the business is selling software or fixing people’s teeth, the biggest single problem I’ve come across is individuals’ behaviours or poor staff engagement with their colleagues or clients.
So, if the findings are simple, why do businesses continue to accept these failings and not look to correct them? Well, when things are running relatively smoothly, a business manager or owner does not want to upset the status quo. I hear comments like ‘I don’t want to make waves’ or ‘well, it’s going to cause me too much trouble to sort that out!’ In doing this, we limit the immediate management pain, BUT we prolong the business pain as well as limit the option for growth, profitability and sustainability.
So, what is it we can do?
Well, we now have a paradigm shift, that is, everything we know about how we usually run our business has changed and may not return to normal for a long time. This creates an opportunity, an open door if you will. It allows you to actually think about your future business model, to grasp the nettle and start to shape and sculpt the business you have always wanted.
Most businesses want to make some changes, be that to people’s roles or individual’s attitudes, but are fearful to do so. Frankly, sitting on one’s hands and not taking commercial, pragmatic action at a time of a worldwide pandemic is neither clever nor realistic. The time has come to step back and take a rounded view of what works and what does not in the business. It is time now to examine different roles in fine detail and see what value they bring to your practice.
Performance management and redundancy are not an easy path to take. However, they are, in certain circumstances, a necessary function to breathe life back into a struggling practice or business. Staff wages are one of the biggest financial costs to your business, so you may need to think seriously about the way forward and whether the practice is sustainable working at current staffing levels.
Coping with the pain of redundancy
After taking out a performance assessment, you have an opportunity in certain circumstances to create the future version of your business. If you discover you are not already, you can now become lean and slick in the way you operate by taking robust and positive action for the welfare and survival of your business. It is not only your responsibility as a leader, but also a sound commercial stance to take to protect your bottom-line profit. This is absolutely paramount.
So, take a step back from the front line and allow yourself to take a holistic view of your current business structure. Look closely at which roles work and which are maybe defunct in your day-to-day operations due to the new challenges you face.
If you do have to take the redundancy route, remember it is the role and not the individual that is being made redundant.
Of course, like any technical action, it has repercussions if done the wrong way. Possibly, the largest exposure to risk when undertaking a redundancy process is that of a discriminatory claim. The problem here is that anyone can claim they have not been treated fairly and some of the most common areas of a claim include age, sex, religion, disability and/or gender.
As you can appreciate, being fair, reasonable and transparent in your process of selection is of the utmost importance from a legal perspective. It is worth noting that redundancy planning can take a great deal of pressure off an underperforming business, but, like dental work, you should always seek professional advice or the pain could be unbearable.
So, while inaction can feel comfortable on the surface, it may lead to an infection spreading beneath the surface. We all know that leaving an infection to its own devices can most definitely lead to much bigger problems further down the line.
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