Clarity in roles and expectations is not just beneficial but essential in practices. This is especially true as your practice grows. For smaller settings, such as a practice with two operatories, one hygienist, one assistant, and one front office staff, informal role definitions might be sufficient as everyone adapts quickly to daily operations. However, communication becomes challenging as your practice expands to include more team members. In a complex environment,
Clarifying roles and expectations is equally critical for the practice leader, who must effectively manage the team. Without explicit guidelines, your team may not fully understand your expectations, leading to suboptimal performance and inadvertent mistakes—issues that become magnified as the practice grows. This misalignment can also complicate the dynamics of team leadership. Clearly defined roles and objectives also streamline the coaching of underperforming employees, clearly reinforcing standards to which a team member is held accountable. This structure not only aids in maintaining high-quality care and service but also ensures that all team members are aligned and moving cohesively toward the practice's goals, reducing the need for frequent corrective interventions and allowing for more strategic management activities.
To create role clarity, you must create three resources, each with a specific purpose. Creating these resources for each role exemplifies “slowing down to speed up.” While it takes time to do this effectively, the clarity provided will help the office to run more efficiently.
The three resources that create clarity are:
As we delve deeper into the nuances of effective Role Descriptions and Scorecards, it's crucial to remember that these tools are more than just formalities; they are foundational elements that align every team member with your practice's vision. They serve as clear, detailed maps that guide your employees, not just through their daily tasks but towards a shared goal of excellence and professional growth.
In my last article, I discussed building a list of fundamental requirements, competencies, and special requirements. You will use this list to create the Scorecard, Role Description, and Job Posting.
The first thing you want to build is the Role Description. Generally, a Role Description will have a few key sections:
Once you have completed your Role Description, you will want to complete the Job Posting. The key to a good Job Posting is to really think about how it will be used by candidates. Essentially, you want to build a document they can scan in 5-10 seconds to determine if they will take the time to apply for the role.
The Job Posting will follow the same format as the Role Description but will include a paragraph at the top describing your practice and why it is special. This is essential as it will help “sell” the practice to potential candidates who should connect with your practice's vision for care.
The main difference in the content of the Job Posting is that it lists only the most essential elements of the role in enough detail that a reasonable person should understand what the role entails as opposed to the Role Description, which has all the details a team member would need to be successful in the role.
Let’s look at the Key Responsibilities section of a Role Description for a front office role and see how the Job Posting compares:
Key Responsibilities:
Job Posting:
Key Responsibilities:
The Role Description details all the tasks that the person would undertake, while the Job Posting uses a few bullets to convey the essentials of the role in a way a reasonable person will grasp.
With your Role Description and Job Posting complete, it is time to move on to the Scorecard. The Scorecard is about setting measurable success metrics, as opposed to the Role Description, which describes tasks and attributes. The Scorecard distills key elements of the role and then prescribes a way to measure them so that the employee has a black-and-white definition of what it is to be successful in the role.
Here is an example of a Scorecard, this time for a front desk role:
The key with the Scorecard is to consider what value the role brings to the practice and how to quantify that value into a measurable target. This does not dictate how they get there, only the standard. As you can see in this Scorecard, the front desk in this practice is the patient's first contact and last impression, and their role is to make sure the patient shows up to their appointments, is fully informed and satisfied with their visit. To achieve these metrics, the front desk team member must be a great communicator focused on the details that make a practice successful.
Beyond giving the employees clarity while working, the Role Description and Scorecard are a blueprint for the questions you ask during the interview process. Your goal in the interview is to assess how likely a candidate is to fulfill everything in the Scorecard. You will design your questions to ensure you unearth the candidate's key knowledge, skills, and abilities to determine if they align with what you have written in the Scorecard. In my next article, I will address what specifically to ask during an interview but remember that none of the questions will have meaning if they are not tied to what the role entails.
Ultimately, having a clear Role Description and Scorecard for each employee will help the office run more smoothly, as everyone will know their jobs and what success looks like. Once you have created your Role Descriptions and Scorecards, I encourage you to share them with the whole team. When everyone knows what they need to do and clearly understands what their teammates are doing, they can begin to see how their roles should intersect to achieve the practice's vision. The goal is that your office runs like a highway on a typical weekend. Cars move smoothly, and everyone gets to their destination quickly and in one piece.
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