I was listening to our current President’s State of the Union message recently and as he emphasized bi-partisanship, my husband commented “that’ll never happen.” I understood what he meant, because every legislator is in some way beholding to his or her party and has to follow the party line. Right about now you’re probably wondering what this all has to do with dental offices. Well, as I sat down to write this blog, I began thinking how the very same issue arises in dental offices between the back office and the front desk. As with Republicans and Democrats, the battle is as old as any of us can remember and we don’t see it ending any time soon. But what if it could? Our President talked about the good that could be done for everyone in the country if the in-fighting could just stop and real dialogue could begin. Let’s think about what good could be done for our patients, office moral and the doctor’s sanity if office in-fighting could end.
In our offices, we’re not bound by allegiance to any political party…..but we’re frequently bound by our stubborn unwillingness to cooperate. The front desk doesn’t put that difficult patient in at 4:30 to annoy the back staff…..they do it because after listening for 15 minutes to her telling them she just can’t make any other time, they give it to her rather than lose a patient who, although annoying, always pays fully and on time.
And on that same note, the back staff is not trying to irritate the front office when they forget to add a procedure we did to the chart and the patient leaves without paying a substantial balance. They really were so swamped with the doctor calling them to help him as they were dismissing the patient that they forgot. These things happen.
In both instances we can berate our fellow employees behind their backs for their lack of consideration and forethought, or we can bring these issues up at staff meetings and work together to find ways to get past these hurdles. As with our legislators, we may not always agree, but we should be listening and talking to each other with the intent of finding a good solution instead of always feeling like we “won” the argument. Doing this will not only ease a great deal of the tension in offices, but it might even make us better citizens. If we can do this in our offices, we’ll be much more inclined to elect people to represent us who behave in this bi-partisan manner. Every office is a tiny microcosm of the country, and every office can be a catalyst for improvement if staff really want improvement to happen. It won’t be easy, and it won’t happen overnight….there will always be holdouts….but when the majority are working together, the holdouts will just have to jump onboard…..that’s how the spirit of bi-partisan cooperation works.
