Doctor, do you ever have that moment where You think that something's going to be easy to do, like hosting a job, something that feels easy and simple, and it ends up becoming a much bigger headache than you ever bargained for. If so, you are not alone. Uh, at PDA, we have seen this time again, and in fact, so many times so, HR, this sort of. Ambiguous word with a lot of feeling behind it, underserved, uh, really can equate to a lot of pain if not done properly.
And we've thought about that and provided a solution. So, on this special episode of Everyday Practices podcast, I am your host, Regan Robertson, here with Dr. Adrienne Reynolds, Chief HR Officer at Predictive Dentist Academy and lead champion of Dental TQ, a brand new product offering. aimed at eliminating your HR headaches. Dr. Adrienne, welcome. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. And you know, HR actually rocks. So I'm very excited to talk about our new offerings around dental TQ.
You know, when you say HR rocks, I can almost hear the dentist listening in my own mind. I can see them rolling their eyes. And I say that because I was part of that. Even though I'm not a dentist, I, I never thought HR was fun. I thought HR was, was strict compliance. I've not had good HR experiences. You guys can't see my video, like quotes, air quotes. I've not had great HR experiences in my past. In fact, it felt like, it almost felt like internal police as, as an employee.
And I just thought it was just something that you had to do. Eh, like it left a bad balance. You came in a few years ago to PDA. You changed my world, and I don't mean that, um, from a dramatic, like, I'm not over exaggerating it. You completely shifted how I manage people, how I attract talent into the organization, and how I manage. It's just, it's night and day.
You have brought this heart and soul, but you've paired it With like systems that make sense, systems that work, um, frameworks that work, and it takes all of the, I guess the crunchiness for me, or the anxiety, or the, the negative feelings, like it all just goes away and you've made it easy. Uh, so that's my personal experience with you, not to toot your own horn, but. I am thrilled that you are bringing this into dentistry. So we brought you in to help Productive Dentist Academy.
Uh, you have an expansive, uh, you know, background. You've been an educator and a professor for a very long time. From your experience, Adrienne, tell us how you got into HR and why, why you are even passionate about saying HR rocks. Well, you know, it is so typical to hear the HR department compared to a police shop, and in fact I know, I'm sorry to say it. No, please don't be, because that is, it is, it has earned that reputation, unfortunately.
And, um, the reason why I got into HR is the first time I ever managed anybody, I was horrible at it. I was such a horrible boss because we train our doctors for four years in medical school before we allow them. to practice as a doctor. But we very rarely ever train someone to supervise or manage people before they actually start supervising. And so HR always has to come in as the police shop and say, Oh no, don't do this or clean up this or that type of thing.
And so it's become a vicious circle. And looking back on when I was first a manager, it's still Kind of a horrifying memory for me, and I actually reached out to one of my, uh, subordinates ten years later on Facebook and apologized to her for being such a lousy manager. And, my, I'd run that road, Adrienne, as well. I think, I think anyone who's had experience being that cringy manager that looks back and says, that's really bad at that. Like, I didn't have the training.
Yeah, I'm, I'm glad you made amends. People don't, don't intend to be bad managers. They don't intend to be bad leaders, but without the training, without the tools, it's basically just guesswork. And so it's kind of my life's mission to make sure that I can't retire until there are no more bad managers of people in the world. So obviously I'm never retiring, but that's kind of my reason I get up in the morning.
And so, You know, the more that I have worked with PDA and being in the dental industry, there are so many talented, amazing leaders out there in dental practices. Yeah. But they just don't have the tools and the training to move them from doing guesswork around how to hire the right person, how to manage and lead the right person, how to give feedback on performance. They're just guessing.
And what they're going by is honestly, what they have seen modeled in the past, which was probably also a lot of guesswork. And so, what I'm trying to do, especially with dental TQ, is to get the guesswork out and bring in evidence based, science based techniques, tools. And understanding that we know will give you a much higher success rate of hiring that right person, of retaining the right person, of how to let the wrong person go, and how to get the most out of your employees.
So, that's what I'm so thrilled about. You know, when I was a manager without the tools, not realizing that I didn't have the tools, I cannot tell you how bad my confidence struggled. And, uh, so many times I would say, I'm just, you know, I'm just not cut out for this. I'm obviously just not cut out for this. And, and when you came in, um, with. It wasn't just the tools, but it was the guidance that you gave in how to use the tools.
You helped me realize that it had absolutely nothing to do with me and that there are, there are many leaders that are fully capable way more, I think, than any of us realize. They just need not just the tool, but that guidance that goes with it. And. And the transformation just ripples out, um, you know, across the whole team naturally.
So I'm wondering if we could, because, because what made it sticky for me started from the very beginning, meaning how we actually even job posted all the way through to performance reviews and, um, and basically the entire employee life cycle, you've helped me with every single step. So if we could look at it from that dental practice, cause we've heard dental practices talk about struggles in each of those areas.
Uh, I'd love for you to sort of pinpoint, you know, how you help, like give, let's give some tangible examples, because this is so important. If you're listening right now, I can guarantee there are areas where you could smooth out and streamline your HR process. And not only would it remove so much headache, but let me tell you, it, It'll end up boosting your profit. It'll end up making you money in the long run. Um, so let's start off with, with job posting.
Cause that's one thing that I hear a lot. Um, is walk us through like your process of, of attraction. How do you attract talent into that dental practice? Because staffing is hard right now. Oh yeah. Staffing is very hard. Well, the first thing you have to understand is who are you? As a dental practice, what are your values? What are you known for? What is it like to work in your dental practice? You have to be able to almost sell yourself, not as a product, but as a place to work.
We call that employer branding. And it's communicating to potential candidates, Hey, this would be an awesome place for you to come and work. And you actually end up defining that in your job posting because you want to address. You know, um, what it's, what it's like to work there, but then you also want to show that you have very specific requirements in mind for that job posting. And that actually starts with the job description. And here's where I see a lot of it break down all the time.
Is People will go to the internet and they'll grab a job description, you know, they'll just do a Google search, let's say, for a dental hygienist and they'll just grab something from the internet and then they'll throw it up and they'll think, okay, this is it, without actually looking at, is this really how a dental hygienist must perform in my practice, but the biggest key point missing is it's not just the skills you bring into the office, It's your behaviors, how you
do those skills, and that's really what makes or breaks a really good employee. It's not necessarily the technical skills. It's what we call the behavioral competencies. So this is something that I've been putting into, you know, as you've seen into our process at PDA and what I've been building in Dental TQ is the tools and the knowledge that is needed of what are the behaviors that science shows us. leads to the best performance by job, not just in general, because it depends.
I mean, the, the behaviors that you need your front office person to have. May be quite different than what you need from your associate doctor. So, we actually have the knowledge of what behaviors actually correlate and predict higher levels of success by specific job. So we build those into the job description. We build those into the interview process. I also, you know, I've created a module, I think it's really important, is how do you even know what you're looking for in a resume?
How do you know that the resume you, you know, that you have on your desk that you're looking at actually is telling you anything about that person, or it's just a whole bunch of fluff, and it sounds great. But it really isn't giving you any idea into that person. So, every single, this is where, this is why I think HR rocks. It's just like, you know, if you start to learn to play the piano, or you start to learn to swim. Anything that you do has a process, it has a technique.
And then you practice it, and you get good at it. But you don't have to figure it all out yourself. And that's what I've been focusing on, is building that process, and building those tools, so you can get good.
at how to hire that right person or how to manage that person and then you don't have to guess anymore and you know it just as you said it ends up making more money for the practice but it also saves a lot of money you know one bad hire can cost your dental practice up to five times that person's salary in lost cost direct financial cost not to mention the indirect costs of you've now You know, made everybody else unhappy in the office having to deal with a person that's not
carrying their load or has, you know, you've had to let go and so now the work has to be redistributed and it's going to take time to get somebody else in. The costs for a bad hire are really prohibitive. Nobody, Nobody wants to hire and, and budgets for okay, I've got to set aside five times the amount of this salary in case this hire goes south. We don't do that and we should, we don't have to do that. Not if we have the, the process and the tools.
You know, those core competencies in the job descriptions are absolute game changers. And uh, and I would, I never thought I would ever say hiring smarter has never been easier, but it gives you this insight that goes beyond. Organized and detail oriented, like, yeah, we know that. We, we know that, that anybody in your team is going to have to be detail oriented. It's helpful if they're organized. So these core competencies, there are a set, how many are there right now? Uh, is it 50?
Uh, there is a, so the, the one that, there's different competency libraries out there. The one that I'm, I'm certified on have been for 15 years. The one that is, uh, the top one used in the world is done by Corn Fairy, uh, a global management, uh, organization. And in the library, there are 38 different competencies.
38. And the key is to understand that, you know, there, it's, it would be nice to have 38 competencies, but if you were trying to hire somebody for 38 competencies and then evaluate their performance, you're going to be doing that all the, it's, you won't have enough time. So what Corn Fairy has done is they've taken the hard work and used the science to again determine. What are those key four to six competencies that correlate the highest to performance by particular job?
And because I'm certified in the tools, that way, you know, when I create a template job description for an office manager or for an associate doctor, I've, I'm able to go ahead and list those competencies. in there. And like you said, it's, it does make it easier because it's not just saying, Oh, well, I'm detail oriented. How would you define that? People are going to define that differently.
But using, for example, a, a, a library like Corn Fairy gives us a common language, a common definition, descriptions of what those behaviors actually look like. when someone is talented at doing them, or if they're underskilled, or even if they're overusing them. So you get all of that information, so you're not, it's not just, it's not just a phrase. It is genuinely providing you with optics around what that behavior should look like that leads to higher levels of performance.
So, I love this as a preview example because this is just one tool. This is one tool of many that sit in dental TQ and, um, and I speak about it personally because I've worked with you personally. Um, you know, the stickiness factor of that is, is in the guidance that you've given me. So these competencies. Total game changer for me and how I hire.
And then also how I manage the examples that you mentioned of when someone is using them, uh, well, or if they're out of alignment with them and they're, they're underperforming, uh, and then, and then taking the management steps with it, it has definitely helped make my life so much easier. Let's talk about dental TQ's guidance function. So dental TQ, tell me.
What is, I know it's a monthly membership program, but what are the key components that make Dental TQ so special, um, you know, and really act as a gift for dentists and teams? Absolutely. So yes, it's a, it's a monthly subscription and what that gets you is unlimited access into there. Right now there are four modules in the dental TQ course correctory. So there's a module on recruitment and onboarding. There's one that focuses on performance management.
There's one that focuses on employee engagement and retention, and then there's one that focuses on talent and career development, and in each one of those modules, there's anywhere between five to eight individual pre recorded lessons with downloads, with job aids, with me Kind of explaining what this tool is, how it gets used, the, the reasoning behind it, and, and how you would actually adopt it into your own organization. Now, the cool thing is, is, you know, these are, they're just in time.
They're designed that, you know, if you're hiring somebody, then go into module one and and pull out what you need from module one or if you're getting ready to do performance reviews go into module two you can do them and go in at your own pace in your own order but also you get access to the dental tq community and this is kind of like a facebook group where you can you know put in if you've got a specific question you can just type that in and you're going
to get an answer very quickly from me. Um, about that. And you also will have in the community, I'll be posting additional things and, you know, things that you may want to read or, or, uh, additional tips and tricks. And twice a month, I hold open office hours. So, the links are also posted in the community so you can just, you know, sign in and come into the office hours and we can talk about whatever HR topics that you have, live and real time.
So, it's really designed to be there as a resource or as a guide, like you said. It is the tools. It is the, the, you know, the, the things that, the job aids you can use. But It's also guidance and support and learning, and that's what I'm really excited about. My favorite thing about this is the, um, the high adoption rate.
So your voice specifically, uh, the, you know, the dental TQ suite, you've also worked in other areas of PDA, such as with the emerging leaders for team leads and office managers. You're so disarming. You're very, um, easy to talk to. And in this type of environment, it's a sensitive topic still. HR, just the word HR can be triggering and it's sensitive and you do a great job at, um, you know, having really warm, welcoming office hours environments.
I know I've taken you up on many office hours environments and you're a really great teacher. You know, you're really, really great at teaching and listening and helping from a personalized perspective. I mean, I think that is a gift of a teacher, right? They can see the individual and know how to work with them so that they can really fully adopt what it is that.
That we are, you know, guiding people towards and so I think that's a beautiful benefit and I love This formula of having access to the learning, uh at your fingertips online It's a beautiful online campus that you can go to then having those Those office hours so that you can interact together. And then the third component, which we hear at our live PDA conference events all the time, it's that interaction with other productive dentist practices.
So to me, when people, you know, say, what is, what is it about that? Why is that? productive dentist team like such a rock star. Why are, what makes them so amazing? We finally found a solution in Dental TQ, I think, to answer that question. Uh, and, and it feels, it feels great. Why, why are you excited about this? Like, what are you looking forward to for the teams that are going to come into Dental TQ?
For me, it's watching the smiles erupt when they see, Oh my gosh, this is going to help me. Oh, this is going to relieve that pain point. That is the greatest, like I said, I can't, I can't retire until we don't have any more bad managers. And nobody wants to be a bad manager. Nobody sets out for that, but they don't have the tools. You know, as you said, you thought you couldn't do this, and it's not you at all.
It's the, it's having the training, and once people see that, oh, with this tool, with this training, oh wow, I can do this, and I can do this well, that's what excites me so much, that I just, I'm, I'm just all goose bumpy right now thinking about it. All right. I have one more question. This is for all of my discerning listeners. If you're listening right now and you're like, just the facts, give me what it is.
I know that, uh, our listeners love to have tangibles and, um, and then the feelings, you know, how, how are they going to, how is this going to help them grow and feel confident? So give me the data. Like what do they have tools, scripts, templates, like what resources will they get? Absolutely. So, depending on the module, uh, well, every, every module, every lesson has, uh, downloadable slides that come with that.
But there's also templated job descriptions for the six most common, uh, jobs within a dental office. And that includes those behavioral competencies as well as templates of how to do structured interviewing so that you can interview people around those behavioral competencies. We also have. Um, onboarding checklists for best practices. We have templates for how to do the best performance reviews, how to respond when your employee is getting a little defensive, and how to manage that process.
Um, there is a great tool called a stay interview, and we have templates that help with that, as well as How to manage your priorities. So we have so many cool takeaways that aren't, it's not only the recorded material, but downloads that, you know, you, you've got it, your hands right there. Now, thank you. Thank you for that. That gives me that like feeling, you know, in my hands, like I will be able to truly hit the easy button with this and your interview questions, by the way, are fire.
They're so, so, so good. Uh, I've walked through, uh, in my own process with you and that that's, you just. Pulling to mind all of the ways that you've helped. Let's talk about the emotions really quick. So thinking about, you know, the different sessions that you've had with productive teams and productive doctors, what are some of the words that come up, uh, as a result of going through this training? Oh, gosh. Well, a lot of them really center around Oh, I can, I'm not so nervous anymore.
I feel like I have something I can use and I can see that it works and that I'm not having to guess. And it is, it's a stress reducer, honestly, having these great tools. And then also of, oh, hey, you know what? Actually using this tool. It worked. I, you know, the, the employee's performance changed and, and now she's right there and she's all in and she's, you know, doing what we need her to do. Gosh, I didn't know it would be that easy to make it happen.
They just didn't know to have those tools. So, you know, uh, ease, reducing stress, increasing performance, those, those, those are the big feedback. areas that I hear. Yeah, let's do the math really quick. I said I had one more question, but I have one one more question. So this, this to be part of the dental TQ community and get access to everything that we just talked about. I think it's 150 a month. Is that right? That's right.
Okay, her office, her office, but you got unlimited team and limited teams. Okay, um, Okay, so 1, 800 a year, and yeah, I think so, 150 times 12, right? 150 times 12, 1, 800 a year, and if you have one bed higher, what did you say that that cost again? What was that statistic? Five times that person's salary, annual salary, annual salary. So let's say you hired somebody for 50, 000 and they turned out to be a bad hire.
That can cost you at minimum 250, 000 in terms of lost salary, the cost that it takes to rehire, uh, to re, you know, fill that position, the lost productivity, the, the extra work on others. Yeah, it's, it really adds up. You know, uh, years ago, I, I used to, I used to say, uh, that the mission for PDA was every dentist deserves to be a productive dentist. And there's a lot baked into that statement. What does that exactly mean? Uh, and then who has access to it?
Because, you know, dental consulting can be expensive. And, and I understand that. There's, you know, there's, there's different areas and places that you're at. Anyone. Can do this for 1, 800. Anyone has the ability to be a productive dentist in this way. And one brick that you can place on that path towards your growth is, is, is it's worth it. It's worth it in the long run, I think.
And that is, I'm, I'm personally excited to be able to open up access in a way that any practice, regardless of where you're located at, uh, how much you produce, whatever state you're in, you, you can take advantage of this. right now. Uh, Adrienne, thank you for being our guest today. And is there anything else you want to share with our listeners who are leaning in right now? Anything else you think they should know? Folks, I'm telling you, HR does rock.
And in a good way and, you know, having, having the, the training and the tools and the community support, it's just going to make a huge difference in everything, your culture and your employees and, you know, think about what are your pain points and I'm pretty sure NLTQ can help you solve those, so.
I, I look forward to Dennis, uh, having the ability to stop posting on message forums and Facebook and wherever else complaining about staffing challenges and instead giving advice and celebrating because they have the rock star team that they deserve. Absolutely. And then maybe one day I can retire when every single dental practice has that. One day. Alright, so where do folks go to sign up? So, um, they can go to, uh, dentaltq. com. So, D E N T A L. DentalTQ.
com, um, or if they go into our, um, our, um, ProductiveDentist. com website and they do the dropdown around, uh, learning, they will see, they can, uh, actually click and see the entire course curriculum directory for DentalTQ. And there is an email, uh, and a phone number there that they can use to sign up as well. Awesome. Thank you, Adrienne, for being a guest and for all that you do for dentistry. Thank you so much. This was my pleasure.