Activity vs. Accomplishment

If there is one most frequently asked question by dentists to their front office team when the schedule is showing some open time it is “Are you working the re-care list?” The answer to that question by any well-meaning team member is an emphatic “yes.” But what does “yes” mean? Does it mean one call has been made or twenty. Who knows? The fact is, “Are you working re-care?” is the wrong question. Let me share a better question and a better system that will put your mind at ease and ensure that you will have better scheduling results.

It is easy in any practice, any business, or any organization for that matter to confuse activity with accomplishment. We confuse being busy with accomplishing something worthwhile. Everyone in dentistry has had one of those days where the activity rose to a fevered pitch and lasted all day. By the time the last patient left, you drug yourself, exhausted, to the front desk and asked, “How much did we produce today?” To which the business coordinator answered, “Nothing!” You were busy all day, but just not busy doing things that amounted to any production.

The same is true for other “activities” in the office. Are you just “busy” working re-care or the unscheduled treatment list, or are you really accomplishing something? Nobody knows unless you do the following:

1. Start tracking the activity of any effort like re-care scheduling or unscheduled treatment calls. Keep a tally of how many calls are really being made and how many appointments are scheduled as a result.
2. Keep tracking that activity for several weeks until you can start calculating some averages. Over a several week period you will start noticing some trends. Add up the total number of scheduled appointments you were able to make compared to the number of calls you had to initiate to make those appointments.
3. Divide the number of appointments scheduled by the number of total number of calls to get your call to appointment ratio. For example, let’s say you made 40 calls and scheduled 10 appointments. That is a 25% success ratio. That means that, on average, you have to make 4 calls to schedule 1 appointment.
4. Now that you know the number, you are dangerous because you know the exact amount of activity in which you have to engage to get the result you want. Let’s say you have 5 hygiene appointments to fill. Based on the ratios above, you better be prepared to make 20 calls on average to get those appointments filled.
5. You can always be in competition with yourself to see if you can beat your average, but this system take all the guess work out of how much acitivty it will really take.

Now, let’s go back to the right question to ask. You are in the morning huddle and looking forward as a team to the rest of the week and see that there are 6 hygiene appointment times open. Knowing what the average call to scheduled appointment ratio is ( 4 to 1) you can turn to your team and ask, “Will you make 24 calls today to get those times filled? We need to fill all 6, and we know that we get 1 appointment on average every time we make 4 calls. So let’s make those 24 calls first. That will be most immediate step we can take to get the results we want.

The first goal is an activity goal…make 24 calls. The overall goal is 6 appointments, but we know what we have to do first – engage in the right activity and it will lead to accomplishment. You just have to know what activity you are managing. In this case, the question is no longer “Are you working recare?” it is “How many of the 24 calls have we made so far?”

So start accurately managing activity and you’ll be able to better lead your team to accomplishment. It is all in the questions you ask and the system you have in place to make it happen!