People are at the centre of any healthcare business – both as patients, and as a team of providers delivering care.
While technical concerns are common at a time when the dental industry is undergoing massive changes due to improvements in software and technology, one question I’m frequently asked is about the human side of things: “How can I make sure I have a good team who can provide sterling care, and how should I go about assessing my team’s effectiveness?”.
There are no quick technological fixes to improve how your team operates or to build a better clinic culture but technology can help you confront these problems. One of the best tech solutions available for unlocking the full potential of your team is Human-Focused Technology, or HFT.
Human-Focused Technology is a new approach to quickly gathering information about how and why people behave the way they do. It can help employers better understand their workforce and realize its full potential.
If you want to optimize your team to better serve your patients’ needs, keep reading to find out how HFT can help.
What is Human-Focused Technology?
If you pay attention to the latest news about workplace software, you’re probably familiar with the term “human-centred design” to describe approaches to software design that take the needs of human users into account from beginning to end.
While Human-Focused Technology is similar, its uses are much more specifically geared toward helping employers optimize the skills and capacities of employees to create the best and most effective possible workplace – including dental clinics.
This technology is based on a few fundamental insights, namely that:
- All humans have developed certain innate behavioural styles that govern how they do what they do
- Behavioural styles arise from core motivators that determine why they do what they do
- Traditional hiring methods use unreliable tools like resumes and interviews that don’t yield information about styles and motivators and therefore cannot deliver optimal candidate selection results
- Technology can play a role in helping us determine every individual’s behavioural style and core motivators
Using a few basic tests, Human-Focused Technology can save companies huge amounts of time by providing high-level information about the styles and motivators of everyone on their team, thereby making it easier to understand core dynamics in your workplace culture.
The Role of HFT in the Hiring Process
Unsurprisingly, the first applications of Human-Focused Technology have been in the hiring process. Because HFT provides more reliable information about how a potential employee will actually operate in the workplace, it makes it a lot easier for to find the right people the first time around.
Rather than relying on traditional hiring techniques such as lengthy interviews and over-hyped resumes to find the best candidates for your dental clinic, using human-focused hiring techniques allow you to identify employees to join your team long-term.
Human-focused personality tests can help you to help cut through facades and biases, showing clearly whether an applicant possesses the personality traits essential to helping you run your clinic by identifying soft skills that can’t necessarily be trained, including:
- Flexibility – this is an extremely valuable asset to any dental clinic. People who are able to adapt to any situation are going to be dependable and able to perform no matter what’s thrown their way.
- Creative thinking – being able to develop unique solutions to problems as they arise is an invaluable tool, as it drives innovation while increasing efficiency.
- Feedback acceptance – a major key to fostering growth in any workplace requires the ability to not only accept feedback gracefully but also to apply that feedback going forward.
Because of their effectiveness, HFT tests are an increasingly standard part of the hiring process in a variety of industries and may join other basic technologies like cloud storage and reputation management software as essential tools every dental clinic needs.
According to one recent report, employee turnover rates are one of the top concerns for employers across the healthcare industry. Turnover costs clinics and hospitals countless hours and millions of dollars in lost revenue every year, and bringing turnover rates down requires addressing the root problems in your workplace culture.
Fortunately, Human-Focused Technology is perfectly designed to help you improve retention rates by hiring the right candidates and reaching a better understanding of the deep needs and underlying dynamics of your current employees.
How HFT Helps You Understand Your Team
HFT can help you understand the personalities, needs and habits your current employees bring to the workplace.
Most workplace conflict happens due to misunderstandings between people with different behavioural styles and different core motivators. Unfortunately, the root causes of these disagreements are often obscured by the day-to-day conflicts around which they play out.
As an example, it may seem as though your hygienist and your receptionist disagree over how to handle last-minute cancellations. One may consider building relationships most important and so takes a more social approach with patients while the other is task-focused and insists on a more direct approach. In reality, both are motivated to keep the chairs full and both inform the patient that a cancellation fee may apply so the seeming “conflict” is actually a difference in communication styles.
In summary, HFT helps make deep motivations and behaviour patterns legible, it can help you map out the true dynamics of your workplace, and help your team find better ways of communicating and working together.
