Empowering Employees Leads to Greater Employee Retention

As the number of dental jobs that are available in the industry increase, it is becoming more and more important to increase employee retention to keep recruitment costs down. One way in which to keep employee retention at a good level is to empower employees in their day to day work. The power of empowerment shouldn’t be underestimated. Empowerment can increase confidence that the employee feels and creates an excellent sense of team work, which means employees can be more productive at work.]

Here are four areas which explain why empowering employees is a great idea.

1. Quality of work produced

If an employee can be given the freedom to work independently, research has shown that this allows the employee to produce a higher quality of work. Employees begin to take pride in their work, and will actively want to make sure that what they build is beneficial for the dental office.

2. Satisfied employees

Numerous studies have identified that employees that feel empowered are in turn more satisfied with their work. This happiness is then reflected in the employee retention.

A recent example which shows this is with Toyota. This company empowered employees to find and solve problems associated with production process. If any employee in the production process notices something which is going catastrophically wrong, they have the authority to stop the whole production process. Toyota noticed that employee satisfaction rocketed up when this policy was introduced, and subsequently noticed that retention rates improved.

3. Collaboration

As the confidence of the empowered employees increases, the workforce is more likely to work with each other to share skills and tips with each other to foster a positive working environment. This can only benefit patients who visit the dental office, who will have a far better greater experience.

4.  Employee empowerment reduces costs

Although it may appear that empowering employees may cost the dental office, research has shown that costs will in fact fall. Because of the reduction in staff turnover, money is saved in the recruitment process which can be used for other areas of the dental office operation. Training costs will also fall substantially, because when employees leave, new employees must be trained up to the standard of the previous employee. Since less employees leave, there will be no need to train new employees. Experience will remain within the practice and as a result, staff are less likely to transfer to competitors.

As you can see, there is a good case for employee empowerment, which then has added benefit in terms of employee retention. For more information on how to increase productivity to enable willing employees, check out https://www.dentreps.com/blog/important-willing-productive-employees/.

Jennifer Winget

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