DeAnn McClain, COO of Heartland Dental, spoke with Becker's to discuss how cultivating a strong culture can help support dental teams.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q: How is Heartland supporting its staffing during this economically challenging time?
DeAnn McClain: We offer our support in a lot of different ways, one of which is our recruiting arm. We want to make sure that we're being as competitive as possible for our doctors and making sure that we're out and about and in every way possible. We're continuing to assess the external environment to ensure we're providing the equitable compensation bands. We're all across the country, so we want to make sure that every market that we're supporting doctors in we're [understanding] what's happening in those areas and we're being competitive there.
Also, having increased visibility across job boards and events to make sure that we're reaching potential candidates, both from a clinician standpoint and the teams that they need to support them. One of our biggest things, whether we're talking about patients in the office, or doctors and team members — we just love referrals. We really feel that our current supported doctors and team members know our culture very well. They're more likely to know people with similar values and folks that would be a good fit to join our family and be a good fit for our culture. So we definitely continued to encourage those referrals. Just this year, we enhanced our referral process and we introduced an app that allows our doctors and team members to be able to seamlessly refer others and have a lot of information right at their fingertips so they can refer those great candidates. We're really trying to put everything possible out there to make sure that we are supporting them however we can.
In the end, it's all about our culture. I can't say that loudly enough to the degree that I really believe it. We're constantly doing everything we can to make sure that our culture stands true, especially with growth. I think that's one of our biggest challenges as we grow, making sure that culture is strong. That goes into how we attract and retain doctors and team members. We just finished our engagement surveys. We're digging into the feedback from our doctors and team members. I think that definitely helps us to stay very pertinent on what they're looking for and any feedback they have for us to make our services better. Whether it's creating more robust diversity and inclusion applications or whatever [else there] might be, all of those things will come out in that survey, as well as compensation and all the things that we want to make sure stay top of mind.