Document Type

Article

Journal Title

Dental Hypotheses

Publication Date

Fall 10-2011

Volume

2

Abstract

Staff meetings in general dental practices represent what is believed to be a key management strategy to build teams and to enhance ef-ficiency and effectiveness. However, very little research has been done regarding staff meetings in dental offices. This study examined staff meetings from the viewpoint of dental hygienists who grow in unique careers in that they work largely independently of the dentist and yet typically within a dental practice while providing patient care and education. One-hundred-six dental hygienists completed a sur- vey about staff meetings in dental offices. Key findings include: only approximately 43% of dental offices conduct morning huddles to get the day off to a smooth and organized start, 72% of dental practices conduct longer staff meetings with largely positive outcomes, includ-ing increasing practice efficiency and productivity, few practices (12%) hold specific meetings only for the hygiene-department (and probably thereby miss some opportunities for practice improvement), the most important variable by far to hygienists' job satisfaction is re-spect from the owner-dentist, and there exists an important and syn-ergistic relationship among job satisfaction, relationships with other staff and relationship with the owner-dentist.

ISSN

2155-8213

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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Dentistry Commons

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