JOANNA CAREW

Regular readers will know I use my blog to report unpolished truths: I’ll aspire for excellence, mess things up, then share it all on here! Today I’m writing about staff satisfaction and, with habitual transparency, you’ll find attached our latest staff satisfaction survey results – in full – towards the end of this post.

I talk a lot about being a great employer, our fabulous workplace, and how our ‘Carew Crew’ love the business. Many business owners aspire to this, but in reality achieving it can be a total headache.

Over the years I’ve experimented with getting staff feedback. Initially, I was surprised to discover that the team would complain loudly to one another about x or y, but say everything was fine when I asked! It didn’t make sense to me that I was offering a forum and nobody would speak up. I believe the two biggest factors were a lack of trust and past experiences of top-down management.

Sadly, autocratic leadership in old-fashioned dental practices seems to be endemic here in the north-east. Whilst recruiting I have encountered countless candidates reporting work-environments where their voices went unheard. Thankfully though, trust can be earned and over time mindsets can change, so when employees join us they go through an adjustment period as they learn about our flatter hierarchy and how we collaborate as a team.

Currently, these are some of our pathways for securing staff feedback:

💛 Building trusting relationships.

🩶 Demonstrating people are heard by delivering change.

💛 Weekly 1-2-1s encouraging staff to be vocal about their happiness.

🩶 Using Kaizen to generate employee-led continuous improvement.

💛 Monthly breakfast meetings without any management present.

🩶 Bi-annual anonymous satisfaction surveys.

We’ve just carried out a staff satisfaction survey, completed via Google forms, and last week we shared the results with the team. Crucially, when all of the responses are in, I take time to consider feedback and draft an action plan to address anything raised.

We get candid feedback using these surveys and I think collecting the data anonymously is key to enabling staff to speak out. The full report can be found here:

You’ll see from the action plan that having identified issues we then consult with the team on finding solutions, and add deadlines for delivering outcomes!

The new uniforms I raved about in the Spring are loved by the clinical team and loathed by the admin staff, so back to the drawing board we go … 😅

Sometimes I think, “Oh for goodness sakes why are you moaning about …” but then I give myself a shake and put my ego back in its box. Honestly, being patient and compassionate is far more powerful, understanding why something is causing problems and investigating can be time-consuming, but if it helps the team to function at full throttle then it is worth it. An unhappy workplace is unbearable for everybody.