IS YOUR TEAM READY TO FACE A CRISIS?

As you may know, Practicon is headquartered in Greenville, NC--and that was a tough, wet place to be over the weekend of October 8-9, 2016. We knew Hurricane Matthew had plowed across Florida and soaked the southeast coast as it blew north. We didn’t, however, expect the hours-long pounding our entire area received on Saturday night into Sunday morning.

Our local river, the Tar, with all its tributaries as well as the larger rivers downstream simply could not hold Matthew’s magnitude. F-L-O-O-D! Practicon, along with many other businesses, is located in an industrial park north of the Tar River on low lying land prone to flooding. On Monday and Tuesday following the hurricane weekend, all but one bridge over the Tar were closed so that most of our staff had to cross that one open bridge to get to work. We wrestled mightily with the decision to close the company or to remain open to serve our customers. Customers won! We remained open with the invitation to all staff members to stay home if they felt it necessary.

I cannot express to you the amazement and pride we felt as almost 100% of our 65 team members came to work every day of that scary week. Some even left their own flooded homes (They had moved in with family or friends.) to come to Practicon, to put service to our customer FIRST!

Our biggest problem that week was that UPS and FedEx did not make pickups. The USPS, though operating on late schedules, made pickups, actually outperforming the other carriers. Failure of those two major carriers led to yet another example of Practicon staff heroics--a large order had to reach a dental school by a prearranged deadline. One of our team members volunteered to drive his own car to the closest still-operational UPS shipment center in Wilson, NC, about 40 miles away. By detouring around flooded roads and closed bridges, Mike made it in time to get the shipment on the last UPS truck of that day, on its way to meet the school’s needs by the date promised. Extraordinary customer service that was!

Incidentally, Hurricane Matthew was a sort of repeat of an even worse storm, Hurricane Floyd, that hit eastern NC in 1999. During that awful time all Tar River bridges were closed for days. Unwilling to fail our customers, many of the Practicon staff members met at a local mall at 6 AM each day to travel in vans 128 miles to the office, winding their way west, north, and then south to get to Practicon. The 128-mile journey was repeated at day’s end for almost a week. So, the Practicon team has a history of tremendous loyalty to customers, determination to open Practicon doors if at all possible, and teamwork that marks our company as a most unusual, caring place to work.

Enough--you get the idea as I unapologetically brag on Practicon’s team. Question--would your dental team put the practice and patients first in a similar crisis?  Many of you would, no doubt, answer “Yes” to that question while others may not be so sure. As you ponder the question, I have a suggestion: You, the dentist/owner might ask yourself, “Do I put my team members on a pedestal at all times just like I want them to put our patients and loyalty to the practice on a pedestal marked #1 at all times?”  If you can answer “Yes!” to that question, chances are your staff would react to a crisis just as competently as our team did.

I can say unequivocally from more than 30 years of consulting work with hundreds of dental offices, that those dentists who cultivate a close, caring, appreciative, warm, respectful, professional, fun relationship with staff, making them feel necessary, important, and involved in the practice in meaningful ways, have a team that is ready to face a crisis. Any crisis. In summary, I hope that you have learned in your practice what we have learned at Practicon:  our staff members are the backbone, heart, hands, and feet of our company. We strive to make sure Practicon is a superb place to work with team members who are like family in the way we care for each other and in the way, therefore, they respond to and care for our customers. It is a WIN-WIN for all of us! It can be the same for you and your staff if you make it so.