Job mobility is an agile strategy designed to upgrade (or unearth) the skills of workers, allowing them to accelerate their career development while helping dental practices to save employment costs. Not only is it an agile approach to professional life, but a flexible one.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to job mobility or the implementation of job mobility strategies. Depending on the work culture of your dental practice, as well as what your needs are, job mobility strategies will differ. But, as long as the job mobility strategy effectively connects growth opportunities with skill development, then dental leaders, their teams and the candidates engaged in mobility will simultaneously (and immediately) benefit.
Emphasizing Permanent Roles
Job mobility should not only present more opportunities for roles within a dental practice but should also pose the prospect of added job security for dental professionals.
Not only should your job mobility strategy enable permanent employees to move from one full-time role to another, but should also allow dental temps to become full-time if they impress during their stint. There must be a well-defined career path for dental professionals that consistently gives them something to aspire to, providing flexibility and giving dental employees true ownership over their career trajectories.
Leveraging Tools and Technologies to Facilitate Mobility
One reason why many businesses struggle with facilitating job mobility is that they lack the technologies and tools to make it possible. It’s the leading barrier to mobility as the lack of technology and tools prevents leaders from mobilizing talent as well as establishing clear processes to make mobility easy to achieve. Such stagnation leads to increased turnover as permanent workers and dental temps alike will search elsewhere because they feel one-dimensional working at their dental practice.
Dental practices can create a talent matrix to identify employees based on multiple variables such as performance, behavior, and adaptability. Alternatively, dental leaders should engage in succession planning, consistently locating talent within their practices while allowing leaders to monitor career progress and actively invest in their career development.
Also, by using dental temp services, dental leaders can identify the professionals best poised to contribute right away to their practices, analyzing their adaptability within their practices and ability to coordinate well with team members.
Preaching an Agile Mindset
Job mobility doesn’t function without an agile mindset from the top down. Dental leaders must be consistently adaptable and open-minded, seizing unique opportunities to help develop their employees and to help dental temps maximize their time in their practices.
Again, job mobility gives dental employees some degree of control over their career trajectories while acquiring or unleashing different skills to ensure career progression.
The dental office culture is critical to executing this mindset and enabling dental professionals to embrace the mindset, becoming more motivated and engaged with their responsibilities. A positive company culture promotes versatility, where assistants, dental temps, administrators, and hygienists are all encouraged to try new roles within a practice. Such as resourceful method prevents dental offices from looking externally to fill roles while ensuring dental employees improve their skill sets.
Whether it’s laterally or vertically, change is something that should be embraced and promoted in a work culture within a dental office. With an agile mindset, dental employees become active problem solvers who can be thrust into any scenario and be poised enough to handle the weight of responsibility.
Furthermore, when shifts in work culture take place, your job mobility strategy should still encourage an open and collaborative space where there is no barrier to the lateral or vertical movement that is fundamental to job mobility. Many talent acquisition leaders point to the reluctance of leadership groups to let go of high-performing employees. While the need to hang on to higher performers is understandable, dental leaders must encourage openness in their structures so that employee skills aren’t muted because they feel they can’t achieve higher goals within a practice.
An Increased Focus on Leadership Development
Leadership development should also be a primary aspect of job mobility. Many employees working in a practice have a desire to lead in some way, whether by managing teams or being the head of admin.
By putting an increased focus on leadership development, dental leaders must encourage upskilling and increased exposure to various aspects of day-to-day operations. Additionally, leaders can encourage reskilling among their dental teams to enhance their abilities. The aim should always be to provide an environment where dental professionals feel that there is no limit to their success. By facilitating leadership development, seasoned dental practitioners and dental temps aline are best poised to lead in various situations and showcase their advanced skill sets. Dental temps benefit from this development as they gain valuable experience and make themselves more attractive candidates for future dental roles.
A good job mobility strategy enhances any dental office work culture and shows a commitment to improving careers, benefiting practices financially and reputation-wise while making professionals more adept at their jobs.
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Dr. James Younger
Dr. James Younger graduated from Dentistry at University of Toronto in 1999. Since then has been in private practice, providing a full scope of care, including implants and bone/sinus grafting. In April 2015, James was inspired by the idea of improving hygiene temping through modern mobile technology and thus TempStars was born. TempStars now makes it fast, easy and stress-free for dental offices to find a good hygienist quickly, and allows hygienists to live a busy, flexible and empowered professional life.