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Howard Speaks Howard Farran, DDS MBA, MAGD, Publisher, Dentaltown Magazine

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Spouse in House
– by Howard Farran, DDS, MAGD, MBA, Publisher, Dentaltown Magazine

As you might guess, I spend a lot of time lurking around the Dentaltown.com message boards. It’s usually the first thing I look at when I get up in the morning and the last thing I see before I go to sleep at night.
A few weeks ago, I wanted to see what Townies had to say about having spouses working in their practices. Man, I found dozens of message boards asking questions like, “Should your spouse work in the practice?” and “Is your spouse on the payroll?” etc. Coincidentally, a couple days later, I had a discussion with practice consultant Jennifer de St. Georges about spouses in the workplace. One of Jennifer’s lectures deals with this very subject, which I’ve heard, and I think is phenomenal.

Spouses in the workplace is a huge issue, guys. And its pretty common. In most of the situations I’ve witnessed, the husband is the dentist and the wife is part of the team. If your spouse works with you at your practice, or if you’re considering bringing your spouse on as part of your staff, here are a few things you should think about.

1. Leave your personal baggage at home. If you’re married – heck, even if you have parents – you know spouses argue and fight. In most marriages, where the husband and wife don’t spend all day with each other, they can go to their jobs, chill out for a few hours and then come back and address their problems in a (hopefully) constructive manner. But when your spouse works with you, sometimes the fights at home become fights at work. When this happens, more people are going to get involved. Staff is going to get in the middle of the argument, whether they want to or not. It becomes very destructive.

Let’s say a hygienist on the staff sides with the husband, and the argument never gets resolved. Maybe it gets worse or maybe it just becomes the big two-ton elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. The bitterness carries over to the staff, and pretty soon the decision is made to cut the “problem” staffers in order to move forward. The wife can’t work in the office knowing that the hygienist hates her guts and thinks the doctor should divorce her. Leave the personal stuff at home.

2. You can’t have two chiefs. If you have more than one head honcho, you’re going to end up sending out different messages. Dental offices are too small to operate on mixed signals. When there’s no real command, things start to fall apart. Pretty soon the staff starts acting like they’re your children. They start thinking, “If mom says ‘no,’ maybe dad will say ‘yes.’” That’s a big problem, but here’s how you handle it: There’s one president of the company, and everyone else is an employee. That’s it. If husband and wife disagree on something, don’t turn it into a personal husband/wife argument (refer to Rule #1), and don’t allow the staff to take sides. It is very unprofessional.

3. Guard against embezzlement. Sandy Pardue over at Classic Practice Resources has mentioned time and time again that about 25 percent of all dental practices have been embezzled against. Most of the time the embezzling comes from your longest employed staff member in whom you’ve given much of your trust. Having someone trustworthy on your side, like your spouse, helping with the daily deposits and audits is an excellent way to be sure you’re not being embezzled from. But that assurance isn’t enough, guys. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: You need to work with your accountant to set up internal controls. You need a system of checks and balances to ensure you don’t become a victim of embezzlement.

I’ve heard plenty of stories about wives embezzling from their husbands (especially when the two are preparing for a divorce). Helpful hint, doc: If your marriage is going south and your spouse works in the practice, you really need to keep a close eye on the deposits and audit sheets. In economics, we call divorce a “luxury item” because they’re so expensive. A divorce is about $40,000 a piece for each attorney and chances are, if your spouse is embezzling money from your practice, he/she is socking it away for the legal fees.

4. Everyone follows office procedures. At some practices I’ve visited where the husband and wife work together, it seems the wife gets special privileges. Maybe she doesn’t feel like she has to be there at 8 a.m., so she strolls on in whenever she wants to. Or maybe she doesn’t want to stay as late as everyone, so she picks up and leaves. Maybe she throws her weight around, criticizes staff in front of patients, or tries to cheat staff out of their pay. Maybe it even gets worse than that. There has to be a set schedule and set rules in the practice and everyone needs to follow it. Everyone. The doctor is the boss and the team is the team.

The rules must apply to the entire staff, otherwise people will resent the person who isn’t following the rules (and getting away with it). They’ll start to think the spouse is a prima donna, and they can’t count on that person for anything.

I think spouses should always address the doctor the way the rest of the staff addresses him/her instead of “honey” or “sweetheart.” It’s the professional thing to do. There needs to be outward respect for the dentist, even though you’re married – after all, this is a business, and it sends the rest of the staff the message that the doctor is the boss.

In every dental practice, job descriptions need to be clearly defined. For every single staff member – even your spouse – roles and duties need to be clearly spelled out, placed on file and referenced any time an issue arises. That way, everyone is held accountable. If your spouse has no job description – if he/she doesn’t have a set schedule and works in one area one minute and is answering the phones the next – it becomes extremely disruptive and stressful for the rest of the team.

The best situations I’ve seen are when you can’t tell that someone on the team is married to the doctor. When the spouse is one of the team, the entire office works well together. There’s one dental office I know of in particular where, for 30 years, not a single one of the practice’s patients knew the front desk person was married to the doctor.

Now, what happens when the husband and wife are the dentists? It really doesn’t matter how tight a ship you’re running in this situation, because the staff is going to build strong loyalties toward one over the other. Which one does better dentistry? Who does more painless procedures? Who has a better chairside manner? Etc…

Two-doctor practices like this work best when there’s a strong office manager involved. If the dentists disagree or if the staff has negative feedback against one of the dentists, it goes to the office manager, who can then handle the issues with specific people in private and work through how issues need to be solved. If you have husband and wife dentists and no office manager (or even a weak office manager), you’re going to have big problems. Sometimes an easy solution is for the husband and wife to stagger their hours, but both still need to be on the same page when it comes to managing the team (otherwise, you can refer to Rule #2). Maybe one of you is in charge of hiring and the other is in charge of finances. Set up roles for yourselves so your staff knows who to talk to about a specific issue.

There are hundreds of ways to ruin anything, and I’ve said for years that human relations (HR) are without a doubt the most difficult part of business in America. You’ll never have a perfect team because it’s made up of imperfect people. But you can create a winning team with the right people! If you’ve got the right players on your team, then management doesn’t have to manage too much and you get winning results. If your players are performing poorly, management is spending most of its time managing the people and the results aren’t improving, there’s too much dysfunction.

Toss in the interpersonal dynamics of a husband and wife on the staff and you’ve got an entirely new issue to deal with. Generally, to avoid conflicts of interest, it’s not recommended to work with a relative, but spouses working in a practice can be a good thing. It’s nice to have someone in the office that you know has your back (just as long as the rules aren’t being abused).
Howard Live
Howard Farran, DDS, MBA, MAGD, is an international speaker who has written dozens of published articles. To schedule Howard to speak to your next national, state or local dental meeting, email colleen@farranmedia.com.

Dr. Farran’s next speaking engagement is May 25, 2010, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For more information, please call Colleen at 480-718-9914.

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