Practice Management
Three Components of Training an Office Manager By Roger P. Levin, DDS
O
ne of the topics that does not get enough attention in practice management is the training of an office manager. Most dental office managers have very limited management education, experience or training. Levin Group has reviewed the performance of hundreds of office managers over the last 39 years and determined that many would benefit tremendously from understanding the real role of an office manager — starting with their job description. We always recommend that for every position in the office there is a clear, detailed job description that also includes a list of responsibilities. Job descriptions force the practice to think through exactly what they want the job to be. Some job descriptions are more straightforward than others. For example, it is easier to document what you want the front desk person and the assistant or hygienist to do. These are relatively clear and easy to outline. It is not as easy when you are talking about an office manager because the set of responsibilities varies widely from practice to practice. Let’s look, for example, at three different types of dental office managers. In one practice, we found the office manager was
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strictly in charge of the front desk area and also participated in answering phones, scheduling patients, collecting money and other typical day-to-day front desk responsibilities. In another office, we found the office manager, overall, knew the financial aspects of the office but had no role in employee management. In a third office, we found the office manager had full responsibility for all day-to-day operations, oversaw human resources (including hiring and terminations) and was responsible for day-to-day performance of the practice. These three scenarios — and there are others — represent the wide variation in office manager responsibilities and why job descriptions become essential.
What Should an Office Manager Really Do? In the ideal practice business model, the office manager literally manages the office. This means complete responsibility for day-to-day operations, human resources and any other factor that is a normal part of creating excellent practice performance. This version of an office manager is more like example No. 3 above. Having said that, what I’ve observed over the past four decades is that the majority of dental office managers have no manage-