The Campbell Academy Business Blog

Moving along to HR!

As we move along through the different subjects that we can cover to try and influence our businesses and our organisations in a slightly better way, the one which seems to create the most amount of discussion in our world in business education is that of human resources (or team building and team care).

While marketing is undoubtedly the most popular subject, and if I were to run day-long masterclasses in all of the business subjects, marketing would definitely be the one that would be oversubscribed.

Human resources is seen as being the most challenging and mysterious to the biggest amount of people.

Human resources is perhaps the most important aspect of your work overall because without any team, there is no work, and without looking after that team, there is no ability to provide stability or, growth or expansion of a business.

If you do not have a team to whom you can delegate successfully and safely, then you are inevitably stuck at the level of a freelancer. That may be an extremely profitable, agile, and rewarding situation, but you will be limited by capacity because a freelancer can only do as much as one freelancer can.

Team building in dentistry, the building of a successful, effective, happy and stable team, is the work of ages, it is an enormous task to undertake, especially from scratch, and it is an ever-developing and evolving discipline because humans are not predictable or certainly not predictable as business would like them to be, and therefore you will always find yourself working around the human elements of human resources.

While that is daunting and unpredictable, it's also wonderful and rewarding, and systems can be put in place, philosophies can be drilled into, and strategies can be upheld to ensure that you have a much more stable workplace and a much more stable team than you would have without these things.

One of the things that we have realised in our pursuit of excellent human resources and teambuilding in our organisation is to set the guard rails in both directions, understand what people can expect from us as an employer, what people can expect from us is an institution that takes people into their work family and what we will deliver for them on a month by month and year by year basis, but also what we will expect from them in return.

Team building in human resources is the development of a social contract with your workforce, however small or large that workforce is, and you have the ability to define what that social contract would be.

Our social contract is formed around our human resources manual and our team Handbook, and you can see a copy of The Campbell Clinic Handbook here.

This is one of the best bits of work that the practice has ever provided, and the majority of this was produced by Hayley Brown (Our MD) and the rest of the team in our practice.

The Campbell Clinic handbook allows us to share with people before they come to work through advertisements and recruitment processes what they can expect from being here and what we expect for someone to have the opportunity to work with us.

This book is based on the principle of transformational leadership (We will come to leadership later in these blogs), and transformational leadership is the opportunity to give people the chance to become better than they already are.

We subscribe to two different types of leadership in human resources. One is transformational (transformative), and one is transactional.

Transactional leadership is when you have to tell someone what to do when you have to use their contract or their terms of reference to keep them in line with the work that is required.

We hope to limit any sort of transactional leadership interactions to 10% or less of all the interactions we have with our team.

While it's not possible to go through the whole of human resources in one small piece of writing, there are two specific areas that we think give people the clarity and stability that they need in order to be the best version of themselves moving forward and to extol the values of the system that we have in place, which is 'There is no such thing as extraordinary people, only ordinary people doing extraordinary things'.

Two of the most important things are as follows:

1) A clearly defined and transparent pay scale.

This isn't easy to produce initially, but it provides enormous benefits and stability to the workforce.

It reduces the risk of people looking over their shoulders or looking over someone else's shoulders. It allows you to apply wage rises and remuneration increases in your business around a budget-setting system, which provides stability and clarity.

2) Performance management review systems.

If you have set up an appropriate appraisal system, which is removed from the remuneration system and a proper and well-defined performance management review system, it allows you to address issues with your team of underperformance however, they may be caused, these may be due to social, emotional, physical or health situations or can be attitude based or skills based but it allows you the opportunity to systematically approach these and therefore raise the quality and interaction of the team on a day to day basis.

Definitions of all of these are included in the TCC handbook so that our team are fully aware of the process that exists and how they can access care, help, training, guidance, coaching and all sorts of resources to improve themselves and to keep them working at the highest possible level.

Throughout this blog over the years to come, we'll talk more and more in detail about the different aspects of human resources and modern human resources, too (One of the main driving forces in exceptional companies is designing jobs as a product where people buy the right to work in your practice - more about this later).

For now, though, it's enough to know that if you are not looking at the structures and systems of HR and team building in your practice, it's probably time to start.