AADOM DISTINCTIONcast – How Do I Stay Organized in All This Chaos? The Recipe for Organizational Success
It can be hard to stay organized in the day-to-day trenches. We all have glorious dreams about steady, organized days where everything goes perfectly.
But what about the other 364 days of the year?
Learn some tips and tricks from a 25-year veteran who organizes 12 doctors and 45 team members in the CHAOS that is Pediatric Dentistry.
We will discuss Nicole’s #1 most important part of staying organized. Plus, we will review the *RECIPE for success for your good days, bad days, and everything in between.
*RECIPE:
- 1 Cup SOP
- 3/4 Cup Confidence
- 1/3 Cup Calendar
- 1/3 Cup time blocking
- 2 tbsp of “not right now”
- 3 tsp of delegation
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Read the Transcript Now!
Penny: Hello everyone, and welcome to the DistinctionCast where AADOM showcases the best and brightest minds in the dental industry from within our own dental management association. I’m Penny Reed, the Executive Vice President of Membership and Events for AADOM, and I am so excited to have you with us today.
In case you’re wondering what a DistinctionCast is, it’s more than insights into dental management. We amplify the voices of AADOM’s Distinction holders—the leaders in the trenches of dental office management who share their insights, inspiration, and real-world strategies to help you thrive in your practice.
And, before I introduce our guest for today, let’s hear a word from our sponsor, CareCredit.
CareCredit is pleased to sponsor educational content as part of our continued support of AADOM and its members. CareCredit continues to invest in the dental community with resources and technology that can make your day a little easier.
In fact, CareCredit is integrated into 90+ percent of practice management software. The integration may be a time saver and day changer, especially batch quick screen, which enables you to see who on the schedule has a CareCredit credit card, and who is pre-approved, helping you have easier costs and payment conversations.
CareCredit—the easy way to help more patients get care.
So, today we have the opportunity to hear from Nicole Hartshorn. Nicole has been in the dental industry for 25 years, and during that time she’s had the privilege of working in just about every position within the dental office, accept the dentists themselves.
She’s a self-starter who thrives in a fast-paced environment while building, growing, and partnering with successful teams. Her ability to navigate ambiguity and pivot quickly has allowed her to lead teams from a single location to a large 25+ DSO.
Nicole is currently a Regional Manager at a seven location, privately owned group, multi-specialty practice in the Denver area. When she’s not at work, she is providing EMT services for her daughter’s equestrian club and leading teams of 30 plus teenage girls in one of the top mounted drill teams in the country.
So, it can be hard to stay organized in the day-to-day trenches. And we all have glorious dreams about steady organized days where everything goes perfectly. But what about the other 364 days of the year?
I love, Nicole, your topic for today about helping us wrangle in the chaos in dentistry.
So, without any further delay, I would like to introduce Nicole, who is also our highest level of distinction, DAADOM—the Diplomat for the American Association of Dental Office Management.
So, Nicole, take it away. I know you have a wonderful program for our audience today.
Getting to Know Nicole
Nicole: Well, thank you so much for having me here today, guys. It’s been really fun putting this presentation together and kind of just looking at all these things that really help me day to day and I’m so excited to share them with everybody.
My name is Nicole, and like Penny said, I’ve done lots of things in the office except for the actual dentist. I’m not convinced that I couldn’t do that, but legally, I guess we won’t.
A little bit about me. Penny was right. I do organize a team of girls for a mounted drill team. So, there’s some of my team there. A lot of fun organizing teenage girls. And then I work in a large, large, large office as well.
I’m a cat mom. You can see my babies there. My horse baby and my daughter Aria.
This is my work team right now. We just took this photo this past October and there’s a couple of people missing from it, but overall, that’s our team here in Colorado. Pretty big team. We’ve all been together a long time. We’ve got some team members that have been with us for 36 years this year. So, great team to be a part of, and I’m very lucky to be here.
Creating Structure in the Daily Chaos
So, today we’re gonna talk about some things that can help us stay organized and all the chaos that is the day to day. I know that we all dream of coming into an office that’s highly organized and everything goes smoothly, but we’re in dentistry, so that’s just not how things go for us.
So I kind of put some, you know, a little bit of a recipe here together for us so we can kind of talk about all the things that go together to make a successful day for us—successful day, month, year, and all of those kind of things.
So, just a little bit about, we’re gonna talk about some SOPs and of course confidence, cause that’s the part that makes it all stay together, right? Calendars some time blockings…whoops. Sorry about that. And a little bit of not right now. And all of that comes together to make one large bowl of madness for us.
Standard Operating Procedures in Practice
So, we’ll just jump straight into the, you know, that first part, SOP, SOP, and the SOP.
I know that we’ve heard it from time to time. The SOPs are really, you know, the lifeblood of our office that helps us train new team members as well as just kind of keep everyone on the same page with the team members that we currently have.
So, for our team in our office here, we have SOPs for absolutely everything down to cleaning the kitchen or taking out the trash. And really, I know that those simple things seem like they wouldn’t need an SOP, but really, everything in your office does so that way you can say, you know, if you’re meeting with them to go over their performance, you can say, “You know, we have these SOPs and they’ve noticed we’re not really following, you know, taking out the trash on the end of Tuesdays like we’re supposed to.”
Or, “Hey, we’re not following our end of day procedures as we should.” All of those kind of things.
So, SOPs really help our team stay organized, know how to do things, and know what’s expected for them. They kind of go hand in hand with our job descriptions.
Hopefully you guys all have those. I’m sure that you do.
All of our SOPs, we keep them organized on the Google Drive, which is really nice because it actually pairs with our Slack, which is our organization communication—pairs together really nicely with that so everything can just, you know, be laid out on the top of the Slack and everybody has access to it all the time.
I think that’s about it. There’s a theme here. We definitely love our SOPs and are very, very thankful to have the one for absolutely everything.
If you guys need any examples, I’m happy to send them to you later on. You can always find me on our Facebook page or whatever the case may be. I’m happy to help you guys organize those.
On a side note, so we kind of talked about, you know, having them digitally, and I would highly, highly recommend everything to be kept digitally just in case anything were to ever happen in the office—a flood or a fire, or who knows what—keeping them organized digitally really helps, especially with multi-location teams, so that you can spread all that information out there to all of the locations.
And then you’ve got some really systematic uniformity between your locations, which for those of us who work in multi-locations, we know how hard it can be to really keep all of those teams operating the same.
So, the cost investment is usually pretty minimal for the SOPs other than just your time putting them together.
You want them to be pretty detailed, but not overly detailed to the point where they’re like three pages each.
Best Practices for Writing Effective SOPs
Yeah. Other than that, I would definitely suggest, if you aren’t sure what to include, I’ve kind of put that here for you.
We want it to be clear if you need to put screenshots in it from your software or anything like that, I would highly recommend that. Our end of days have little snapshots of what each page and what the reports look like.
All of my SOPs are no longer than a page long, so that it doesn’t feel monotonous or daunting to kind of take a look at those. But they shouldn’t be overly vague. You want to make sure that these can really help your teams train a new hire or kind of regroup, should there be any kind of loss of consistency there.
Written in a clear third person active voice. It shouldn’t be, you know, overly educated sounding, just kind of like you were talking with your staff one-on-one.
The Importance of Confidence Building
Let’s see. The next thing that I highly, highly encourage my team to develop in themselves, and I try and develop in them as well, is really building up their confidence.
You know, I know that confidence doesn’t seem like it’s a big part of our lives day to day, but staying confident in everything that you do and standing behind the choices that you make can really, really help your team feel confident in following you and feeling confident in helping your business grow. It improves decision making, making clearer choices, and it unclouds your mind.
I know for me, I am super guilty of getting wrapped up in the what if moments of the day. What if I had said this or what if I had done this differently, or something like that. And being confident in your choices really helps eliminate the “what if” world.
If you’ve ever tried to follow an unclear roadmap or follow someone who doesn’t know how to read a map, I’ve kind of included a little screenshot here. We don’t wanna go straight, we don’t wanna go backwards, we don’t wanna turn right, we don’t wanna turn left, but we might wanna stop.
So that can be very, very tricky if you are not confident and don’t have your ideas clearly organized.
These I thought were pretty funny, we can’t turn left, right, whatever that top left one may say. Don’t throw your paper towels in the toilet, please use bins. You know, things that shouldn’t be necessary to say, but yet here we are.
And if you ever, you know, are cooking and assist to chill in the fridge, it does not mean to grab a book and Netflix and chill in your fridge. So that’s good to know.
Planning and Organization Through Calendars
My number one tool that I use every, every, every day is my calendar. And, yes, I know that we are of the digital age and everything should be digital. And not that I don’t use my digital calendar, because I absolutely do, but I am still using my paper calendar. I’m not going to lie.
So, I do have both and I use them both interchangeably. But, when I am going through with my team and my doctors at the beginning of every year and the first Monday of every month, we are planning out our roadmap for the year and for the month.
And in doing that, it really helps me to have my calendar out in front of me and know for sure what is going on that month, that day. Whose anniversaries are we looking for? Whose birthdays are we looking for? Do I need to register their doctors for anything?
One thing that I like to compare my calendar to is, we all know Tia Hunter. She’s an amazing, amazing lady. I think that everything she has to offer us is just fantastic.
But she makes a calendar for the dental office for dental compliance. I included the link here for you. She is amazing at keeping dental teams organized in the back office with all of the compliance things they need to do.
And so, my calendar is similar to this. Helps roadmap my day-to-day to show what I need to be thinking about and doing for this week, next week, and the entire month, sometimes maybe even the entire year.
So, here’s a picture of mine. It just talks, you know, kind of about, you know, how I use both. I use the dual calendar to know where all of my doctors are going. I have 11 of them that I have to keep track of every day at 7 different locations. So, it can be kind of tricky to know who and where everyone is that day.
And then I use my paper calendar for things like people’s anniversaries, days off birthdays. This is from December and it’s showing that here in the pediatric world, we need to start preparing gifts for our pediatric medical offices that refer to us and that we have a really good relationship back and forth with. And so I like to get out ahead of that and make sure that I have all of that planned, meticulous, ready to go at the beginning of December.
Same with summer hours. There’s a big note there with like orange stickies on it that say: “Plan for summer hours.” In the pediatric dentistry world, we have different hours in the summer than we do in the school year, because we all know our kids can’t miss school anymore. There’s so many activities and so many things going on.
So, I like to make sure that I’m helping get our teens out 6 months ahead of what all of that looks like, so that 6 months from now we’re not rescheduling a bunch of appointments and upsetting our patients.
So, I just make sure that my calendar is meticulously updated, keep it all organized. So, like I said, we meet as a team monthly, quarterly, and yearly to plan out our roadmap for the year.
And so, part of that roadmap for the year can be reminding each other of when to register for the Rocky Mountain Dental Convention or the AAPD Conference or whatever it may be.
We wanna make sure that we get all those registrations and things done in time. And I also wanna make sure to thank all of my assistants for Dental Assistant Week, or Office Appreciation Week, or Bosses Week—can’t forget that one, or Office Manager Appreciation Week.
So, we wanna just make sure that we’re doing all of that. Kind of says, you know, referral gifts, building out anniversaries and birthdays.
We also keep copies of all of our notes for those staff meetings, and those are kept for our level 10 staff meetings. If you aren’t sure what Level 10 staff meeting is, make sure you take a look at that. It really helps your meetings flow a lot smoother as well.
Protecting Time for Focused Work
Time blocking. This is a tough one because I know us as office managers, we don’t want to ever say that we can’t do something right now.
But don’t hesitate to come up with scheduled times that you need for you to get your things done.
I know, I’m just as guilty of this as well. I wanna take on every single thing, every single time, and get everything done right then and there. It’s just not realistic. It’s not good for our mental health, any of that.
So, establish those times that you need to get payroll done or schedule on insurance, whatever those tasks are that you really need to get done without being interrupted.
Your team knows on Mondays from one to three, Susan’s in her office working on payroll, for sure. If my door is closed, everyone knows I’m always working on payroll if the door is closed. Otherwise, my door is always open.
First Monday of the month, we have three hours set aside that we meet myself, the other office managers and the doctors, and we are hardcore planning for the month, deciding what needs to be done, what’s going on.
And I always tell my team if Taylor Swift is not here, I don’t wanna be interrupted. Or if Harry Styles isn’t here, I don’t wanna be interrupted. If the building’s on fire, maybe let me know that one. I should probably know about those things.
But those will help keep your team organized and that you are getting uninterrupted time to do what needs to be done to help your team succeed.
Managing Bandwidth and Setting Boundaries
It’s okay to acknowledge that your bandwidth is full. It happens to me quite a bit, especially in leading all these teenage girls from day to day. It’s easy for my bandwidth to be full.
So, it is okay to say I cannot do that right now, but I can shortly. That is one of the hardest things that I’ve had to learn over the years, to say, “Not right now.”
I never wanna tell someone I can’t do something, but I am starting to be okay with telling them, “You know what? I will get to that tomorrow.”
Rather than overcommitting and under underdelivering or underperforming, all of us have been super guilty of that. We’ve had so much on our plate that we maybe didn’t get this done quite as well as we wanted to, and that’s okay. This happens to all of us.
But if we know when our bandwidth is starting to get full, we can absolutely pause and say, “Hey, I need some help.” In needing help, you are asking your team to help you, which means you are gaining their buy-in for all the projects that you have going on in the office. And we know that by gaining their buy-in, they’re supporting you and they’re supporting the office. And morale will absolutely increase once they have accepted all these things.
If I am making a change in the office. Let’s say right now we’re trying to decide if we wanna keep our texting system. It’s super helpful. It’s really expensive.
But I need help and that’s okay. I need help from my team to research what other options might be out there and the costs associated with those. So, it gives them a sense of ownership to really take on that project and think of it as their own.
And then when we switch to whatever this software may be, then they are able to really say, “I am invested in this because I researched this.”
So not only does it help take things off my plate, lowers my bandwidth, I’m not overly stressed, and they think that I’m investing in them by giving them the trust that they need to research these things.
So, it can be helpful for all of us. I know delegation is tough, but it is an absolute necessity.
How Delegation Strengthens the Team
That leads to the next one: Delegation
Gains buy-in, accountability, increases your teamwork because team projects are fun, right? Maybe not for middle schoolers, but as you get into adult, teen projects can be fun.
They increase your efficiency for the entire office, which we all need a little bit of, right? And it goes back to you normalizing the “I need help” phrase. It’s okay to need help. It’s so okay to need help. That is one thing that I can teach my kids all the time.
It’s okay to say I need help. That’s honest. It’s open. It really helps you bond with those around you. And it does help you to be better organized and less chaotic by allowing your team to help absorb some of those daily tasks.
The Impact of Staying Organized
These are all things that we all practice day to day and that we all probably heard other people speak on a thousand times, but I can’t say enough about the need to stay organized in your day-to-day, week to week, month to month.
Because in staying organized and keeping all of your things together and all of your teams running smoothly, it helps not only your mental health, but it also helps when you go home to be able to separate that work and home work life balance, which is, is something that I know for sure most of us office managers need, right? A clear delineation of work and life balance.
I know, when we go to conferences, it’s so hard to get back to the office and be super excited about starting all of these new plans. And sometimes it can feel a little bit daunting. So, I’d like to see us maybe pick one or two things that we talked about today to start and let it grow just like a tree.
Growth Under Pressure
I heard Steve Anderson one time talking at a conference about the significance of a pine cone. The pine cone is significant in that it only releases its seed under extreme pressure, which is probably what most of us feel. But the ability to grow a new tree from scratch only comes under extreme heat pressure.
So, just know you guys are all doing great. Stay bonded. Stay grounded. Let’s get organized and see how tall trees that we can grow.
Penny: Wonderful, wonderful program. And I was on the cliffhanger after I saw your slides wanting to know about the pine cone. So, I didn’t realize that came from Steve Anderson. So, he’s always got such great illustrations.
Nicole: He really does.
Penny: Love, love, love what you shared. I jotted down a couple of thoughts that were going through my mind that if I were an audience member, I might tuning in, that I might ask.
Where to Begin When Creating SOPs
So, let’s go back to the SOPs, and let’s say that we don’t have very many, and that this is something that maybe for a period of time we’ve known that we should do it, and now we’re deciding to do it and we’re committed and we’re overwhelmed because we don’t know where to start.
So, what would you recommend to an office manager that really wants to begin to implement having SOPs for everything? How would you suggest that they tackle that? What area, what department?
Nicole: Yeah. So, you know, I think I would actually start that by, you know, asking your team for their help because your team knows just as much as anybody else what they do from day to day. And so, asking your team to kind of lay out their systems and what they do every day will kind of give you an idea on where to start in terms of, “Hey, you know, this assistant is responsible for this.”
And then once they give all of that to you, you can really start to just break it down one at a time. That’s the key. Just one at a time. Keep it slow. Keep it organized, but yes, get your team’s buy-in for sure. They can help you develop all of those things.
Penny: Well, that’s great. And I remember this has been a couple of decades ago now, like before, really before digital photography became really big, going into a client’s office and seeing in the sterilization area or in the lab, the pictures of how she wanted the tray set up right.
And it would say, root canal, right. And I thought, well, isn’t that brilliant? And now with technology, we’re able to—we don’t necessarily have to plaster those all over the place. Although them being right up above where the tray setups were, I’m sure probably helped.
Nicole: For sure.
Structuring Calendar Access for Efficiency
Penny: So, tell us a little bit about, from having a calendar and working with the team, you know, especially across multiple locations. Does everyone in—do all the team members have access to a Google Calendar? Is it primarily your leaders? Let us know a little bit about how that works across your practices.
Nicole: So, I created calendars for the different types of teams that we have. So, I have a front office calendar that is shared with every single front office person. And I have a doctor’s calendar that’s shared with every doctor. And then I have a dental assistant calendar that’s shared with every dental assistant.
Now they all show on my phone or my laptop. But, for my team, the front office only sees the front office and the assistants only see the assistants. But it’s helpful for me to have like the overarching access to all of it so that I kind of know, “Hey, today, they’re supposed to be changing the traps here,” but I also know that I have a staff meeting here with the front office.
So, how can I support our teams who are changing traps or how can I support my back office that is having a back-office training today when I have a front office meeting?
So, my schedules go out to who they need to go out to and try not to overwhelm anyone else. There’s no reason for the back office to have the front office calendar and etcetera.
So, for all of the calendars, it’s just myself and the owner doctors that have access to all of them.
Using Level 10 Meetings for Accountability
Penny: Got it. That makes a lot of sense.
When you said, shifting to another topic, level 10 meeting, it made me giddy. I’ve been in a part of several different organizations where we have used the level 10 methodology from the book, Traction, and actually at AADOM, in the last few months. We’ve had the team read, “What the Heck is EOS?” you know, which is part of that.
So, curious to hear anything that you’d feel comfortable with sharing about how you began to use that process and then how you practice it, not only with your leadership team, but also how it kind of flows through the organization.
Nicole: Yeah, so we start ours by every Monday, the first Monday of every month, myself and the leadership team meet together. And we have our Level 10 software that we all have access to throughout the month
And so we’re adding staff meeting topics to it. We’re adding things to it all the time as it comes up so that we’re not writing notes and saying, “Oh, I’ll remember to talk about that.” So, we’re putting it in our Level 10 app and trying to stay all together as a team.
But the nice thing about the level 10 is that you can assign these things to the people you’re meeting with and it has a level of accountability that just sitting around the table talking doesn’t give you.
Penny: Right.
Nicole: So, I first learned about it here at AADOM as well. Read the book, you know, “What the Heck is EOS?” and all of that. So that’s how it started for us.
And then after we meet as a group, those are trickled down to each location, and then I’m assigning those things to, you know, Diane at Wheatridge or Josie in Lafayette, or whatever the case may be.
Penny: Yeah.
Nicole: We’re assigning those at a local level so that all of those same notes are reviewed at every location so that I can make sure all the same communications are going everywhere.
Using Communication Tools Like Slack
Penny: Very cool.
And then using a tool like Slack, is that something that you would recommend to an office manager? You know, let’s say that I was still an office manager and I was in one location. What’s the—definitely, I believe people see the value when it’s—everybody’s not in the same building.
Share your thoughts around us utilizing it, even if everyone works in the same physical location.
Nicole: Yeah. You know, I have a girlfriend who works at a single location—one doctor, one hygienist, kind of on the slower end, at least compared to what I do every day, right?
But they use it all the time as well because it stays active and it stays—it doesn’t archive your messages or archive your contacts or anything like that. So, if you have a team member who’s calling in sick and you need to communicate that to everybody because now it’s an all-hands-on-deck, that can be really helpful because it goes out to everybody and then it stays active.
So, it can help you build documentation should you ever need that in the future, which we all know that we have at some point.
So, it can be really helpful for a single location. It can be helpful for families, it can be helpful for sports teams, whatever the case may be, not just in the office, but all over.
We use it in that I can attach my SOPs, schedules, roster, team roster, contact list, birthday lists. All of those are pinned to the top of our Slack channels so that our whole team has access to those at any given moment.
Penny: That’s so awesome. That’s awesome.
Well, I think you have a great presence, you know. Not that there—I’m sure you probably have a day where everything isn’t calm, yet I can tell your organization skills, you know, help you with that calmness and it sounds like you definitely have just as many irons in the fire outside of the office as you do in the office.
Nicole: I do. My team teases me about that all the time. “Oh, how are you gonna take on one more thing?”
“Well, you know, I’m just gonna plan it out in my planner and it’s all gonna be okay.”
Penny: There you go. What’s the phrase? “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”
Nicole: Yes.
Closing Remarks and Appreciation
Penny: Well, I want to thank you, Nicole, for the time that you spent putting this presentation together and that you’ve spent with us today and for being such a great example, being an AADOM distinction holder.
So, we appreciate you so much. You’re such a wonderful part of the AADOM tribe and a wonderful example, and I love that you offered for those that heard something that they want information on to find you in the forums, or, you know, or send you an email.
And we just appreciate you so much. Thank you. Thank you for offering your time and your talents.
Nicole: Well, thank you.
Penny: For those of you that are tuning in, thank you for being here and for following us. If you’re not following us on all of our social channels—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube—be sure and do that so that you’ll be aware of all of our educational opportunities.
So, Nicole, thank you again. It’s a pleasure to be with you and to learn from you. And we’ll look forward to seeing you again sometime soon.
Nicole: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
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Learn About Our Presenter:
Nicole Hartshorn, DAADOM
Nicole has been in the dental industry for 25 years. During that time, she’s had the privilege of working in just about every position found within the dental office (except the dentists themselves).
She is a self-starter who thrives in a fast-paced environment while building, growing, and partnering with successful teams. Her ability to navigate ambiguity and pivot quickly has allowed her to lead teams from a single location to a large 25+ DSO. Nicole is currently a regional manager at a 7-location, privately owned group multi-specialty practice in the Denver area.
When not at work, she is providing EMT services for her daughter’s equestrian club and leading teams of 30+ teenage girls in one of the top mounted drill teams in the country.
