Monday, eight in the morning. Your new colleague is standing at reception and the first patient is already waiting. What happens over the next three weeks decides more about her probation period than any job interview did, which is why your practice needs a fixed sequence for it.<\/p>\n
For most new colleagues, the clinical side fits perfectly well. It is the organisation around it that stalls. Nobody feels responsible, access to the practice software is missing on day one of all days, and the briefing happens in the corridor between two appointments. What follows is the complete sequence from signature to the end of probation, plus a list to tick off. No corporate programme, but something that fits a practice with five treatment rooms.<\/strong><\/p>\n Finding a good assistant takes months these days. Losing her again in the first few weeks sometimes takes only a handful of unfortunate days. The most expensive mistake is not the wrong hire, it is the right hire without a plan.<\/strong><\/p>\n Take five minutes and do the maths for your own practice. The advert, the interviews, your team’s time for training, and on top of that the empty chair when somebody leaves during probation. Practices that feel the shortage of skilled workers in orthodontics<\/a> every day can hardly afford a second round.<\/p>\n Four weeks with an unstaffed chair weigh more heavily in orthodontics than elsewhere, because check-up appointments cannot simply be stacked. A well thought out start is therefore the cheapest staffing measure available to you.<\/strong><\/p>\n Participants at Lean Orthodontics\u00ae often say the same sentence. \u201cShe just did not fit the team.\u201d Look more closely and something else was almost always missing. There was no responsible person, no plan for the first week, no appointment at which anyone asked how things were going. Onboarding is not a feel-good topic, it is a business decision.<\/strong><\/p>\n Four phases are enough. Each phase has one goal and one responsible person<\/strong>, and no more structure than that is needed. Write the process down properly once and you will only have to call it up the next time.<\/p>\n Whether two of you work together or you employ twenty people changes little about this frame. Commitment counts for more than size.<\/strong> Store the sequence as its own document wherever your work instructions live. A single page is plenty, because anything longer ends up maintained by nobody.<\/p>\n Training means learning the clinical work at the chair. Onboarding adds the organisational layer with access rights, rules and responsibilities, and the social layer, meaning the connection to the team. Clinically confident and still not settled in is the most common reason for a resignation during probation.<\/strong><\/p>\n The four phases<\/strong><\/p>\nThe first 90 days decide your next recruitment round<\/h2>\n
Your onboarding roadmap at a glance<\/h2>\n
What onboarding adds to plain training<\/h3>\n