5 Tips to Reduce Cell Phone Use at Your Dental Practice and Improve Performance

Over the last twenty years, we’ve watched as cell phones begin to permeate every aspect of our work and life. While this piece of technology is meant to improve our communication and productivity, it can often bring us more problems than it solves.

Smartphones can negatively affect your performance at work, diminish your ability to concentrate, reduce the quality of your sleep, and even cause you to lose empathy and the ability to find real connections with others. This can be damaging if you are trying to run a patient-focused business.

Though it seems excessive, preventing cell phone overuse in the office will actually improve the mood and performance of your staff.

Setting cell phone use ground rules in the office can improve productivity and communication within your practice.

Here are 5 tips to reduce cell phone use at your dental practice.

1. Keep your phone out of reach

This seems like an obvious tip but making an effort to highlight this to your staff really makes a difference. The reality is that reaching for our phones is usually a conditioned reflex, which means when we have any spare time we’ll go ahead and do so.

What started out as just us checking the time quickly turns into us checking social media and emails, and before we know it work has been left at the wayside.

2. Place your phone on silent and turn off wifi

One way to solve that constant need to reach for a phone to check social media is to simply put it on silent and turn off wifi. Doing this does require a degree of willpower, so you may want to introduce rules and repercussions for those staff members who fail to do so.

3. Block social media during work hours

There are a number of free and paid apps for smartphones that allow you to make sure you aren’t able to check social media between certain hours. Though you can’t force your employees to have such things on their phones, you can lead by example and encourage them to do so.

4. Ask why?

It’s important for everyone to bring a little awareness to the experience of habitually checking our cell phones. Think about why you’re constantly using your phone? Is it boredom? Maybe anxiety? Or simply procrastination? Often just realizing that it’s not for a decent reason will reduce use.

5. Set windows for usage

This can be hard if, for example, your administration uses cell phones to organize appointments. In this case, it’s recommended that you buy a basic phone with apps disabled so that only relevant calls and texts can be made.

We hope these tips offer some value, and that you and your staff can begin to reduce smartphone use in the office.