So I work in dentistry in the front office, I have for about 2-3 years now. I first worked in a corporate environment. So there was a point system for tardies and absences, morning and monthly meetings, disciplinary action and yearly employee reviews. It was an organized but disorganized mess. The micromanaging was becoming a lot right before I left. Numbers and production were priority, but it was to a point where many of us were getting too stressed. For a dentistry office, this didn’t feel right, as we would sometimes force treatment on patients to meet production and I felt gross. I left a few months ago.
I now work at a private office, where the dentist is the owner, and the office manager is his wife of over two decades. They are in their 40s. They are very sweet and nice people, but they tend to be perfectionists. So if you say something wrong over the phone or in person to a patient, they’ll try to “nicely” correct you but they will overdo it daily to a point where sometimes I’ll get annoyed towards the end of the day and not even want to answer the phone or talk to patients. The doctor will tell the front office to put any movie they’d like in the front, and to play whatever playlist they’d like from his selection, but then he’d come back an hour later and change the movie that’s playing and change the playlist because “it doesn’t fit the atmosphere”. They talk about how much they love the team but if someone in the team messed up or doesn’t act how they want them to, they’ll lowkey talk shit in a lower voice that most of us can still hear and it’s so cringe. They suck up to referring offices and difficult patients and force us to as well, and it is so cringy and disgusting sometimes – some patients don’t deserve to still be our patients with their behavior. Again, they’re nice people but sometimes they can be super annoying.
So, I guess that begs the question. Would you prefer to work at a corporate office, or at a mom and pop place?