Bigelow Family Dentistry is a two-location dental practice in northeast Alabama. Owner Brett Bigelow, D.M.D. had tried using an employee engagement survey in the past, but found it complicated and inefficient. Employees had “dreaded” taking it.

He tried again in 2014, signing up for the Engagement Multiplier program. Dr. Bigelow and his team were pleasantly surprised by how simple and easy the survey questions were. Great results naturally followed.

There’s always an opportunity to improve

The practice scored a company-wide 78.2% on their very first survey—already an Engaged Organization. So where do you go from there? Up.

“When things are going pretty well, you can use tools [like Engagement Multiplier] to make things even better, and that’s what happened.”

– Dr. Brett Bigelow

Engagement Multiplier revealed a key opportunity for improvement. Answers to the survey question, “What one action do you think leadership can take to improve engagement?” shared a common theme: Communication was largely one-way – management-to-staff. The most effective communication goes two ways, of course, and Dr. Bigelow acted on the opportunity to get better at listening to his team. Engagement Multiplier has designed the engagement survey questions very intentionally, and it shows in our clients’ results.

New action plans every 90 days

Dr. Bigelow found it made a crucial difference to create a forum in which “people in the trenches” not only have the ability to provide feedback about projects that are going well, but also projects that are not proving successful. Improving two-way communication going forward enabled him to find out what was happening in different areas of the business, to address problems identified, and to elicit suggestions from his team for getting things back on the right track.

Continuous cycles of improvement

Dr. Bigelow says listening to his team more was the primary factor in the practice’s success in raising its overall engagement level to 89% in just nine months.

In the process, his practice has also become more self-managed, with more effective processes in place, and greater efficiency across the board.