How to Help Your Team Adopt New Technology: Lessons from Trinity Dental

Watch Trinity Dental’s story above to hear Alison and her team discuss patient care, technology and what they want for the practice.

Start with the desired improvement

Alison’s first clinic did well commercially, but it didn’t fulfill her as a person or as a doctor. At Trinity Dental, she wanted patients to feel cared for with the best technology to support that care.

Their financial systems serve a more down-to-earth purpose, but share the same goal. Before she switched to cloud accounting, she made most of her decisions instinctively.

“In a company, it’s important to have instinct,” she says. “But it’s actually great to have the numbers to back it up.”

Without clear numbers, she kept wondering whether she could afford the technology she wanted and whether she could even afford to hire anyone anymore. Better financial information speaks directly to this concern.

When explaining a change to your team, link it to a task or customer need that the team recognizes. For example, a new booking system could be used to reduce repeat phone calls or make it easier to find appointment details. Say who needs to make the job easier and what a good outcome would look like.

Then ask your team to test this explanation against their own experiences. They often point out practical needs that you have overlooked, such as: B. the way colleagues hand over work or handle exceptions.

Find out what makes people insecure

Before you decide how to help someone, find out what is troubling them. Someone who doubts a system’s performance needs a different kind of help than someone who trusts the outcome but can’t remember the steps.

Adelaine Ginns, operations manager at Trinity Dental, was used to checking paper invoices, bank statements and bank records by hand. Moving to Sage meant switching to a digital process after years of relying on documents she could physically review, and at first she wasn’t sure the new approach could be trusted.

However, the old process had its own uncertainty, and she saw that clearly.

She says: “When we were doing all the paperwork, you weren’t completely sure because you didn’t know if you had everything.”

This is worth remembering. A familiar process can feel safe without actually being reliable. Helping people see the gaps in the old way of working can make the new way of working feel less like a risk.

Ask a colleague to show you a task they are unsure about. Where are they hesitating? What would they normally check? Do they know what to do if the result looks wrong?

Their answers will tell you whether they need another demonstration, an explanation of how the controls work, or help with a technical issue. Reassurance alone leaves the actual difficulty unresolved.

Make practicing part of the rollout

An initial demonstration gives people a start. Everyday use then raises variations, exceptions and questions that were never covered in the training, so give people time to work through them with on-site help.

Through regular use, Adelaine became more familiar with the accounting systems and knew she could ask Alison if she got stuck. Both counted: repeated practice and a person who could explain the unknown parts.

Choose a routine task that your team will do frequently. Let them try it out and then ask which steps need further explanation. Follow up once the task has been completed under normal working conditions, where interruptions and unusual cases complicate the work.

Agree on who will answer questions and how people can reach them. If the same question keeps coming up, a quick guide or clearer instructions will probably help. More complex issues may require the supplier.

Build study time into your plans. When people have to maintain their usual workload while learning a new process, the training becomes something they attended rather than something they used.

Help people grow into new tasks

At Trinity Dental, workforce development is part of the culture. Receptionist Sally Willmott describes Alison as “very pro-training”, someone who “really encourages you to expand the world”.

Adelaine is a good example. She joined Trinity Dental as a trainee dental nurse and moved into broader operational roles, including accounting. She now handles most of the regular processing while Alison reviews reports and provides oversight.

Alison says that, alongside patient outcomes and the company’s growth, one of the things she is most proud of is seeing colleagues do things she never thought they could.

Growing doesn’t mean that every new task feels easy. Sally is open about the challenges of new technologies, but also makes it clear why she sticks with it: “I know that once I master it, I will be able to do so much more. I don’t want to be left behind.”

Ask people what tasks they can now do themselves and where they still need help. Recognize their progress, but don’t assume that confidence in one area will carry over to all others.

Agree on who will do the work, who will review it, and what issues need to be escalated. At Trinity Dental, Adelaine processes and Alison inspects. This division allows people to grow without having to guess what they are now responsible for.

Check what the change does

Pick a technology change you’ve already made and review it from two perspectives: how your team finds it and whether it delivers the desired improvement. People can become familiar with a system while problems persist elsewhere in the process.

At Triniy Dental, the result is evident in daily work and decision-making. Invoicing takes hours instead of days, and Alison has the clarity she was missing.

Ask people using the system three questions:

1. What has become easier?
2. What task still feels difficult or uncertain?
3. What would help you master this task confidently?

Work through a real example. If someone says a task is taking too long, ask them to show you where the time goes. They may be typing the same thing twice, waiting for information, or checking something they don’t yet trust.

Based on your findings, agree on an action, e.g. E.g. more practice, clearer instructions, a change in responsibilities, or a look at the system itself. Decide who owns it and when you will test whether it works.

Then go back to the bottom line. If the goal was to reduce repetitive work, does it happen less often? When it comes to improving customer communication, is the right information reaching the right person?

Final thoughts

For Alison, investing in technology and her team goes back to why she founded Trinity Dental: patients feeling cared for, colleagues growing, and the confidence of knowing where the company stands.

When you make your next change, start with the improvement that matters to your business and then plan the support your team needs to achieve it.