How long should we be polishing?

I remember when I worked at this toxic, cut-corner’s office, the other assistant and I would frequently told off for polishing too fast. I’ll take accountability and admit that at first I was moving a little too fast but only because we had 1 doctor, 2 assistants, and 4 full columns. Every hour we had 3-4 patients in the chair and sometimes every 30 minutes. I had to get out of each room asap or else pt would be waiting forever. Well, I got the second talk about this in the meeting and since then the assistant and I started polishing for 5 minutes. That’s what I learned was the standard for polishing. We even timed ourselves to make sure we were hitting that time. Flossing took another 2 minutes. Despite taking more time, we still kept getting told off. At some point we started polishing for even LONGER. I remember polishing people for 10 minutes sometimes. We then got told off for taking too long and not bringing people back fast enough. The assistant and I got fed up of getting told off even after changing and started to pay attention to other things like how long Doctor’s cleaning actually took, if we were talking to the patient enough, duration of exams, etc. We started to time the doctor and found their exam from start to finish took 3 minutes. It would be 15-20 if they talked about Invisalign (which makes the office the most production). The actual cleaning (Cavitron + hand scaling) took an average of 6 minutes.

Yes, 6 minutes. This is not an exaggeration and I’m not lying when I say me and the other assistant timed it, wrote it down secretly, and kept tabs each shift.

We brought this up to the office manager who said she also caught onto this and tried to talk to the doctor about it and apparently the doctor said, “That’s just how it is sometimes”. So…. Cleaning appointments only take 15 minutes? Tf? At other offices I have worked at it would take 30-45 minutes minimum. 15 is insane and somehow that was our fault.

I don’t know, I don’t really see how the assistants were the reason for pt’s cleanings being short. We never got told off by the office manager/schedule coordinator the way doctor did. Are we really polishing too quickly? Is it our fault?