How to Prepare and Execute a Successful Staff Meeting

Meetings are an important component in engaging your staff and preparation is key to conducting a productive meeting. The meeting agenda is a summary of your practice priorities and ensures that your staff remains focused on revenue drivers.

If you are thinking, my staff is only three people do I really need to do all of this? I urge you to think about meetings that you have attended where the leader did not share an agenda or they did all the talking. How productive were those meetings?

Planned meetings motivates your staff to focus on practice priorities and ensures they are thinking about those priorities in advance of the meeting. An effective agenda includes the staff and connects their daily responsibilities to practice goals. This is also a great opportunity to recognize what was done well over the previous period and identifies areas of opportunity that help to develop a growth mindset.

Let us look at how a common revenue driver, new patients, is incorporated into your agenda. For example, a main responsibility of your practice manager is to optimize the patient schedule so this is included on your agenda with their name noted as the presenter. Included in the patient schedule discussion should be the booking window and new patient data. Your practice manager would share that the next available appointment is January 14th and that last week 17 new patients were seen and this week 22 new patients are scheduled. The topic also drives conversation around how busy the phones are, including how many patient scheduling messages are being received via email or after hours. Based on the number of patient messages, one of our clients determined that he should extend his office hours and his new patient bookings picked up immediately.

In addition to emphasizing the importance of the booking window and new patients, the agenda drives a level of consistent accountability with your staff. I refer to this as organic accountability and it allows you to easily identify your high performing staff members as well as the under performers.

Yes, new patient growth is the responsibility of everyone on your staff, but ultimately there must be clear ownership of the process from beginning to end and this responsibility belongs to your practice manager.

This is just one example of how your agenda drives focus and accountability. Below is a basic sample agenda that you may use as template to get you started.

And lastly, try to keep your meetings to 30 minutes. This will drive efficiency and focus.

And if you’d like help in enhancing your practice, please let us know.