How effective are your team meetings? You may feel like Dave Barry who once said, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings’.” Fortunately, you can transform meetings into opportunities to make the team and practice even better.
Results-oriented meetings start with an agenda. What do you want to accomplish at the team meeting? Challenge everyone on the team to contribute to the meeting agenda by proposing ideas and potential solutions. Team meetings are not gripe sessions; instead meetings are for working through challenges and developing implementable solutions.
Since it is easy to lose sight of the big picture with day to day tasks, remember to consider big picture items for discussion. How can you make the patient experience even better? What is a system or protocol you would like to fine-tune? How can the schedule be more efficient to minimize wait times for patients? What is one thing everyone could do to improve teamwork?
Use the team meeting to brainstorm ideas and work toward solutions. Encourage participation from the entire group. By the end of the meeting, the team will have steps to take to implement agreed-upon ideas, and you can use subsequent team meetings to check on progress. Strategic agenda items often take multiple follow ups to work through kinks and implement everything effectively.
Team meetings can be transformative if you take the right approach. As someone once said about effective meetings, “It’s not about ideas; it’s about making ideas happen.”