Practice Management Alert

Question: Our practice meetings take up a lot of time, and they don’t seem like the best use of our time. What can we do to run meetings that achieve what we need in less time?

Massachusetts subscriber

Answer: Most physicians have never been trained on how to conduct efficient, effective staff meetings. At their best, staff meetings are an indispensable team-building tool, Joy Gibb, ABOC, told optometrists and administrative staff at the 2016 Vision Expo East conference. At their worst, they’re more painful than productive. How can you break the cycle of long, boring staff meetings where nothing actually gets accomplished? Here are some best practices to make sure your next staff meeting is worthwhile — not a waste of time:

Find Your Why

Before you put any meeting on the schedule, says Gibb, ask yourself two questions:

1. What is the purpose? Meetings must offer value to those attending, so tailor them to the needs of your practice and team. If there are certain actions you want your staff to take as a result of the meeting, identify those actions.

2. Is this meeting really necessary? Once you’ve identified the desired objectives, make sure that a meeting really is the best way to accomplish them. For example, a simple announcement that requires no discussion could happen via a group email.

Essential Personnel Only

Research shows that meeting productivity decreases as the number of participants increases. If you have a larger practice, try breaking down staff meetings into departments.

Timing is Everything

Mornings are usually the best time for staff meetings, Gibb finds. Staff won’t be enthusiastic about meetings if they have to arrive early or stay late — especially if you’re not paying overtime — and appointments that run behind schedule can impact after-work meetings. Consider scheduling your first patient one hour later to accommodate a regular weekly or monthly meeting schedule, Gibb recommends. Yes, you will initially lose the revenue from that appointment slot—but you’ll quickly make up for it with better staff skills and communication, which mean better care and customer service for your patients, she adds.

Take Time to Prepare

When it comes to making sure that you and your staff don’t end up falling down the rabbit hole of a long, ineffective meeting, preparation is most important. Think about it: You wouldn’t see a patient without looking at their chart. You wouldn’t start surgery without the right instruments on your tray. So why would you conduct a meeting without a predetermined agenda?

“To prepare, you may want to review meeting minutes from the previous session or create and circulate an agenda based on open items and requests for further direction from staff,” advises Virginia Fraser, whose Austin, Texas-based firm Insights Learning & Development focuses on team and leadership development. “Staff will lose confidence in their leader’s competency if they spend meetings reviewing the same agenda items as the previous meeting without outlining next steps or seeing any type of resolution,” she said in a November 2015 interview with The Rheumatologist.

Meetings tend to balloon to fill the time they’re allotted, and then some. To keep a meeting well within its intended scope, create a written, detailed agenda and make it available to all attendees at least 24 hours before the meeting. This gives staff members (especially introverts and those who are reluctant to speak up) time to assess meeting topics and devise suggestions and input.

Prioritize the agenda by identifying the objectives that you absolutely must accomplish. Address those first thing so that there’s adequate time for discussion and decision-making, Gibb advises. If you don’t get to every item on the agenda within the time allotted, carry over the remaining items to the next meeting. Better yet, consider limiting the action items of each meeting to a manageable number, like three.

Fierce Moderating

Every meeting needs a moderator who can do these important (and sometimes uncomfortable) things:

• Ensure only one person speaks at a time.
• Prevent any one person from monopolizing the conversation.
• Politely but firmly interrupt people who repeat what’s already been discussed.
• Hold people accountable for staying on-topic. Gibb recommends using a phrase like "This is interesting, but can you help me understand how it relates to the agenda item we're discussing?"

Bring Out the Best Ideas

Good meetings are “safe zones” for ideas, Gibb notes. Encourage everyone to share ideas and let your employees shine. Watch out for longer-term staffers trashing potentially good ideas with responses like “we did that 10 years ago and it didn’t work.” Also, look out for what Joe Quitoni, The Ritz-Carlton’s corporate director of culture transformation, calls CAVEemployees — those that are Constantly Against Virtually Everything.

Essential Next Steps

Never leave a meeting without an action plan, Gibb warns. You want to make sure that staff is motivated to perform better as a result of the meeting, and failing to clarify next steps sets a tone that nothing really important happened. If a meeting is important enough to have, it’s important enough to follow up on, she adds. Be sure staff leaves knowing who is responsible for what, relevant goals and deadlines, and whom they should report progress to.

Resource: For more tips on conduction staff meetings that work — and to earn CME credit at the same time — check out the AMA’s STEPS Forward program. The module “Conducting Effective Team Meetings” can be found at stepsforward.org/modules/conducting-effective-team-meetings.