Blind Spots in Dentistry™:  Team Meetings — When Did You Last Have One?

Doctors become so involved in “doing dentistry” and caring for their patients they sometimes don’t take the time to work on the business side of their practice. As one example, when is the last time you held a staff meeting? If you ask your colleagues, many will tell you that having staff meetings is a waste of time because they are nothing more than unproductive “gripe” sessions.

Why have a meeting?

In my experience, however, these meetings are what you design. As a business owner, you set the stage for how your business will be run and you lay the foundation/groundwork for team meetings and how they are structured.

Each meeting should ideally have a facilitator, a recorder, and the participants. Each person on the team contributes to the agenda. A sheet for agenda items is placed in the staff lounge or in an area where each member of the team can add an item to be discussed at the meeting and how much time they think it will take. If you have a good internal email system, you can also ask for agenda items from team members in this way.

The facilitator sets the “stage” for the meeting, setting up the easel/flip chart with markers, making copies for every one of the agenda, having a new action plan sheet available for the recorder, and puts a message on the machine/a sign on the door/whatever needs to be done to prepare for the meeting and make certain the team meeting is not disturbed, except in cases of a patient emergency.

The recorder will go over old business/action plan items to check on progress or completion. If discussions take a turn and stray off topic, the facilitator’s job is to bring everyone back on topic. If a topic takes longer than the time allotted, the facilitator asks the team for a consensus, to either table the topic and continue with the agenda, or continue with the topic and adjust the agenda for a future meeting. The entire team votes on which direction to take.

Meetings’ focus

The meeting the first week of the month is focused on finances. While your practice is built around your relationships with patients, you need to be fiscally aware to run a business. The team needs to understand that there is a consequence of caring for patients and that a fee is involved for the services we provide.

During weeks two and four, an hour is set aside for team training. How many times do you purchase a new piece of equipment while attending a trade show or seminar but then when you  return to the office, you don’t take the time to learn how to implement it effectively into the routine of the day, or have the team develop their skills and knowledge in using that new piece of equipment or improve their skills?

The time it takes to develop your teams skills and expertise is a small overall investment. Training meetings are also centered around building our communication skills. What we say and how we say it to our patients can make a world of difference between a patient accepting and completing treatment, or saying, “I need to think about it”. Every scenario needs a script and the team members need time to practice their skills to “own” the dialogue so it sounds authentic and not robotic.

The third week of the month is teamwork meeting. This meeting is centered around the entire team and follows the same format as all of the other meetings. This meeting can be based around review or working on OSHA, HIPAA, CPR trainings, workshops to tweak, develop and implement new systems. This meeting can take the form of a celebration or planning a patient appreciation event.

Team meetings are never “gripe sessions”. They are learning sessions – if someone has an issue with someone else, that discussion is to be handled privately. If a team member has a concern about a system, the topic is brought to the meeting for discussion (on the agenda), and a solution is devised. It is each individual’s responsibility to contribute to the team effort and to the growth of the practice. How does this happen? Leadership! Who is the leader of the team? Like it or not,  as the doctor and business owner, you are.