Conducting Productive Meetings With Your Dental Staff

The inability to run effective staff meetings has the potential to damage the health of your dental practice. In fact, we’ve seen some dental offices that don’t hold meetings at all! Staff meetings or ‘huddles’ should be useful and effective, not just gripe sessions that serve no purpose.

If your staff doesn’t find the weekly or daily meetings to be useful or valuable in any way, they’ll be a waste of time. Additionally, your staff should feel like they can contribute concerns and ideas that are taken seriously and followed up on. When your staff feels valued and heard, their motivation and loyalty to the practice will only grow.

Staff Meeting Tips

Below are a few tips to ensure that your staff meetings are constructive and useful:

• Schedule – Meetings should be held regularly, either once a week or every other week and should last about an hour. Make sure your employees know when meetings are held so that they can make any arrangements to be there.
• Agenda – Have a plan for the topics covered in each meeting so that they don’t drag on or involve topics that aren’t valuable for the whole group. It’s important to have a good idea of what the meeting needs to include and accomplish.
• No Complaining – While you want your staff to feel like they can communicate whatever they need to, a staff meeting is absolutely not the place for rumors, gossip, or causing conflict. If there’s an issue that needs to be addressed, welcome any suggestions on how to correct the situation.

For more tips on boosting staff morale and holding successful meetings, please contact CTC National and speak to one of our dental consultants.

Training: Take the time to step back and analyze the practice to determine what areas need improvement and more training. When appropriate, I highly recommend recording role playing so you can review it and observe for yourself what needs to be improved. It’s amazing to see oneself on video.

Successes: A key part of a successful staff meeting is the sharing of patient testimonials. When patients tell team members that their visit to your office was something special, those comments need to be shared with the group because patient compliments are one of the highest forms of motivation. Great success stories from patients will give your staff fuel to do an even better job moving forward.