Organize a focused weekly staff meeting

Weekly staff meetings are the backbone of a well-functioning practice. When structured properly, they facilitate communication, provide opportunities for “mini” training sessions, and allow team members to anticipate and solve problems.

To assure that your weekly staff meetings are effective:

1. Schedule them on Mondays. A Monday meeting enables you to focus yourself and your entire team for the week ahead. An early-in-the-week meeting allows you to review the previous week, set your targets and goals for this week, and decide on specific action steps to achieve those goals.

2. Set aside 45 minutes. This is an optimal meeting time.

3. Start the meeting with an affirmation. Ask your team to develop the affirmation and to recite it at the beginning of each meeting.

4. Develop a specific agenda for each meeting. Without an agenda, you chance adjourning the meeting without addressing key issues. With an agenda, you follow a protocol.

• Practice successes and highlights. Include such items as practice statistics and patient responses from the previous week, and highlights from a recent seminar.

• Personal victories. Let each team member tell the “good” thing that has happened in his or her department, or about a positive experience. This is also the time to acknowledge outstanding performance.

• New patients and office statistics. Review the number of office visits, services rendered, and income collected. Include the telephone tracer log and healthcare class attendance.

Address challenges or problems that have occurred relative to achieving goals and statistics. Brainstorm solutions.

• Training (pre-determined topic). List all of the systems (such as new patients, report of findings, and adjustments) used in your practice, then devote training to each one during each meeting.

Take 10 minutes every meeting to review one of these systems. Go over each team member’s role, dialogue/scripting that should be used, and changes to the system.

The training done in regular staff meetings is a review and reinforcement. You will provide detailed training on these systems in separate training meetings.

• Case of the week. Teach your team about the miracles of chiropractic through your patients’ cases.

• Goals for the week, month, and quarter. Discuss steps to achieve the goals.

• Upcoming events. Review upcoming screenings, patient appreciation dinners, and internal and external marketing events.

• Marketing calendar review. Go over recent events and discuss what went well and what could be improved. Assign follow up.

• New patient review. Assess the new patients from the prior week, including identifying their personality types, to help your staff communicate more effectively with the patients.