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If you dread team meetings because they’re repetitive, unproductive, and painful, then you can feel pretty confident that your employees dislike them even more. The question is, how can you transform team meetings from something everyone can barely stand to productive conversations that move your practice forward?
Through my many years of consulting, I have observed that employees and dentists adopt meeting personas that help and hinder meeting effectiveness. Do you recognize any of these descriptions?
Persons of dental team members
Vacationer: Vacationers welcome meetings as an opportunity to sit and check out for an hour. They don’t care what’s on the agenda because their primary interest is whether they’ll be able to eat lunch or what they’ll do after work. They will answer direct questions but rarely initiate anything because this is their time off and they believe appointments are the dentist’s responsibility.
The prisoner: These people hate being forced to meet and can be counted on to express their frustration in all sorts of challenging ways. Inmates roll their eyes, sigh, and counter most ideas with, “We’ve already tried that,” or “We’re already doing that,” or the ever-familiar, “That won’t work here.” Prisoners see meetings as a colossal waste of time, and their behavior ensures that meetings are so.
Student: Ideally, there are some employees who may not look forward to the meetings, but since their attendance is mandatory, they are willing to make the most of the time. Students hope that the meetings will help them do their work better, improve their skills and solve communication issues. However, if meetings do not provide these things, students can become vacationers or prisoners.
Dentist characters
Bus driver: Bus drivers use meetings to tell everyone what to do: they provide information, identify practical issues and present solutions. Their goal is to steer practice in the right direction, but bus drivers also enable vacationers to control, inmates to rebel, and students to become passive.
Accountant: This dentist thrives on numbers and is convinced that by sharing a table of depressing statistics, the team will spring into action. Meetings led by accountants are punctuated by advice such as: “We need to do better about this!” or “This month wasn’t too bad” and ending with “Anyone have any questions?” Team members, having gone into a collective trance state, usually have no questions.
Toothpick: This dentist is so frustrated that his teeth are metaphorically or literally grinding from stress. This is not a great sight for a dentist. Gnasher notes that the team rarely talks, they have to be prompted to add things to the agenda, and they rarely follow through. This results in repeating the same team meeting over and over again. Gnasher doesn’t know how to change this dynamic, so he considers canceling team meetings all together.
You may also be interested in: How to avoid ineffective dental staff meetings
7 tips to increase team participation in meetings
It may seem counterintuitive, but if you stay behind in your meetings, your team members can become leaders. Here’s how it works.
1. On your next date, declare that the era of bad dates is over. Do something symbolic, such as tear up a spreadsheet (if you’re an accountant) or ask everyone to pop and open balloons representing previous bad dates. Share your new purpose: From now on, meetings belong to the team, meaning everyone has a role in organizing and running them.
2. Since these are now team member meetings, inform them that they will decide on every aspect of future meetings, from time and structure to purpose. The goal is to make meetings more useful, efficient, relevant and productive.
It’s likely that your team will look at you with either horror or cynicism. They assume that you will eventually settle down and the status quo will return. To show that you have a bad business, ask questions and assign a recorder to write the team’s final agreements. (This is the last meeting where you’ll be this direct.) If your team is particularly quiet, have them write down their answers to questions like these:
What do you see as the best possible use of our meeting time? What is our purpose? For example, are these meetings to plan, train, solve problems or share statistics? If it is all of these, what is our priority? How can we structure our time to achieve this?
With this goal in mind, when and how often should we meet? Should we make this decision by consensus, or vote and let the majority rule?
Who leads these meetings? What is the responsibility of the facilitator? Who needs to take notes to capture important information? What ground rules for dating behavior should be adopted and how should we handle violations of behavior?
Who will create the meeting agenda? If it’s the team, what if nobody contributes anything? How can we make these meetings fun and interesting? How should we celebrate successes or acknowledge each other’s efforts?
How should we evaluate how well meetings are working, and how often should we evaluate—at the end of each meeting, monthly, never? When and how should we give feedback?
3. The team can choose from a variety of meeting structures: from weekly one-hour meetings to a monthly half-day meeting. Because continuity helps, I encourage dental practices to hold weekly appointments on the same day and time.
4. Because a common complaint about meetings is that agenda items are not always relevant to every job role, consider scheduling one meeting per month as a departmental meeting. Each department will create their own agenda and then bring their decisions or questions back to the whole team. In this model, the dentist can rotate between teams.
5. My observation is that Lunchtime meetings are a problem. If the team prefers to meet over lunch, check with your state’s labor board to determine if this is allowed. If the team insists, I suggest you set aside 90 minutes to accommodate people using the microwave, checking their phones, using the bathroom, etc.
6. Employees are responsible for their professional growth, so they should vote on the topics they would like more training on. Each quarter the team must answer two questions: What would I like to learn? What can I teach others?
7. If it will lead to improvementssharing practice statistics can be helpful. To ensure this, the facilitator can ask three action-oriented questions.
- What should we stop doing because it doesn’t work?
- What should we start doing?
- What should we keep doing because it’s getting results?
Ultimately, the goal is to develop the leadership skills of employees. To make these changes, you will need to provide training, direction and support so that each person can make a strong contribution. Meetings will then become a time when your team grows, collaborates, and solves problems.
Editor’s note: This article appeared in the October 2023 print edition of Dental Economics magazine. Dentists in North America are eligible for a free print subscription. Register here.
