Do you want more transparency in the day-to-day operation of your optometric practice?
The tech community found a way to create more transparency and productivity in their development activities by holding brief daily standup meetings. These standup meetings occur at the same time every day with the focus of moving projects forward.
While the daily standup has helped software development teams stay focused on individual tasks, increase productivity and improve team collaboration, it is also a methodology adopted by many other industries and departments. In this post, we’ll explain how your optometric practice can conduct a standup meeting to increase operational productivity and transparency.
Conduct a Standup Meeting in Your Optometric Practice
Find Your Focus
When first organizing your stand up meeting, you want to identify your practice’s most important goal. Whether you’re trying to improve patient growth or achieve greater profits from claim reimbursements, you need to identify the goal and ensure that the stand-up meetings focus only on the progression towards meeting that goal.
Assemble Your Team
Once you’ve established your goal, you need to identify the team players responsible for achieving the goal. These team members are required to attend all of the meetings and are expected to participate in helping keep the project moving forward to reach the goal.
Make It Consistent
Typically, the standup meeting is conducted at the same time and same place (usually in the morning), and includes all key people responsible for getting the job done. The reason for this consistency is to help team members prepare for the meeting and to avoid scheduling conflicts.
Choose The Leader
The leader of the meeting is usually the person that starts the meeting and makes sure it’s brief. In many cases, the team leader could be the practice owner, the OD, or the office manager. Whoever the leader is, they must be able to enforce these rules:
- Keep the meeting to 15 minutes or less
- Make everyone stand (if they can) to keep the meeting brief
- Only one person talks at a time to improve communication
Ask The Right Questions
So, now that you have the meeting room, the time-limit, and the meeting leader figured out, you need to make sure that the participants focus only on answering three. Short. Questions.
- What did you do yesterday?
- What are you doing today?
- What’s blocking you from moving forward?
If anyone gets off topic or the problem is too large to solve in a few minutes, schedule a follow up with the person(s) experiencing the problem to try and solve it. Scheduling separate meetings to solve problems will allow staff members not involved with the situation to continue making progress on their tasks.
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