Office meetings provide a way for you and your team to maintain focus on your team goals and help identify problems that threaten your optometric practice’s ability to meet those objectives.
Also, weekly meetings are a great way to strengthen a team's bond. Meetings may seem like they are going strong in the beginning, over time you will find that participation is starting to wane. When your staff members stop engaging in your team meetings, it could snowball into to other problems like missed goals, staff turnover, and errors due to decreased communication.
To help revive the energy in your optometric practice team meetings, we’ve provided a few tips below.
Tips For Increasing Engagement In Your Optometric Practice Team Meetings
Switch Meeting Structures
If you’re finding that your team doesn’t seem interested in weekly meetings anymore, you need to look at how the meetings are structured. If you or the office manager are the only people allowed to talk during the meeting, then switch the format to one where everyone has to talk.
Holding a daily standup meeting where each person in the meeting is required to give an update will not only increase engagement, it will also help your team stay focused on the goals and how each individual is contributing to the team’s success.
Change Content
Sometimes you only need a few minutes to report on the numbers or remind your staff about the goals of your practice. The rest of the time could be spent building team relationships and helping your staff learn new skills that could be used to meet your practice objectives.
Trying changing the content to increase team engagement. For example, one week you can focus on education or team personality tests, and the next week play a game that’s based on what they learned the week before or will remind the team to think about the goals for your practice.
Reward Engagement
There are times where team members just need a little incentive to get the creative juices flowing. If you’re experiencing low participation in your team meeting, consider rewarding people who contribute during the meeting or offer the most creative approach to solving a problem. There are ways you can reward employees without spending money.
Staff management can be tough, but that's why we compiled all our tips in this ebook.
Originally published in August 2017