Do you have a question about managing your practice? What about growing your business or becoming a better business leader? If you have questions, Jay has answers. Email your questions to [email protected]. Jay will answer them here and in an online video.
Q: Hi, Jay. I have a question regarding our daily morning huddle. Do you recommend structuring this in any way? Currently we look at the schedule and usually just discuss clinical things. What else should we be talking about?
A: Before you can learn how to best structure your morning huddle, you first need to be clear on why you’re holding one in the first place. Huddles shouldn’t be treated as a formality because they serve an important purpose to the growth of your practice.
It’s always important to cover results and daily goals in your huddles. This is because accountability and goal setting are critical to achieving results. Having everyone share their goals out loud on a daily basis increases accountability. It also keeps thoughts and actions intentional. This helps everyone stay focused on what’s expected of them. For instance, the front desk team should report on how many new patients were scheduled the previous day as well as their goal for that day.
The rest of your huddle should be focused on your patients. That’s because you should be striving to create a patient-centric office, which is the concept of engineering 100% of your team’s focus on patients’ needs. The emphasis should be on what can be done to create exceptional patient experiences for that day. It gives you a chance to highlight those experiences that you want to make sure the office nails—for example, recognizing birthdays, making new patients feel like special guests, and making sure longstanding or high-referring patients feel extra appreciated are great things to discuss.
You and your team lead hectic personal lives outside of the office. Once you arrive at work, it can be extremely difficult to transition your focus from self to patient without a little help. You can’t be thinking about your problems and giving patients the level of attention they need and deserve. It’s impossible. The morning huddle is an anchor that helps everyone transition from being distracted to fully present.
The patient experience conversation is one that you want to make sure you get right in your morning huddles. It will be critical to your practice growth. As such, I recorded a short video to do a deeper dive into the topic to make it easy for you to fully absorb this important material. After watching, you’ll know how to effectively make patient experience a focus during these meetings. To watch the video, go to the online version of this article on
dentaleconomics.com.
Jay Geier is founder and president of the Scheduling Institute, a premier dental consulting group focused on practice growth, team training, and doctor coaching. Learn more about the Scheduling Institute at schedulinginstitute.com.
