What is the vet practice owner’s and manager’s second biggest HATE??Did you guess what the 2nd biggest ‘hate’ of most practice owners and managers is?It’s STAFF MEETINGS – how to have them and how to make them effective.Did you guess the answer – well done if you did.In this quick video I talk about;WHY holding regular staff meeting is one of the MOST IMPORTANT things you can do for you and your practiceandI share the MAGIC FORMULA to Holding Effective staff meetings
I help my inner circle clients do this it always pays big dividends.So hopefully, it will do the same for you.
Click below to listen to the Podcast
Diederik ‘Effective Staff Meetings’ Gelderman
P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 3 ways I can help you grow your practice:1. Keep your eyes peeled and get ready to gray yourself a copy of my new book Veterinary Success Secrets Revealed – it’ll be available soon
It’s the road map to growing your practice and your profits while getting more time off2. Join the Veterinary Business Academy and connect with other Veterinary practices that want to do better
It’s my monthly membership program (where you also get my person help every month) where practice owners and managers learn to get more income, have a better practice team, improve their marketing and get time off to enjoy life. — Click Here3. Join our Implementation Program and be a Case StudyI’m putting together a new coaching case study group at Black Belt this month… stay tuned for details. If you’d like to work with me on your client-getting and scale plans… just reply to this message and put “Case Study” in the subject line.4. Work with me and my team privatelyIf you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take you from where you are to where you want to go… just reply to this message and put “Private” in the subject line… tell me a little about your practice and what you’d like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details!Warmly
Diederik
TRANSCRIPTION
How To Hold Effective Staff Meeting
Hi, it’s Diederik Gelderman here, and since we’re early into the New Year, I thought we’d start off the New Year with one of the biggest strategies that you can use to grow your practice, to grow your team and to give better client and patient service and care. And this strategy, or lack of this strategy, is also one of the biggest mistakes I see practices make.
What am I talking about?
I’m talking about those things called ‘staff meeting’. The ‘thing’ that SO MANY team members DREAD! So, many practices simply don’t have staff meetings, or have them twice a year or something like that.
Why
Why should you hold staff meetings? I’m a huge proponent of staff meetings.
Why should you have them?
There are THREE big reasons.
- Number one, there is a statistical relationship between practice profitability and staff meetings; in other words, the practices that have staff meetings are consistently more profitable than those practices which don’t hold staff meetings.
- Second thing is communication; exactly the same thing applies here as it does to profitability; communication lines and communication flow, studies show, work much, much better in practices which have staff meetings than those that don’t.
- And the third reason to have staff meetings, the third big why, is better patient and client care, as I talked about a little bit earlier (communication flow).
I just want to go through a staff meeting structure today that will allow you to minimize the time needed to have staff meetings and to maximize the outcome of those staff meetings, and I’ve made some notes that I’m going to refer to on a regular basis.
If you want to know more about this structure in depth, then a book you could read is ‘Mastering The Rockefeller Habits’, or just read the chapter on team meetings in Mastering The Rockefeller Habits, you’ll get a lot of insight from there.
We divide the staff meetings into four different kinds of meeting.
- The first one is strategic,
- The second one is operational
- The third one is tactical, and
- The fourth one is the daily huddle.
- Strategic meetings occur every quarter,
- Operational meetings occur every month,
- Tactical meetings occur every week, and
- Huddle’s occur every day.
Strategic Meetings
The first strategic meeting of the year is going to take you probably about three to four hours and it should occur off-site.
It should be run by the practice owner. Everyone needs to attend, i.e. that’s compulsory, and that meeting should not occur at the beginning of the year, not in January anyway, because it’s too much tied into New Year’s resolutions and Christmas hangovers and everything else.
My suggestion is that you hold it in February.
In that first meeting of the year, you will set the whole agenda and tone for the year in general terms, as I said the first one is going to take you three to four hours, typically off-site, over dinner or something like that.
The second and the third and the fourth meetings that will occur every quarter will be focused on that upcoming quarter.
Every one of those meetings has an agenda and there are minutes that come out at that meeting with actions that apply to various people in your business.
Let me re-iterate that; there are minutes, there’s an agenda and then there are ACCOUNTABLE action items for people to action within a certain time frame.
Everyone gets a copy of the agenda, the minutes and the action items. Everyone needs to attend.
As I said, the first meeting gives an overview of the year and then focuses on the strategy for the next specific quarter, and then each subsequent meeting focuses on the strategy for that specific quarter.
You really focus on what’s upcoming and what you need to do in the next 90 days.
When you get to the second of these strategic meetings, you need to focus on what’s going to happen in the upcoming 90 days, and you also focus back on what happened in the last 90 days; that’s important as well so that the mistakes or the errors from the last 90 days aren’t repeated in the next 90 days.
The next one is the operational meeting – so these occur monthly.
They are typically going to occur on-site. Again, the owner typically runs these, and everyone needs to attend.
Again, agenda, again minutes, again action items and an action plan and accountabilities come out of this meeting.
This operational meeting is the monthly meeting, as I said, and it’ll focus specifically on the next month’s strategic stuff that needs to be done as well as the tactical stuff, as well as focusing back on the last month to discuss the outcomes of that month. i.e. what’s working well and not so well.
So now we’ve got a plan for the quarter, we’re a month into that quarter or two months into it; what’s working well, what’s not working so well that we need to massage/change/modify, where are we at, how are things going etc.
Then we have the tactical meeting.
Tactical meetings occur on a weekly basis. They will typically take you to 20 to 30 minutes so you can just block off one or two exam slots for those meetings.
The tactical meetings are going to be run by people taking turns. The owner typically won’t run these.
These meetings will be used to grow your team members so that they need to learn to step up, take the lead, etc.
Now, not everyone will be able to run a tactical meeting and step up, but the majority of your team over time will be able to do that.
The tactical meetings are run by different people at different times, and the idea is to help grow your team into being able to take up and run one of those meetings.
There is no agenda but there are minutes, and there is or are action outcomes from this meeting.
This is the meeting in which you focus on the niggling, this is what’s driving me crazy type stuff.
For example; we keep putting ‘St’ on the computer rather than ‘Street’, and that’s driving me crazy.
Whatever it happens to be, we’re putting ‘Ridgeback X’—Ridgeback cross—rather than the whole word for the breed ‘Ridgeback Cross’.
It’s all that stuff that typically goes on and on and on and on at other meetings and drives the people at those meetings crazy.
This meeting, which is once a week, which lasts you 20 to 30 minutes, is the meeting in which you just bring the shit and have it out.
There is no agenda, as I said there are minutes.
This meeting, again, is compulsory, and you might have it the first Monday, the second Tuesday, the third Wednesday, the fourth Thursday-type of thing, of the week. So it would rotate to be more easy for people who are not on shift to attend.
In many practices t’s not held on the same day of the week every week so that it gives more people the ability to attend.
Now we get to the question; are meetings compulsory are not compulsory?
In my model of the world, they are compulsory because they’re that important in driving the practice forward and in client care and patient care and great clinical outcomes and standards of care.
Then the next question becomes, well if they are compulsory, are people paid?
Again, in my model of the world, yes absolutely.
In certain countries, you only pay for the time that they are called in. So if it’s 20 or 40 minutes they get paid 20 or 40 minutes – and that’s all.
In other countries like Australia, you’ve got a minimum call in time of two hours or three hours of whatever it happens to be, and yes those people are paid for that call-in time.
Is there any reason why people might not attend one of these weekly meetings, or an operational meeting or a strategic meeting?
Again, yes. In my model of the world, if they have doctor’s appointments or dentists appointments or whatever it happens to be, or if they have to take their kids to [you know] school stuff or whatever happens to be, but they still need to attend about 80% of the meetings over a month period of time.
Then we get to the last meeting which is the daily huddle.
The daily huddle is really all about how the day looks from my perspective.
This is not a sit-down meeting. It would occur at a strange time, but at the same time every day.
It might be nine after eleven. You might have a weird clock or Gong sound the meeting time.
It’s going to take five six seven eight minutes; people stand in a circle, and someone just says “Okay, I’ll start,” and hopefully that would be a different person every day.
Now, it’s not compulsory, there are no minutes, there’s no agenda, there’s no action items, there’s no nothing.
This is how the day is looking from my perspective. “Hey, remember guys, we’ve got Bernie the German Shepherd coming in. He’s really aggressive. I’m going to need an extra nurse to help me take blood from him today. We got Sophie the cat coming in, she’s absolutely dog phobic, make sure she goes straight into an exam room.” Whatever it happens to be….
Everyone speaks out and contributes.
These are designed to help the day flow more easily.
That’s a really quick summary of the way that you’ll get the most out of staff meetings.
If you want to talk to me about this in more detail, I’ve helped many, many, many practices implement these strategies. If you want to send me an email, I’m happy to talk to you about it in more depth. I’ve got a lot more data on this, I’ve just tried to keep it quick and simple today.
See on the next video. Bye.