July 2004

Making the Most of Staff Meetings

Today's healthcare environment focuses on increasing productivity awareness. To help establish efficiency, managers should determine if the following problematic meeting symptoms are present:

• Staff members arrive late and later each meeting.
• One individual completely monopolizes the discussion.
• Staff members are disengaged or “check-out” (“thousand mile stare”).
• Frequent interruptions with pagers, phones, or “cross-talk”.
• Staff avoids volunteering and no plan for follow-through is made.
• Assignments are not completed on time.
• Exclusive discussions occur after the meeting with select employees- “triangulation”
• Meeting goals and agendas are absent

Developing an effective staff meeting process will increase staff morale, productivity and teamwork. Here are some practical suggestions to update and inform operational procedures while optimizing staff time:

1. Create structure to the meeting. Include a consistent meeting time, place, agenda and participation expectations.
2. Establish goals for the meetings and re-direct when the discussion has lost focus.
3. Foster involvement. Ask open-ended questions of all staff members. If management and hourly workers are included in the meeting, make sure that all levels are contributing and leading.
4. Validate team members' idea contributions while striving to build a working consensus. Point out great solutions to the group, while tackling areas that still need consensus. For example, “I hear that we all agree about how we will handle ordering patient trays. Now let's tackle our disagreement about solving the tray return process.”
5. Move to action. Always end meetings with clear assignments and time-line expectations.

Working Solutions is a non-profit  organization providing employee training and  leadership development services for  healthcare organizations,  non-profits and corporations.  This retention tip is  published monthly to provide tips, strategies and new  ideas for HR professionals, managers and executives to  help retain their  employees.