Healthcare Practices: Secrets to Holding Effective Meetings

When you visit top-performing medical practices, you can’t help but notice one characteristic they usually share: Focus. Everyone from lowly file clerk to managing partner seems to know what they’re doing and why. Further, they understand how their efforts interact with fellow-workers, and they function in concert with a coordination and rhythm that leaves patients feeling very satisfied with the level of service.

This kind of interaction and harmony doesn’t happen by accident, of course. Well-run practices have learned how to leverage the power of effective meetings to generate and maintain the group’s focus on its mission to serve patients.

But take a quick poll at your medical practice to see how your physicians, managers, and staff feel about meetings. Typically, you’ll get a lot of negative feedback—in some practices, it seems everybody hates meetings.

Often they have good reasons for their contempt. A history of ill-prepared, aimless, and disorderly meetings has jaded many participants over the years.

So how do best-run practices overcome the “Meeting Monster”? Over the decades, we’ve noticed a pattern that provides the following principles that can help you transform your business meeting from a necessary evil to an engaging—even energizing—experience:

Frequency—meet just often enough to address objectives and maintain momentum.

How often a group should meet depends a great deal on what needs to happen between meetings. Short-term, intensive projects often require committees or task forces to get together frequently—much of the work takes place during the meeting. Directorial, organization-wide meetings tend to be held less often, with more focus on analyzing and monitoring, assigning tasks, and reporting on problems or progress.

Meeting too often leaves participants feeling that the meeting wasn’t necessary because very little has happened since the last meeting. Waiting too long between meetings causes agendas to swell beyond a manageable size and leaves group members feeling as if they don’t know what’s going on most of the time. So what’s the ideal frequency? There is no hard-and-fast rule to guide you. The scope of the meeting’s purpose, as well as the size of the group, plays a big part in determining the most effective schedule. In general, the broader the scope and the larger the group, the less often it can practically meet.

• Board of directors: Small and mid-size groups (wherein every partner/shareholder is a board member) usually have their needs adequately addressed with monthly meetings. Larger organizations that elect board members from among the partners/shareholders sometimes have monthly or bi-monthly board meetings with quarterly or semi-annual shareholder meetings.

• Executive committees: Executive leaders (CEO/managing partner, CFO, and medical director) meet with top administrators more frequently—sometimes weekly in smaller practices.

• Staff meetings: Better-run practices hold staff meetings every month (larger groups often schedule monthly departmental meetings and less-frequent general staff gatherings).

• Daily “huddles”: Many practices have revolutionized their operations by implementing brief (10 to 15 minutes), informal gatherings at the start of each day. These usually work best on a departmental level, led by the department’s leader and focused only on today’s work. These meetings alert staff to specific situations and special task assignments, and serve to promote teamwork and camaraderie.

Regularity—cancel standing meetings only in extraordinary circumstances.

A commitment to meeting regularly often follows the course of your New Year’s resolutions. You start out with the finest of intentions—but pretty soon you find yourself making an exception here, an excuse there, and before you know it, several months have gone by without a meeting. We don’t advocate simply “meeting for meeting’s sake”—it’s up to the chair and organizers to ensure that you have a full and relevant agenda. If you find that too challenging, perhaps it’s time to revisit the question of effective meeting frequency.

Leader—the chair requires a balanced mix of diplomacy, discipline, and authority.

It makes no sense to install a leader whom no one will follow. Physician meetings, for example, almost always require a physician in the chair. Doctors simply tend not to accept leadership from anyone they don’t consider a peer. Among nonclinical employees, the chairperson needs to have sufficient authority and knowledge to guide, moderate, and even control the meeting’s flow. Whoever runs the meeting must have the self-discipline to stick to the agenda and keep an eye on the clock. When meetings drag into “overtime,” the participants become fidgety and inattentive, and you’ll soon encounter resistance to meetings and attendance problems.

Every decision needs a clearly assigned responsible person and due date, as well as a clear goal for the assignment.

But the authority and discipline must be tempered with the kind of diplomacy that invites participants into the discussion and helps them feel their individual contributions are valuable. The moderator often must intervene when a disagreement spirals out of control toward an unproductive argument. A diplomatic chairperson must protect the dignity of each meeting attendee.

Participants—invite only those for whom the meeting’s goals are immediately relevant.

No attendee should ever wonder, “What am I doing here?” Inviting the appropriate people and crafting an effective agenda help ensure members will feel engaged.

Be prepared, though, to answer the question, “Why wasn’t I invited?” If that inquiry comes from a physician or an administrator, you’ll likely need a good amount of diplomacy to offer a satisfactory answer. (Hint: An offer to brief that “left-out” physician after the meeting can go a long way toward smoothing ruffled feathers.)

The Stuff “Everybody” Knows—follow commonly understood (and often neglected) principles for effective meetings.

Countless articles and conference seminars extol the benefits of planning and running effective meetings. But like the concepts presented in that other perennial conference topic “time management,” the principles won’t help you if you don’t actually implement them:

• Preparing Effective Agendas: Not only should the agenda be thorough but manageable, it should also be in the hands of participants well in advance of the meeting. Participants also need a clear deadline for requesting a timeslot in the agenda.

• Conducting an Efficient Meeting: Sticking to the agenda, drawing-in the participants, moderating the discussions, and following procedure all help to make the most of the time allotted for the meeting. You don’t have to hire a parliamentarian, but a bit of Robert’s Rules can go a long way toward maintaining order—especially in larger (or contentious) meetings.

• Making Decisions: It’s up to the chairperson to make sure that every agenda item concludes with a decision, even if it’s only to decide to table the issue pending further development or research.

• Creating Accountability: Every decision made by the gathering needs a clearly assigned responsible person and due date, as well as a clear goal for the assignment.

• Following Up: Meeting minutes should be in the hands of attendees within 24 hours of the closing gavel. Chairpersons who see the best results make a point of following-up on every individual responsible person’s assignment to make sure he or she understands the assignment and to ask, “How can I help you get this done?”

Don’t expect results overnight. The local attitude about meetings is part of your organization’s culture—unconsciously formed over the years. But it won’t take years to diminish the negative feelings. Just a few months of truly effective meetings—with perceptible results—will breathe new life into your organization and help you sharpen its focus.