The habit of having a team meeting is really important….

And I think one of the things that’s critical to enable consistency has to be putting a team meeting in the diary. Whether that’s five minutes every single day, or whether that’s half an hour once a week, matters.

But the most important thing is, to begin with just getting some consistency and some rhythm so that everybody knows when they’re going to see you and when they’re going to have a chance to communicate and ask any questions and then setting up those one-to-ones.

In the beginning, I believe 1:2:1’s should be once a week, this gives people a chance to ask questions. Over time they might shift to fortnightly, monthly, or quarterly.

Either way, you’ve got to make consistent time for your team just in the same way that you make time for your clients. And the more you can get things in a rhythm, the smoother they are and the less confusion there is, and the more certainty and consistency you’re able to provide everybody.

In this video I discuss why and how to set them up.

How can you implement team meetings and 1-to-1s if you and your team work different shifts?

Often a clinic owner is not in practice at the same time as their team and their associates. A typical set up maybe that a clinic owner work’s alongside some of their team members, but they might not work on the same shift patterns as everybody.

This makes it really important to schedule regular one-to-ones and stick to the schedule. Don’t push them out when you think, you just have another patient in a fit another patient in because your communication with your team is essential. You don’t want to be ships in the night with your team never talking to each other as three to six months down the line, either your employee or your associate will feel disgruntled, unloved, not looked after and they go and find somewhere else.

Alternatively, you might not happy with their performance, but the reason you’re not happy with your performance could stem from:

• They don’t know what’s expected of them. You haven’t sat down and really been clear about what the expectations are.
• They don’t know that they’re not meeting expectations. So you might have set out the expectations, but you haven’t actually said to them, look, you’re not actually hitting the mark. Your capacity is only at 50% and you really want it to be at 75%, but you have never told them that. And they don’t really know.
• They can’t meet expectations. So you need to then identify what training your team members need to be able to meet the expectations.
• Unfortunately there will be some of these instances where they just won’t meet expectations. And at that point, when you know that they’re not going to meet your expectations, they’re not going to, align to your values and how you want the patient journey and team experience to be, you need to invite them to go and express their talents elsewhere, but you need to be having those meetings and the communications for each of those stages. Setting expectations, making, letting them know that they’re meeting them or they’re not, helping them with the training or finding someone that is better suited for your organization.

Much of this can be resolved with really good recruitment if you are really clear about what it is that you’re looking for when you are interviewing and allow the candidate to interview you too and thorough induction process which is probably going to last between three and six months.

It takes time and effort to really learn, to operate together as a team, requires commitment!