Maximize Your Dental Office Morning Huddle

One of the best ways to start your dental team off on the right foot every day is to hold a morning huddle. These short meetings help ensure your office is on the same page about various topics that will affect their day and your business before the first patient walks through your doors.

But, these get-togethers before the day begins are not informal chats about thoughts and feelings. In fact, you should maximize the benefit of this time by discussing scheduling, metrics, and other elements that impact the success of your brand. If you find it hard to help your team dial in and be ready to seize the day, this guide can help you maximize your morning huddle!

Before The Morning Huddle: Prepare

As mentioned in the introduction, a morning huddle in your dental office shouldn't be an off-the-cuff discussion about random topics affecting your team, patients, and business. Instead, bring a renewed focus to this short review time by preparing ahead.

Preparation is always a benefit to any meeting you might hold and will create a more responsive and impactful experience for all involved. Below are the top talking points you should have ready before gathering round:

Know Your Metrics

How well is your dental office hitting new patient goals? Have recent interactions with prospective patients shown a need for more training to help convert them to booked appointments? Has your no-show rate dropped after implementing a new follow-up strategy?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) provide valuable insight into how your team and different operation strategies influence your business. Sharing analytics with your hygienist, front desk reception, and other key employees brings a new level of accountability in their role to help their careers and your dental business be successful.

Set a Daily Goal that Aligns with Your Long Term Strategy

When discussing long-term strategy during a morning huddle, you need more than just a goal list on a sticky note. Be ready to explain why this goal matters and what path is to be followed to achieve it. By rallying your troops around these important milestones, you can also point out past met goals and how they've benefited your dental office, patients, and team.

As you can see, your morning huddle is about more than dark roast coffee and jelly-filled danishes. It's all about leadership and empowering your team with crucial analytical insights to help them succeed. So, preparation is essential for this daily meeting.

During the Huddle: Best Practices

Your morning huddle with your dental team is meant not just to energize and motivate but create a proactive strategy to meet educational, operational, and educational goals that will benefit your business. To get the most out of your meeting, remember these essential tips:

Keep It Short and On Point

When huddling up, you need everyone laser-focused, so minimize distractions like food and heavy reading. Ideally, you should only need 15 minutes to cover everything on your agenda. To meet this timeframe, keep everyone on topic so it doesn't carry over longer than it should and become a drain on productivity.

Ensure Key Team Members are Present

Morning huddles should involve everyone, especially those who lead in certain areas of your operations. For instance, if you plan to review scheduling strategies, ensure your department head is present for this conversation. Likewise, if someone is running late or can't make it that morning, have one of their co-workers catch them up on the details.

Key Topics You Should Always Discuss

Fifteen minutes may seem like a lot of time, but trying to list out topics to review at your huddle, you may wish you had twenty instead. To better streamline your talking points, stick with giving a brief run down in each of the following categories:

Production

You should evaluate productivity based on weekly demands and monthly goals. Every morning huddle with your dental staff should provide a quick snapshot of what objectives must be met and how to achieve them.

Marketing

When discussing marketing with your crew, remember to explain this aspect of your business as finding ways to highlight what makes your dental office stand out. Reviewing what makes your business attractive can help your team communicate this to patients and prospects, which increases your chance of appointment bookings.

Your Patients

You should always bring up your patients during the morning huddle because you wouldn't be in business without them. Mention their names and what dental care they will be receiving that day. Also, bring up any upcoming procedures or exams they might be due for so your team will be ready to follow up and recall them.

Collections

While you could save collection goals for business meetings, it doesn't hurt to mention ways to help encourage timely payment from your patients. These strategies can save you significant man-hours in calls and costly postage for mailed reminders.

However, avoid discussing specific accounts. If there is an issue with payment from a patient, save that conversation for you and your accounts team. These matters have to be handled carefully and with sensitivity.

Quick Tips to Boost Enthusiasm During Your Huddles

Do you already have the perfectly prepared huddle but can't get your team excited to participate? The following ideas can help add a new level of engagement to your morning meetings:

Switch Up Huddle Leadership

Who said it needs to always be the same person leading your huddle every day? Change things up a bit by asking other team members if they would like to run your dental office's morning meeting every now and then. This brings fresh perspective to the usual issues that get discussed and gives your staff a chance to expand their leadership experience.

Before you start asking for volunteers, consider taking the following steps to prepare everyone:

• Ask for volunteers. Don't randomly assign an unsuspecting or unwilling team member
• Create a schedule
• Review what they will discuss at the huddle
• Always provide constructive feedback afterward and encourage them to lead again another time

Consider Quick Team Building Exercises

Halfway through your meeting, conduct a quick team-building exercise to engage everyone. Short games are often a fun option that only requires a couple of minutes to complete. Some favorites include:

• Hangman
• Brainteasers
• Trivia
• Riddles
• Telephone

These activities can spread ideas about goals, positivity, teamwork, and other relevant topics.

Motivational Quotes of the Day

Everyone appreciates a little encouragement in life, and working in your dental practice should be no exception. A motivational quote at the end of your morning huddle can inspire your team to perform at their best level for their patients and career goals.

Classic sayings about empathy, compassion, and other important personal qualities can also help your employees go that extra mile for your patients. Finding ways to bond with your team and your patients will pave the way for brand loyalty and willingness to buy additional dental services and products from your practice.

Avoid Doing These Things During Your Daily Huddle

With all of the options you can incorporate into your morning meeting, there are several things you should avoid to maximize your efforts:

• Don't cover too many topics at once. You only have fifteen minutes, so you need just the right amount of information that it's easily understood. If you cover twenty different issues, some will surely be forgotten, and your team will feel drained and unmotivated when getting to work afterward. Prioritize what's important and save broader discussion points for other office meetings you have scheduled.
• You may think that you could just hold a separate huddle for each department, but the reality is that many of your teams overlap. This means attending multiple meetings and losing valuable production time. Stick with a single morning meet-up where you and team leads can provide updates and discuss further throughout the day during any downtime or other scheduled meetings.
• Avoid using your morning huddle as an opportunity to check up on a team member's progress on a project or task. This can feel like they are being called out in front of their peers and cause resentment. Instead, talk about goals, achievements, and concerns as a whole whenever possible.

Your dental office's morning huddle isn't meant to replace your weekly, monthly, or yearly meetings. These quick get-togethers at the beginning of your day can help prepare them for these more significant meetups.

The Best Dental Analytics Starts with Adit

Adit leverages automation and AI to boost your dental company's productivity and streamline operations as a comprehensive cloud-based practice management software. As a result, we help you not only eliminate bottlenecks in your communications and workflows but centralize your communications and collections.

Acquiring new patients is also easier because we help you create a personalized experience they can't get enough of and are eager to share in online reviews. All of this progress and more are tracked through our built-in analytical tools. Take raw data and create informative metrics that reveal revenue opportunities and growth strategies with our extensive range of digital practice management features, including:

• Call Tracking with Adit Voice
• Patient Forms
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• Dental Website Design
• Adit Pay
• Pozative Review Module

Dentists can use these high-level analytical tools to bring new insight and purpose to their morning huddles, creating measurable goals with clear paths to achievement. Discover how dental practice management software by Adit can make your business dreams a reality. Schedule your free demo today!