Routine veterinary staff meetings help you coordinate practice responsibilities, highlight relevant data to your staff, and keep your practice on track with your goals. Learn how to plan a productive group huddle with these six tips.

Finding the time to complete all your daily tasks can be challenging when managing a veterinary practice. Still, you need to make time for routine veterinary staff meetings to address practice concerns and keep your business moving forward. Without proper planning, your next team meeting could result in a waste of productive work hours. Get the most out of your meetings by following these six helpful tips. 

1. Can It Be Communicated Via Email or Team Chat?

Effective communication is crucial to running a successful veterinary practice.

Before planning a meeting, double-check yourself to make sure what you’re covering isn’t best communicated via email or team chat.

2. Set an Agenda

Never have a meeting without an agenda. Many veterinary practices only call meetings during emergencies or when disgruntled employees need to air their grievances. However, on-the-fly meetings are rarely productive and can distract the entire staff from their responsibilities.

Plan your meetings to address one or more goals you want your staff to accomplish within a specific period. Making an agenda beforehand lets you present action items quickly, so you aren’t wasting time trying to remember points during the meeting.

A good agenda includes:

• Updates on company policies

• Group training

• A briefing of expectations for the upcoming week

If you don’t have substantive information to share with the group, it may not be worth calling a meeting in the first place. The last thing your employees want to do before finishing their coffee is to sit through a tiring morning huddle with information that could have fit in an email.

3. Find an Appropriate Time to Call Your Meeting

You’ve heard all these stories before. The number of times you’ve heard of someone skipping lunch because they’re so busy they can’t take 5-10 minutes to eat is more than you can count. So, don’t be surprised that some employees cannot afford to attend a veterinary staff meeting during the middle of the day.

For some practices, it's best to hold morning sessions before clients arrive. Others prefer to hold end-of-week meetings after the practice closes. 

Regardless of what time you want, it is best to be practical and ask your employees what time works best for them. This method is not always the most efficient for you as a planner. However, it can optimize workflow efficiency during the week and gives your employees more flexibility. 

4. Support Your Meetings with Technology

Always prepare for your meetings with reports, presentations, or other relevant documents. 

These resources keep employees engaged with the orders of business and provide helpful visuals. 

For example, you can increase veterinary production with Chckup’s Daily Huddle dashboard. These analytic tools allow you to review practice goals and present client data with easy-to-read charts.

You can also upload your meeting itinerary or presentation to your practice’s shared network before everyone gathers. This allows employees to review action items ahead of time and come prepared with questions or comments.

5. Focus on the Agenda

It can be easy to derail staff meetings with complaints, gossip, or other disturbances. Remember, these veterinary staff meetings are only suitable for discussing concerns that impact the workflow and performance of the entire team.

Encourage your employees to stay focused on the agenda, be engaged professionally and stay respectful at all times.

Some of your employees may have valid concerns about behavior or actions taking place in the practice. In this case, it’s best to plan a separate meeting with relevant parties or direct them to Human Resources.

6. Remember to Acknowledge Your Employees’ Time

Whether your meeting lasts ten minutes or two hours, you should acknowledge that your employees are taking time out of their day to attend. 

Remind them that they provide an important service to the practice and their community and that their hard work does not go unnoticed.

The end of your meeting may also be an appropriate time to recognize individual employees for the value they bring to your veterinary practice. These small moments of praise can give your practice staff the motivation they need to get through the rest of the day.

Resource Management Tools That Improve Your Productivity

Many veterinary practices waste hours of their week on unproductive meetings that could be time spent with clients. When you plan your next meeting, remember to include material that will help your staff optimize their workflow or better understand their responsibilities as veterinary professionals.

If you need to come up with new veterinary staff meeting ideas, explore how Chckup can help. 

We provide unmatched tools that help your practice stay up-to-date with the metrics & reporting that actually matter. 

Schedule a demo today to learn more about how your veterinary practice can accomplish its goals.