Your team needs to start off every morning the right way if you want the amazing results you deserve. If you aren’t doing morning huddles, you should; they’re one of the best ways to get your team to do their best work every day.
We can work towards our vision by sharing our objectives with our team, and this can be done easiest during the morning huddle. But even if we meet every morning, sometimes we can find that our team still isn’t doing their best work. Believe it or not, it’s usually because one of your team members is upset — and their negativity is contagious. Their sour mood has a huge impact on your patients and other team members.
Your team is your family. The key to getting them started off on the right foot every day is being there for them through thick and thin. Here are two ways you can ensure they’re feeling in good spirits every morning.
1. Focus on how your team members are feeling during the morning huddle, not the numbers.
It’s great to monitor KPI’s and make adjustments during your morning huddles. But that’s not the only thing you should be focusing on. Measuring stats should only be a small part of the meeting. Designate the majority of the huddle to check in with how your team is feeling.
If one of your team members is grouchy, it’s going to breed drama. It's going to put a dark cloud over your practice where everyone is in a bad mood. Energy vampires can ruin the mornings for everyone else.
So, in your team huddle, ask one question: “Who is not at ten today?” Encourage your team members to be honest about their current mood. If someone is feeling at three, then it’s up to the rest of the team to support them, build them up, and bring them up to a ten.
Even if everybody is at a ten, continue to support them by showing appreciation. It's demoralizing when you work your butt off at work and nobody ever shows that they appreciate you. You’ll feel like you aren’t worth anything to anyone. You won’t be enthusiastic about getting out of bed on a cold morning. It won't be exciting to make the commute into the office and interact with your team or do your job. But when your team members come in feeling like they’re a big part of the practice, they’ll be happy to get to work and they'll be more engaged.
2. Put the morning people upfront and the non-morning people in the back for the first hour of the day.
We all know someone who isn't a “morning person.” If you have a front desk team member who isn’t a morning person, get into a routine where they sit in the back for the first hour of the morning.
Have another front desk team member who is a morning person replace them for the time being. That way, the non-morning person isn't shooing patients away with an unhappy-looking face. They can remain productive in the back. Have them handle insurance or whatever other tasks they can do that doesn’t require interacting with patients.
Now, that being said, you wouldn’t put a hygienist up at the front desk. That’s not what they’re trained to do and it’d mean patients aren’t getting the treatment they need. But, if your hygienist is a non-morning person, tell your scheduler not to book the hygiene appointments in the first hour of the day. They can stay an hour later, instead, so you can still meet those productivity goals.
Is your team getting started off on the right foot every morning?
A lot of the time, you don’t know what’s going on at home that’s making one of your team members grouchy. They could be dealing with a really bad situation that’s spilling into their attitude at work. A loved one could be sick. Their newborn could be keeping them up all night. They could be going through a divorce. The possibilities are endless.
For some team members, the issue might just be that they're not a morning person. Regardless of what's going on in the lives of your team members, you need to be emotionally available. Being sensitive to the needs of your team members is the key to getting them started off on the right foot every day.
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