Your team needs to be aligned every single day.

Health care service business simply moves too fast to rely on a weekly meeting.  If you wait a week, you’ll miss opportunities and get off track.

The Daily Huddle fixes this.

It’s a five minute, stand up meeting for your management team. In my companies, 8:45 AM was the best time to hold the huddle. It gave everyone enough time to get sorted, but didn’t delay the start of the day.

Everybody attends every day, without exception.

The goal of this meeting is simple: make sure we’re headed for our goals today.

Health Care Service Company Daily Huddle

Here’s the agenda:

1.  What’s up

Each person reports what they’re up to that day. It may be a summary of a project they’re wrapping up. Or, it might be a particularly important client meeting they’re looking forward to. But, every person, including you, gives a super quick summary of what’s up today.

2.  The Numbers

Each person is responsible for a few daily numbers. We’ll discuss in a future article how to decide what to count and how to record it in a dashboard. For now, let’s just agree that some numbers are important to us. Go around the room and ask each person to report their number.

This takes thirty seconds, but after a few days, you’ll have such a visceral sense for the numbers that you’ll be able to react to them like a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. What’s even more awesome is that your team will too.

3. Get Unstuck

Sometimes you know you’re stuck. Sometimes you don’t. This part of the agenda has two purposes. First, it gives your team an opportunity to tell everyone about a problem that’s giving them fits.

Second, it gives your team the opportunity to help one of your colleagues who’s stuck, but doesn’t realize it. For example, if, for a few days in a row, your scheduling manager says she’s working on a tough weekend case, she’s probably stuck. Respectfully tell her that she’s stuck, then move on to the next step.

When someone is stuck, you must resist the urge to process the issue right away. Make a SWAT team and assign them to work on the issue together. Cross functional help is often the best way to get unstuck. So, in the example above, ask your marketing manager to spend a few minutes helping your scheduling manager fix her weekend case issue.

The daily huddle is purposefully designed to help health care service companies do one thing:  ensure that every sing day your team is aligned.

Hold this meeting and you will be.

Image credit:  barryskeates