Ep. 34: Making Your Morning Huddle More Productive
Keeping your team in tight coordination is essential for running an efficient schedule and achieving your production goals. A morning huddle (or “production meeting” as we call it) is the most efficient way to get everyone coordinated at the start of the day, and can be a major boost to production. If this meeting isn’t managed well, though, it can be pointless drawn out affair. So in this episode, Jeff covers the blueprint for an effective morning production meeting.
Links:
Morning Production Meeting document - https://www.mgeonline.com/morning-production-meeting-download
Learn more about MGE – https://www.mgeonline.com
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Questions From This Episode
What's the actual purpose of a morning production meeting, and how is it different from a clinical meeting?
It exists to coordinate that day's scheduled production and case presentation activity, lining up which patients will be presented treatment or closed on cases already discussed, and making sure everyone's treatment keeps moving forward. It's entirely separate from a clinical meeting, where the team discusses things like which cement or material to use for a specific procedure, that's a different conversation with a different purpose.
What has to happen before the morning meeting even starts?
The schedule coordinator checks voicemails and email for overnight changes and prints or displays that day's schedule. The hygienist reviews the charts of everyone they're seeing that day specifically for outstanding, previously diagnosed treatment, and the doctor and office manager do the same for the doctor's own patients. Everyone should walk into the meeting already knowing which patients still need something addressed.
What should get covered for each patient during the meeting?
Any outstanding balance to collect, any previously diagnosed but unaccepted treatment, who's going to bring that treatment back up with the patient, whether there's enough time in the schedule to present it that day, and if not, whether a consultation needs to be scheduled. The goal is walking out of the meeting with a clear, specific task list, not just a general sense of who's coming in.
Whose job is it to make sure the tasks assigned in the meeting actually get done?
The office manager's, and this is where a lot of practices lose the real value of the meeting. It's not enough to hand out tasks and check back at the end of the day, or worse, the next day. The office manager should be checking in real time throughout the day, noticing if the doctor hasn't made it into that operatory yet to mention a needed consult, for example, so the plan actually gets executed rather than just discussed.
What should you do if the practice is falling short of its monthly goal?
Resist the urge to fixate purely on the numbers, and go back to focusing on genuinely helping the patients in front of you that day, the numbers tend to follow from that. Practically, look at whether any new patients coming in that day have time to start treatment, and check whether hygiene patients with unaddressed treatment could reasonably shift into an opening on the doctor's schedule right after their cleaning.
Episode Transcript
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Does your office have a morning meeting or huddle? Is there a set format, or is it more of a quick get-together? Do you hold it regularly, and honestly, do you think it's effective? Most importantly, has it actually made your office more efficient and productive? This week I want to dig into the morning meeting, specifically how we teach it here at MGE, and how you can use it to improve patient care, productivity, teamwork, and profitability. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host.
The idea of a morning meeting isn't unique to dentistry, plenty of businesses gather in the morning to sort out the day ahead, sometimes with a real structure, sometimes without. You've probably seen the newer trend of standing meetings, the logic being that standing is uncomfortable enough to naturally keep things short.
Which gets at something important. I'm personally not a huge fan of meetings in general, I think they're necessary, but I genuinely dislike meetings that run long for no good reason, someone rambling about something that doesn't actually matter to the group. When that happens, it's usually because the meeting itself never had a clear purpose, or the people attending don't actually know what their role in that meeting is or what information they're supposed to bring.
So the first real question is: what's the purpose of your morning meeting? We have this very clearly defined at MGE, and I have a handout on the episode page you can download to follow along, outlining what we call the morning production meeting. Not a huddle, a production meeting, though you can call it whatever fits your office, the name matters less than the structure.
This is distinct from a clinical meeting or any other type of meeting you might already be running, a weekly doctor and office manager meeting, for instance, or a brief morning check-in between the two of you. If you want to gather your assistants and hygienists to discuss clinical specifics, which cement to use for a given procedure, that's a separate conversation entirely. The production meeting is specifically about what I'm about to walk through.
It should be brief, efficient, and everyone needs to show up prepared. If I'm running a formal meeting and someone asks to borrow a pen or paper once we're underway, that's a sign they weren't actually prepared to attend, and people need to understand that preparation genuinely matters here.
Let's walk through what we teach. This is covered in several of our seminars and in a dedicated video on DDS Success, but here are the fundamentals.
First, purpose: a morning production meeting exists to coordinate that day's scheduled production and case presentation activity. That includes lining up which patients will be presented treatment, or closed on treatment already presented earlier, confirming when they'll actually be seen, and making sure every patient's treatment plan keeps moving forward, not just handling today's production, but setting up tomorrow's.
This needs to happen every single day. Consistency is the whole game here. If you start Monday, keep it going Tuesday, skip Wednesday, do it Thursday, then skip the following Monday, it never becomes a real habit and won't deliver much value. This is true of implementing anything new in a practice, a referral card program, anything, you have to reinforce it consistently or it quietly fades. If you commit to a fixed time every day, people eventually get so used to it that skipping the meeting feels stranger than having it. We see this at MGE too, occasionally our own meeting location changes and someone who missed the update will just walk into the usual spot out of habit before redirecting themselves, that's genuinely the level of consistency you're aiming for.
As for timing, I'd recommend 15 to 20 minutes before your first patient, 20 is the safer option to give people time to actually prepare for that first appointment afterward. Which also tells you the meeting itself needs to be short.
This framework generally applies to an average-sized practice, say eight or nine staff doing 600,000 to 1.5 million a year. Larger practices will need some adaptation, smaller practices can follow this as-is.
Who should attend? In a smaller practice, everyone. In a larger practice with more specialized roles, a schedule coordinator, a hygiene coordinator, a reactivation specialist overseeing their own staff, you might only need the person in charge of each area rather than their entire team, otherwise the meeting becomes unmanageably large. Use judgment based on your actual practice size.
A few core rules. First, keep it brief and genuinely efficient, meaning real information gets exchanged, not just reported by one person while everyone else listens silently. I once observed a meeting where the office manager did all the talking for the entire time with no one else contributing, that's a lecture, not a meeting. People are supposed to actually exchange information, that's the entire point of gathering everyone.
Second, everyone attending needs to show up on time and prepared. Third, keep assigned tasks simple and genuinely doable, don't set unrealistic expectations. Fourth, the office manager runs the meeting entirely, starting it, managing its flow, and deciding when it ends. Nobody just gets up and leaves on their own.
Now, what needs to happen before the meeting even starts. The schedule coordinator checks voicemails and email for any overnight changes, then prints or displays a copy of that day's schedule. A physical printout, or a shared screen if that works better for your office, lets people mark it up as they go, useful when someone needs to flag a specific time slot during the discussion.
The hygienist reviews the charts of everyone they're seeing that day specifically to identify anyone with outstanding, previously diagnosed treatment, they should know that going in, not discover it mid-appointment. The doctor and office manager do the same for the doctor's own patients that day. If a patient coming in for today's procedure also has separate outstanding treatment from a prior visit, that needs to already be on everyone's radar walking into the meeting.
So how does the meeting actually start? First, a quick review of where the office stands statistically, this week or this month, new patients, production, collections. Everyone should know these numbers. If you have a team member who seems uncomfortable with numbers being shared openly, that's worth understanding, whether that's about them or about how it's being communicated, there's no real reason numbers shouldn't be visible to the team, since it tells everyone directly whether the practice is actually hitting its goals. Your financial coordinator might report collections, your schedule coordinator production, and so on, whoever owns each statistic. This grounds the meeting immediately in where things actually stand, say you're targeting 100,000 dollars for the month and it's the 20th with only 35,000 collected, that's worth knowing right away, not discovering later.
Next, the schedule coordinator flags any schedule changes along with open time today and tomorrow. A cancellation, a newly filled slot, an opening from here to here today, another opening tomorrow, everyone should know this, especially the doctor and treatment coordinator, since that's exactly the kind of gap they'll want to fill. You might also notice, for instance, a hygienist has a periodontal appointment followed by open time, and realize they could use that opening to complete a second arch or quadrant they hadn't originally planned to finish that visit.
From there, go through every patient chart for the day, starting with hygiene. For each one: any peculiarities or specific needs, an outstanding balance to collect, and critically, any previously diagnosed treatment that hasn't been accepted yet. Say a hygiene patient at 10am was diagnosed with needing three inlays last visit, who's going to bring that up with them today? Don't assume that because they said no once, they'll say no again, you genuinely don't know that, and it's worth asking again respectfully rather than quietly dropping it. Maybe the doctor pops in during the exam to present it, or if there's no exam scheduled that day, carves out ten minutes specifically to have that conversation anyway.
Then ask: is there actually time in the schedule to properly discuss this today, or does the patient need to come back for a real consultation? If there is time, could treatment realistically begin today, and if not immediately, could time be made available if it makes sense to? This isn't about jamming procedures into a schedule that can't support them, but sometimes the doctor's schedule is lighter than expected while hygiene has several patients with outstanding treatment that day, in which case shifting a patient straight from hygiene into an opening on the doctor's schedule can genuinely save the day. Smaller opportunities count too, a patient who mentioned interest in clear aligners last visit might just need a quick conversation and a scan, not a major time commitment.
Go through this same process for every chart, using judgment on depth, a child coming in with no outstanding treatment and no history of any doesn't need an extended discussion, just a quick note on any specific preferences, like wanting a parent present in the room. Save the real depth for charts that actually have outstanding treatment to address.
As you go chart by chart, you're essentially building a running task list for the day. If I'm the financial coordinator and a patient coming in has an outstanding balance, I note that specifically so I follow up on it that day. And throughout this process, keep checking: given everything on today's docket, are we actually on track to hit our monthly goal? If not, what needs to change today to help close that gap?
Before wrapping up, everyone present notes their specific tasks, the financial coordinator might need to follow up on a specific account, for example, and then the office manager formally closes the meeting.
Here's where a lot of practices lose the real value of this meeting: the office manager goes missing after it ends. The tasks get assigned, and then nobody checks on them until end of day, or worse, the next day, which is far too late to actually course correct. The office manager should be checking in throughout the day in real time. If the doctor was supposed to step into an operatory at 11am to mention a needed consult, and they're running behind, the office manager needs to notice that in the moment and figure out how to get things back on track. That real-time follow-through, not just the planning itself, is what actually drives the meaningful shift in overall productivity, since the plan only matters if it actually gets executed.
One last piece worth covering: what to do if you're consistently falling short of a daily, weekly, or monthly goal. First, be careful about where your attention goes. It's easy to fall into a pure numbers mindset, fixating on needing a big productive procedure at 11am tomorrow, or needing to collect another 20,000 dollars, with everyone's focus narrowing entirely onto that. My honest recommendation, and this is something we tell clients consistently: if you find yourself stuck in that mindset, deliberately shift focus away from the numbers and back to why you're actually there, helping patients. Go help people, and you'll often find the numbers start resolving themselves, simply because the focus moves off money, where it shouldn't primarily sit, and back onto patients, where it should.
Practically, look at any new patients coming in that day, there's no guarantee what they'll need, but if there's time to present and start treatment same day, that's a real possibility worth watching for. Similarly, look at whether hygiene patients with unaddressed treatment could shift into an unexpected opening on the doctor's schedule right after their cleaning.
As for future scheduled treatment, today matters most, tomorrow is the next priority after that. You can always pull tomorrow's scheduled treatment forward if needed, though in practice, running this meeting well and paying close attention to who's actually coming in today usually surfaces enough opportunity that you rarely need to.
To sum this up: the entire point of the morning production meeting is genuine office-wide coordination, and the key to actually generating production is figuring out specifically where it's going to come from that day. To have real control over your practice, you first need real visibility into what's actually happening in it day to day. A properly run morning production meeting takes a little time to become second nature, but done consistently, it makes the whole practice noticeably more productive and easier to run.
One last thing worth mentioning, since I've encountered this a couple of times over the years. Occasionally, someone in a meeting focused on numbers and procedures will push back, uncomfortable with how much attention is on production specifically. The honest answer is that a practice collecting significant revenue is, by definition, helping a significant number of people, that's genuinely the whole point. Production reflects real treatment delivered to real patients, restoring their health, function, and quality of life, that's why the practice exists in the first place, and naturally, doing that well shows up in stronger production and collections as a result, not the other way around. It's rare, but if someone can't get past viewing production itself as somehow at odds with patient care, that's a genuine misunderstanding of why the practice is there in the first place.
I'd recommend downloading the handout on the episode page, and if you're subscribed to DDS Success, checking out the full video walkthrough, you'll also find this covered in our seminars. Give it a real try and see how it goes, if you have questions, I'm genuinely happy to answer them directly at jeffb@mgeonline.com, or call us at 800-640-1140.
This genuinely improves both profitability and productivity, and just as importantly, patient care, since more patients end up actually receiving the treatment they need. Try it, have fun with it, and let me know how it goes. That's everything for this week. If you want to learn more about MGE, visit us online at mgeonline.com or call 800-640-1140. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow, subscribe, or leave a review, we genuinely appreciate the feedback. Have a great week, and I'll see you at the next episode.