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- Are you Zoomed out?
- Are you tired of meetings where it seems nothing gets done?
- Are you frustrated by the sheer volume of information coming across your desk?
This is often the result of unstructured communication. Where people just show up and throw up. There is no agenda, their points are not clear, and your brain power is strained trying to sort through all of the noise to get to the “meat” of the communication.
How do you fix this? Let me share two ways:
First, have an email template that you follow for important communications, where you want something accomplished. In the book Take Back Your Life by Sally McGhee, she describes the PASS model.
What is the Purpose of the email?
What Action do you want taken?
What is the Supporting documentation?
A clear Subject line.
If you slow down and ensure that you are using each of these segments in the writing of your emails and memo’s, you will be surprised at how much more effective they will become at driving your results. When you teach your team how to use this, you will be relieved at how less frustrating their communication to you is.
Second, most organizations have a set of recurring meetings (or they should). If you can create a standardized agenda (and template), you can keep these meetings on track. Let’s talk about accountability. When you have a team accountability meeting you can drive great results by having the subjects covered and the data source standardized.
If you are in the Revenue Cycle, for example, you can track your teams output to goals, ranking the top performers at the top and the low performers at the bottom. I promise, the ones at the bottom want to get off the bottom. This can be number of claims processed, or denials worked or even things like charge accuracy. Measure it and make the measurement visible and watch what gets done.
A simple agenda might be:
- Overall team accountability last period – actual results vs. goal.
- Individual accountability ranked and reviewed – actual results vs. goal.
- Goals for the next period
- Commitment
- End
These are two simple ways to reduce the overwhelming communication that most of us receive by crafting a structure and helping your self and your team create clarity and action through communication.
If you would like to explore simple ways to get this overwhelm under control lets get in touch.
