Mastering the Meeting: Adding Value to Departmental Staff Meetings
Summary
The Boston Public Health Commission (the city health department for Boston, Massachusetts) consists of six disease-specific bureaus supported by several administrative offices. Staff from one such administrative office embarked on a quality improvement (QI) initiative to improve staff perception of meeting value by at least 10% as measured on a scale of 1 (not valuable) to 5 (very valuable) over 4 months.
In fall 2015, the office consisted of three unique yet related sub-offices. Each sub-office was supervised by a director and had a different work plan. This layered office structure with so few (12) staff presented challenges to cross-office communication, and office staff members felt dissatisfied with monthly office meetings.
The lessons learned from this project are applicable to other health departments interested in improving internal practices to strengthen their work and be more efficient.
Ebekozien, O. Public Health Quality Improvement Exchange. Mastering the Meeting: Adding Value to Departmental Staff Meetings. Wed, 06/14/2017 - 16:16. Available at http://phqix.org/content/mastering-meeting-adding-value-departmental-staff-meetings. Accessed April 24, 2024.
Comments
It seems like meetings have
It seems like meetings have always had a bad rap, and rightly so, most of them are done poorly. It's tough to think of good measures to assess meeting quality - but - the measures you identified, 1) whether the office successfully completed all items on the agenda as planned and 2) whether next steps from the previous meeting were completed, seem to be excellent measures for meeting quality. These measures, and your process, are easily replicable too. Nice job.