By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN
In talking with nurse managers today, they all want to spend more time with their staff and on their units. But finding that time can be challenging. In focus groups we recently conducted for my AONL plenary, we learned that attending meetings ranked first in how nurse manager spend their time. Interestingly, of all of the items on the list of nurse manager activities, it is the one where organizations have the most control.
Yet, despite the lack of apparent outcomes or reasons for some of these meetings, nurse managers are still required to attend. Nurse managers often leave meetings feeling de-energized and perhaps even angry that their time has been wasted. It can become difficult to maintain enthusiasm and engagement when this occurs. Unproductive meetings are also costly to organizations in terms of leader time.
In some organizations, numerous meetings are normalized into the culture, whether needed or not. Sometimes, leaders believe that the only way to stay in the loop in their organizations is to attend all scheduled meetings personally. For some leaders, attending meetings will be the core of their work. However, most leaders have many other responsibilities that get pushed aside. This is especially true for frontline leaders who now spend up to 70% of their day on staffing, scheduling, and recruitment. Little time is left to coach and mentor staff.
A good exercise we used in one organization I worked in was to calculate the cost of a meeting in terms of the time of participants. We found few meetings where we could honestly say there was a positive return on investment. With this knowledge, our default shifted to the question – what is the least costly way to accomplish the end goal here?
To begin rethinking meetings in your organization, I have the following recommendations for senior leaders:
- View time spent on the unit as “protected time” and work to promote as much protected time as possible.
- Review the meeting schedules of all frontline leaders to assess how much time is spent off the unit.
- Develop a divide-and-conquer approach by assigning nurse managers to specific committees.
- Work to shorten necessary meetings from one hour to 30 or 45 minutes.
- Teach nurse managers to review agendas before a meeting to see if they need to be present.
- Create good communication systems, so there is no FOMO if a meeting is missed.
- Remind nurse managers that when they attend a meeting – they are giving up time that could be spent on other administrative activities.
- Make it okay to say no to meetings.
Given the work demands in our current healthcare environment, rethinking meetings is low-hanging fruit for regaining administrative time. Numerous meetings are embedded in healthcare organizations’ cultures, but this paradigm needs to be disrupted. Our nurse managers are overwhelmed and burned out. They are asking for our help, and revisiting the need for meeting attendance is a good place to start.
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