Team training tips

In our earlier piece on giving the proper resources to the staff, we discussed training, technology and repetitions as tools to improve employee performance.  Here, we dig deeper into training.  

Obviously, training takes a number of forms and can be conveyed in a bunch of ways, but we will point out some useful techniques that we’ve seen used.  Hopefully, you can use them to apply within your own practice.  Here are some of our favorites:

Annual meeting fails: lessons learned

We’ve gotten several comments looking for more mistakes made during annual meetings and lessons learned from those missteps (aside from the alcohol fueled missteps and mistakes).  We here at the Engine aren’t afraid to admit our mistakes and we’ve made our share so here are more meeting fails:

Doctor’s meeting, New Orleans.  This was around the year 2000 when WiFi access wasn’t ubiquitous like it is today.  But at the time, internet access was prominent enough that we simply assumed that we could plug a network cable into a wall jack and get online.  Big mistake.  I had scheduled a breakout presentation to demo our new online reporting product.  And since this was a Saturday presentation, the one guy in the whole hotel who knew what to do was off and unavailable.  Quite clearly, doing a demo of an online product doesn’t go well when there is no online component.  We muddled through, but I got some poor reviews.

Lesson learned: Test extensively beforehand.  See if the resort will let you into the exact room early to do a quick test of everything.  And have a backup plan.  If something crashes, have something available that doesn’t require you to be online or have power or whatever.