The Meetings You Think You Don’t Need
How regular team meetings can strengthen culture, improve retention, and create a better patient experience
Ask a Roomful of Dentists
Ask a roomful of dentists whether they want better team communication, more efficient teamwork, highly engaged employees, less turnover, and a consistent five-star patient experience, and I doubt many hands would stay down.
Then ask how many regular, structured team meetings they hold.
The hands tend to disappear.
In my work with dental practices, I continue to encounter teams that rarely—sometimes never—meet as a team. The reasons are understandable. The schedule is full. Production matters. Closing the office for a meeting is an opportunity cost. Patients need to be seen. And, hey, we talk to each other all day long anyway.
But talking to one another during a busy clinical day is not the same as communicating as a team.
Increasingly, in our digital era, research suggests that the simple act of bringing people together may be far more valuable than we realize.
There Is a Business Case for Being in the Same Room
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services surveyed 425 business decision-makers in May 2023 about the value of in-person interaction. When respondents were asked about the greatest benefits of meeting in person internally:
74% identified stronger relationships between employees and teams,
60% greater collaboration,
55% stronger organizational culture, and
54% greater employee engagement.
In related findings, 88% agreed that in-person interactions are critical to ensuring positive, long-term relationships between coworkers.
Think about those findings in the context of your practice: relationships, collaboration, culture, and engagement. Those aren’t peripheral issues in dentistry. They are the practice. Dentistry is a team-based business.
A patient may come to your practice because of the dentist, but their experience is created by dozens of interactions with the team: the person who answers the phone, the employee who greets them, the assistant who seats them, the hygienist who listens to them, the person who explains treatment, and the team member who helps them understand their financial options.
When those people work as a team, patients feel it. When they don’t, patients feel that too.
“But We Talk All Day.”
Yes, you do.
You talk about Mrs. Jones being late. You ask whether Room 3 has been turned over. Someone needs an exam in hygiene. The lab case hasn’t arrived. The insurance company is on hold. Your next patient is waiting.
That’s communication, not necessarily connection.
A team meeting creates something the normal workday rarely provides: protected time to stop doing the work long enough to talk about how you are doing the work together.
It gives the team time to ask: What’s working? What’s frustrating us? Where are patients getting confused? What are we hearing repeatedly at the front desk? Where is the schedule breaking down? What could we do differently? Who needs help?
Culture Is Being Built Whether You Meet or Not
Every dental practice has a culture. The question is whether you create it intentionally or let it develop accidentally.
When teams don’t have a regular forum for communication, information often travels through siloed conversations. One employee tells another. Someone complains to a coworker. The front desk blames the clinical team. The clinical team blames the front desk. Employees start solving problems independently, and before long there are three different ways to do the same thing.
Eventually, those little communication gaps become “the way we do things around here.”
That’s culture.
Regular team meetings interrupt that unintentional culture creation process.
They bring conversations out of the hallway and into the room. Instead of talking about one another, employees learn to talk to one another. Instead of assuming why something happened, they can ask. Instead of one person deciding how to handle a problem, the team can develop a solution together.
And something else begins to happen: people start to understand one another’s jobs.
The scheduling coordinator begins to understand why adding “just one more patient” creates chaos in the clinical area. The assistant understands what happens at the front desk when treatment information isn’t communicated clearly. The hygienist hears from the front desk what patients are saying about their experience when they call after an appointment.
Those connections build empathy, and empathy builds teamwork.
Meetings Also Send a Message: Your Voice Matters
Another reason team meetings matter has very little to do with agendas. They give employees a voice. Engagement isn’t created with birthday lunches, gift cards, or another motivational poster in the break room. People become engaged when they believe their work matters, understand where the organization is going, and know their ideas and concerns are heard.
A well-run team meeting says, "You aren’t simply here to get through today’s patients." You are part of building this practice. That distinction matters. The Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research found that 54% of respondents identified greater employee engagement as a benefit of meeting in person, while 55% cited stronger organizational culture.
For a profession struggling with employee retention, those numbers deserve our attention. Will holding team meetings guarantee that no employee ever leaves? Of course not. But if we want people to feel connected to a practice, we have to create opportunities for connection.
And Then There is The Patient
One mistake we make in dentistry is separating the employee experience from the patient experience. They aren’t separate.
A team that communicates well with one another communicates better with patients. A team that understands the practice’s priorities can reinforce the same messages. A team that solves problems together creates more consistent systems. A team that trusts one another can recover more gracefully when something goes wrong. And a team that enjoys working together creates an atmosphere patients recognize the minute they walk through the door.
Patients may not know you hold team meetings every month, but they know what the results feel like.
The Most Expensive Meeting May Be the One You Never Hold
Dentists often tell me they cannot afford to block production time for a team meeting. I understand the concern. But I encourage them to calculate the other side of that cost equation.
What does employee turnover cost? What does poor treatment handoff cost? What does an unhappy patient cost? What does an avoidable scheduling problem cost? What does it cost when the dentist spends hours putting out fires that the team could have prevented together? And what does it cost when a good employee finally decides, “Nobody listens around here,” and leaves?
Suddenly, a few hours of team time don’t look quite so expensive.
A team meeting doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it does need protected time, structure, and a leader/facilitator willing to listen, create a safe space to talk, build connections, and focus on solutions. Practices that hold morning huddles, monthly meetings, and team development days perform better than those that don’t. It doesn’t matter if you have three employees; meetings are essential because each of those three employees performs a different job in a different part of the practice, and they must be brought together regularly to work smoothly and productively.
The real purpose of a team meeting isn’t to meet. It’s to build a team.
And if the research shows that bringing people together strengthens relationships, collaboration, culture, and engagement, perhaps the real question is: can you afford not to?
References:
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services / Amex GBT. Investing in Travel to Strengthen Culture and Increase Engagement. 2023.
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services / Amex GBT. Investing in Travel to Drive Innovation. 2024.
Lipman, V. Psychology Today. In Praise of the In-Person Meeting. 2025.
Ferguson, V. Meetings & Incentives Worldwide. The Power of Human Connection: The Benefits of In-person Events. 2025.
Working note: The HBR Analytic Services research was conducted in the context of business travel and in-person business interaction. The dental-practice applications in the article are the author’s interpretation and should not be presented as findings specific to dental practices.
