In a learning system, the right combination of culture and process enables your team to share knowledge and take action to improve. Your daily huddles play a critical role in sustaining a safe and reliable team.
Huddles provide a regular opportunity for face-to-face communication among the caregivers and others on a team. It’s a social process that reinforces, "We’re a team, we’re friends, here’s what you need to know, what we’re doing today, we have the right people, tools, information to go do it... now let’s go have a great shift."
Participants should leave feeling, "I know the plan and what’s going on today, and if something changes it’s not a big surprise." Surprises in a risky, stressful situation are bad.
Still asking, "Why huddle?" Here are even more reasons:
Establish a predictable venue for having the right conversation with a local team and communicating consistent information to the entire team, everyday
Drive team formation and team behaviors
Identify and share operational and clinical risks in a timely manner
Speak up and give everyone a voice
Set a positive tone
Everyone feels respected
Develop psychological safety
We did a culture survey. What role do huddles play in improving or sustaining our team culture?
Huddles are essential to creating Improvement Readiness through fostering a robust learning environment. They provide an opportunity for all members of the team to ask questions, offer suggestions or observations, and to receive answers or clarifications about issues of concern.
Regular huddles are integral to strong leadership and may influence scores in the Local Leadership domain. Due to the busy nature of our work environments, it is quite likely that the Manager has most of their face-to-face contact with front-line staff during daily huddles. In a work setting with daily or shift-based huddles, staff members will always know when and where to find their local leader. It is also an opportunity for the manager to provide quick, positive feedback to staff (“Lisa -- I heard you did a great job with the family of patient Smith last night - thanks so much for that”) which is often lacking.
Huddles are one of the best ways of improving communication among team members, so if scores in the Teamwork Domain of the culture survey are low, it is likely that huddles could help them to improve. Some questions to ask would be whether or not all the people who need to be in the huddle are attending, and what are the communication issues that are not being resolved.
Want to learn more about huddles?