Within your wellness business or organization, managing the schedule of multiple providers and supervisors can be a large undertaking.  Coordinating appointments, team meetings, and time off for each individual provider is a complicated process and requires time and a comprehensive calendar platform.  When managing a team of wellness providers, a company shared calendar is an absolute necessity to ensure maximum efficiency and organization within your wellness business.

Take the following steps to effectively implement a shared calendar in your business, in order to streamline your scheduling and workflows.

Benefits of a Shared Calendar for Wellness Businesses

✔️ Improves communication and efficiency

Having access to your team’s calendar makes it easy to schedule meetings, appointments, and calls, without spending time on back and forth communication trying to find an available meeting time.  Additionally, if you need to reschedule a meeting, the changes are made automatically and will be reflected within your teams’ calendar, eliminating the need for the extra communication.  

Not only does having a company shared calendar improve internal communication, but it helps streamline scheduling processes with clients as well.  Administrative assistants or receptionists with access to the shared calendar can easily give clients a picture of providers’ availability and avoid scheduling conflicts.  With a comprehensive calendar software, once an assistant schedules an appointment, it should automatically load into the provider’s calendar to be viewable to them from their account. Healthie allows you to access this technology for free with our starter plan so you can discover what is right for you.

✔️ Allows for both short- and long-term planning

Having a company shared calendar allows your team to schedule out each week in terms of client follow-ups, initial sessions, meetings, and projects.  Having a comprehensive overview of each week allows supervisors, providers, and assistants to understand their weekly workload, and plan pre- and post-appointment tasks for each client they will see.

Aside from planning for the short-term, shared calendars are crucial for planning for your business’ future.  If providers are taking a leave of absence, vacation, maternity leave, etc, using a shared calendar allows you to reassign responsibilities to the remaining providers in your team.  Doing this well in advance allows an easier transition for both providers and clients, as you can notify clients earlier of the change, as well as ensure other providers are ready for the increased workload and adjusted schedule.

Ways to Utilize a Company Shared Calendar in your Wellness Practice

1. Find the best shared calendar software to use within your team

The first step to using a shared calendar is finding the right one for your team and your business.  When searching the best business calendar software to use, you’ll quickly realize there are a host of features and capabilities available, and it can be difficult to choose the right fit for your practice.

First and foremost, determine what features are essential for your business’ calendar.  What features are an absolute necessity for your calendar software, and which are a beneficial add-on?  Identifying this prior to selecting your platform will eliminate time spent on deciding between platforms with a plethora of different features.  Common shared calendar features include:

• Cloud-based
• Sync with outside calendars such as Google Cal, iCal, and Outlook
• View other providers’ schedules and availability
• Create group appointments with multiple providers
• Schedule appointments for other providers on your team
• Create different appointment and meeting types for your wellness business
• Send clients appointment reminders and confirmations

The best calendar software  should be comprehensive and include other features that are beneficial to your wellness practice.  These could include client engagement features, telehealth appointments, and billing and insurance capabilities.  A platform integrated with these additional features will help streamline business operations while improving scheduling capabilities. Our free Starter plan provides all of that and more, click here to sign up today.

2. Mark your availability, one time and repeating

Marking your availability on your company shared calendar allows for full transparency and easy communication within your team.  Team members and administrators are able to see when you’re available for team meetings, one-on-one check-ins, and company events by taking a quick look at the shared calendar.  Setting your availability also allows you to clearly establish your work-life boundaries; set the times you are actually available to work, to avoid any confusion or scheduling outside of work hours.  

Marking your availability is mainly important for client scheduling purposes.  Setting your availability within the company shared calendar makes scheduling appointments a seamless process; whether you schedule for clients, an administrative assistant does it, or clients schedule themselves, having your availability clearly marked eliminates the back and forth of trying to find a time, and anyone scheduling during a time you are unavailable.

3. Set up recurring team meetings

Leverage your company shared calendar to schedule regular team meetings, in which the whole team can be in attendance.  Many times, team meetings will happen on the fly, with only the team members who happen to present at the time.  But, when a shared calendar for your business is introduced, it becomes easier to schedule meeting times when all providers are available.

Having regular team meetings ensures that your team is creating effective internal communication and is taking the time for necessary discussions and clarifications.  Within your shared calendar, you can easily give an agenda for each meeting, to ensure they don’t go over the allotted time and everyone stays on schedule.  

4. Stay up to date on your coworker’s schedule

Having access to your employees’ schedules is essential for regulating provider workload.  As an administrator or supervisor, viewing your providers’ schedules each week allows you to take stock of what each of them has on their plate for the week, whether it be appointments with clients, projects, webinars, or team meetings.  It offers an opportunity to get a good sense of their obligations, check in to make sure tasks and projects are completed, and evaluate client progress based on follow-ups from the week.

As a provider, checking on your colleagues’ schedules is also an important part of working in a group practice.  Having a company shared calendar with coworkers is an important step in establishing open communication lines, while also setting boundaries for collaboration and communication.  It helps ensure that when you reach out to them with a task, check-in on project status, or just ask a question, you’re not interrupting an appointment or other meeting.  On the other hand, having an understanding of your fellow providers’ schedules allows you to better find times to collaborate on cases and projects, and spend time team-building.  

Healthie’s Organization Calendar Software

Healthie’s Organization Calendar enables each member of an organization to view the schedule and availability of other providers in an organization. Combined with other back-office tools and client engagement features, Healthie is the most comprehensive all-in-one practice management solution for group practices and organizations. Explore how Healthie can help you and set up a Free Starter Plan today by clicking here.

Administrators within Healthie are able to adjust settings and permissions for each provider/member account.

Depending on which permissions are enabled, features of Healthie’s Organization Calendar software include:

• Ability for organization members to access both their individual and the organizational calendars
• Option to set and view one time and/or recurring availability across organization members
• Organization members, including providers and administrative assistant, can manage the appointments of anyone in an organization
• Members with the role “administrator” can change the availability of anyone in an organization

The Healthie Organization Calendar is cloud-based and is accessible from our mobile app and web platform.  To learn more about how to leverage the Healthie’s shared calendar for wellness businesses as well as other core features of Healthie’s Organization plan, watch our deep-dive video here.