Keep staff by keeping salaries competitive

Practice Management. By Julie A. Jacob, amednews staff. Oct. 28, 2002.

PRACTICE MANAGEMENT

A column about keeping your practice in good health

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Knowing how much to pay your staff is a delicate balance. Pay too little, and your staff will feel underpaid and underappreciated and may jump to a practice with a better salary. Pay too much, and you'll spend too much of your hard-earned revenue on salary and wages.

However, determining what to pay your staff doesn't have to be a guessing game. Several resources are available to help you find appropriate salaries for your medical assistants, receptionists, billing clerks and practice managers.

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The simplest thing to do is to ask your colleagues what they are paying their own staff, suggested Geoff Anders, president of the Health Care Group, a health care consulting firm in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.

Keep in mind, however, that the job descriptions for the positions in your office may not exactly match the job descriptions of staff in your colleagues' practices, and thus what they pay their staff may not be appropriate for your staff, noted Anders.

In addition, it can be helpful to find out how much other types of businesses in the area -- dentist offices, law offices, accounting firms -- are paying their office staff.

"You're competing with more than other medical offices. It doesn't hurt to be in touch with general recruiting agencies," Anders said.

The Health Care Group also publishes an annual office staff salary survey, based on responses from 700 medical groups across the country, said Anders. The survey, which costs $195, breaks down average salaries for medical office staff by metropolitan area and years of experience.

The Medical Group Management Assn. also publishes a compensation survey for CEOs and practice administrators of medical groups.

State and specialty medical societies may also have information on average staff salaries, said Pamela Moore, a senior editor for Physicians Practice Inc., a physician practice management company based in Glen Burnie, Md.

A medical group should plan on paying around the average salary for the position, Moore said. "Most staff people expect to be paid the average," she said.

Dick Hansen, an MGMA managing principal, noted that setting a fair salary is only the first step.

One common mistake that physician practices often make is to forget to conduct annual salary reviews and give merit increases based on performance, he said.

Forget to conduct the performance reviews and fail to award salary increases based on merit, and your staff will soon become frustrated, he said.

If you're not paying your staff a fair salary, you'll probably quickly find out through high staff turnover. Turnover rate, in fact, is one way that Austin Heart, a 26-physician group in Austin, Texas, keeps tabs on whether the staff salaries it is paying are competitive.

"We do a turnover report, and if we find the reason why people are leaving is because of better compensation elsewhere, we will adjust it upward. Or we look at the amount of time that a position goes unfilled," said Steve Gornik, practice manager for Austin Heart.

Gornik also checks with professional associations for information on average salaries for staff in technical positions. The group tries to pay a bit above the average salaries in order to attract and keep good staff, he said. However, he noted, salary is only one component of the overall compensation package. Good benefits have to go along with a fair salary, he said.

"You have to be careful," said Gornik. "You can be paying a market rate in salary, but a below-market rate in benefits."

Jacob served as a staff writer for AMNews from 1996 to 2002.