Compensation Models That Truly Motivate

Compensation is one of the most complex operational systems in your dental practice. When implemented effectively, compensation can be a catalyst for growth, motivation, high morale, and enhanced performance.

The way you compensate your team sends a potent message about the vision and culture of your practice. In short, it personifies you, your goals, and your focus as the leader. A strong compensation system reflects your values and beliefs regarding individual recognition, value, and support. Your choices communicate what kind of team members you want in your practice and which behaviors are valued.

However, compensation is also an emotionally charged topic that magnifies very personal issues such as respect, self-worth, appreciation, and validation. As a result, it’s not unusual to see the approach to this important system powered by guilt, confusion, and fear. With that in mind, we find a lot of bad habits centered on team compensation in our dental community.

Top 5 bad practice compensation habits

Insisting on entitlement pay versus a merit increase

Setting an expectation that once per year your team can expect a 2–5% cost of living increase, no matter how the practice has improved (or not) or how the individual staff member has improved (or not), is referred to as “entitlement pay.”

The original wage and benefits are offered to a person to do the job they were hired to do, so increases in those wages can only be merited by additional growth. Therefore, entitlement wages produce no motivation to grow, while merit increases celebrate new levels of success and achievement, both personally and professionally.

Compensating by the gut (or tumm yache)

If there are no set expectations, benchmarks, or goals to interpret success, then decisions about compensation can only be made emotionally, through judgment and perception. And judgment is hard-wired to miss the mark.

• If the dentist is motivated by fear, they may feel held hostage in wage negotiation.
• If they’re a “glass half empty” pessimist, scarcity will rule, and there will never be a precedent to celebrate success.
• If the dentist must feel liked to feel successful, no performance expectations will ever be enforced.

This leads to managing by the gut, which never works for the leaders or the team.

Treating everyone the same, thereby celebrating mediocrity

Whether wage, bonus, or benefit, if you treat all of your team equally, you’re treating most of them unequally. When everyone gets the same, what happens to your poor performers? Your superstars? In an effort to treat everyone fairly, it’s easy to homogenize the group or motivate them to the middle. To be effective, compensation must inspire team members to move to the right of the bell curve.

Pulling wage increases out of the owner’s pocket, instead of increased profitability

This aligns with the bad habit of entitlement pay. For team members to experience growth, the practice must grow! If your practice hasn’t seen improvements in profitability and you incur new expenses because of a salary increase, that increase must come directly from the owner’s share. If you continue to do this, you’ve trained your team into believing their efforts don’t affect the outcomes of the practice, and that’s dangerous and untrue. If your team exceeds personal job description expectations, it will directly affect your practice. When that occurs, they deserve a salary increase!

Little or no communication

If you want a team member to “go postal,” never communicate to them, good or bad. There’s nothing worse than a leader who sets unclear or no expectations, doesn’t praise progress, and then announces no salary increase when the team least suspects it. Behind cries for higher wages are almost always feelings of lack of appreciation, inclusion, or respect. You want a team to be motivated? Talk to them!

Don’t beat yourself up if you recognize any of these bad habits in your practice. This is your opportunity to enhance employee motivation and contribution in a year that demands new levels of excellence from you and your team.

6 ways you can turn things around

• Set a vision and goals for where you want your practice to be by the end of any given year. Involve your team. Make sure they know which individual and group benchmarks need to be met to achieve these goals. Incentivize great performance by creating a potential pool for individual merit increases that are based on the achievement of these annual goals.
• Make sure you have all the written tools needed to guide your team members to new levels of success. This includes customized job descriptions, statistical interpretation of growth, training plans, progress notes, etc.
• Learn the fine art of effective growth conferencing for your and your team’s sake. If you haven’t already, make sure you carve out time to meet with each team member to discuss goals for personal and professional growth for the rest of the year. Make sure they can see how their efforts will result in the practice achieving success. Check in with them throughout the year to ensure they’re focused and winning. End the year with a salary review to highlight strengths and opportunities and reward compensation increases when warranted.
• Catch your team in the act of doing things very right or almost right and communicate, communicate, communicate!
• Create a culture that demands continuous improvement and recognizes and rewards efforts big and small.
• And finally, break the nasty, bad habits of compensation that hold you and your team back.

Respect and honor your team. Compensate them based on merit and growth and watch them reach for the stars!