18 Sept 2017
Jenny Stuart explains why ensuring your staff are fairly rewarded is vital to ensure your practice runs smoothly.
Jenny Stuart
Job Title
IMAGE: Air Images/Shutterstock.
Deciding how much to pay your clinical and non-clinical staff can be difficult. With vets in increasingly short supply, should you be paying more to attract new recruits or retain your existing team?
Fiona Briault is director of people, operations and partnerships at the Pets at Home Veterinary Group. Individual Vets4Pets and Companion Care practices are free to set their own salaries and other reward perks for their employees, but Fiona and her team try to provide them with a framework and guidance to support that individual decision-making. This includes ensuring the culture in the practice is one all colleagues enjoy and thrive in.
She said: “Ideally, you would be aware of the average salaries being paid nationally, but also what your competitors are paying locally, so you can offer a better package, and remember it isn’t just about salary.
“There is, however, a shortage of reliable data for reward benchmarking in the profession, which is why things like the SPVS Salary Survey are so important.”
A flick through the recruitment pages in Veterinary Times will show packages including generous CPD, subsidised gym membership and accommodation.
Tim Harrison, managing director of White Cross Vets, offers a slightly higher salary than the local competition, along with a 6.5% non-contributory pension, a whole range of perks, Christmas parties and even trips to the south of France. He believes creating a family culture and looking after staff well-being makes sound economic sense.
He said: “Recruitment and retention is perhaps the biggest threat to practices today and it can only get worse with Brexit.
“I would say salaries are increasing to reflect supply and demand, but there is just not enough profitability in most practices to allow for much increase in the total wage bill.
“Add to that the difficulty in recruiting vets and many practices are forced to either drive vets harder to reach an increased turnover, or try to reduce receptionist or nursing costs.”
Alan Robinson from Vet Dynamics added: “In a well-performing, first opinion practice, we advise the wage bill should not exceed more than 40% of turnover.
“A lean practice may manage closer to 35%, but if you exceed 45%, it would suggest you are either overstaffed or underperforming. Hospitals or specialist practices may vary, but it is a ratio you need to track. However, with a chronic shortage of vets pushing salaries up, while competition between practices drives prices down, normal rules become harder to apply.”
Registered veterinary nurses are also in short supply and this is pushing salaries up. However, nurse salaries are still much lower than vets’ and Alan feels practices can turn this to their advantage.
“Nurses have been chronically underpaid for too long,” he said. “But if you are paying them more, you need to use them to do some of the vets’ work, which can, in turn, improve your turnover to wage ratio. The only problem may be persuading your vets to work differently.”
Fiona, Tim and Alan all agree the least well paid, and arguably most important group in the practice, are the receptionists. This is, in part, because receptionists have traditionally been a disparate group, often working part-time and even less motivated by money than the clinical staff, but this is changing.
Alan said: “The number of excellent, properly trained receptionists in practice is increasing, but to sustain that, and attract the right calibre of person, they will need to be paid more.
“The problem right now is seeing where the money can come from to support that.”
Another tricky area is how transparent you are about company salaries. Fiona recommends publishing wage bands for a given role, but allowing yourself flexibility within that.
“Being able to demonstrate to colleagues how they may progress along a salary scale and additional training they can access to develop further are all great ways of attracting and retaining the best people,” said Fiona.
Fiona also believes being clear about any annual pay review timings and whether these are linked to appraisals – plus clear, transparent and inclusive bonus schemes – are also critical to colleague satisfaction.
She added: “For the reception team, it may be a flat cash reward if client satisfaction rises by a given amount, or the team helps clients select a certain number of health plans.
“For a vet, it may be related to fees generated, but while that may drive turnover in the short term, without some element of client satisfaction built in, it could be detrimental to the business over time.”
Some practices, or smaller branches of larger groups, do pay their vets almost entirely according to fees generated. However, in a larger practice it can be hard, for instance, to compare the consulting vet to the surgeon turning over multiple operations.
Tim is wary of individual bonuses, preferring to reward the whole team at White Cross Vets and, in the case of his management team, this is related to staff turnover. He agrees transparency is key and that it is important all staff understand the basic economics of a practice. Their leadership training includes appreciation of the costs of running a practice and how much income has to be generated before a profit exists.
How you reward out-of-hours (OOH) working is another consideration. Those practices that do their own OOH are likely to be doing so because they believe this is best for their patients and it is important their employees buy in to this philosophy.
Some practices share the returns, splitting any OOH fees with the vets on call. If you offer your own OOH, you are likely to reduce the pool of potential recruits as some vets just won’t apply. Others appreciate OOH is where they will get the best clinical experience and this, together with a fair rota and time off in lieu, may be more important than financial reward.
Neither Fiona nor Tim believe a significant gender pay gap within veterinary practice exists, although both agree a gap between part-time and full-time salaries exists that may be likely to be gender-biased as more women seek part-time work.
“Looking outside veterinary medicine, women as a whole are less well paid in many sectors,” said Fiona. “But often, this doesn’t happen until they take time off to have children and then the gap can widen for the remainder of their careers – particularly if they return part-time.
“I do feel it should be possible to offer any job part-time, rewarded in exactly the same way as a full-time position. Start with a full-time job description and reward package, and then look for people to fill it, offering the same salary and benefits pro rata if, for whatever reason, it becomes part-time. Finding the right person for the role, male or female, and being flexible with how this can work for the best candidates and for the practice overall is the key.”
Alan agrees in principle, but feels employers will offer any terms in the current climate to attract or retain staff.
He said: “It is tempting to agree a parent can leave at 3pm to pick up children from school, but this must be sustainable. Don’t create a role that suits the part-time employee, but is unworkable over time and builds resentment among others in the team.”
Increasingly, businesses are offering packages tailored to individual staff. The national workforce is, for the first time, spanning four generations – from school leavers to older workers who choose not to retire – and these different groups are likely to have different motivations. A 30-something mother may want flexible working, whereas new graduates may prioritise support and training.
“Some of the larger groups are offering relatively low salaries to new graduates, but combining this with a very structured support system and masses of CPD, almost like an apprenticeship,” added Alan.
“This can be harder for an independent to achieve, but we are encouraging practices to partner up and take four or five new graduates between them, offering a guaranteed pay scale over their first two to three years, combined with support and varied experience across a range of different types of practice.”
Setting salaries and remuneration in today’s veterinary practice is not an exact science in a far from perfect world. However, Fiona, Tim and Alan agree reliable data is in short supply. SPVS is urging as many people as possible to take part in its Salary Survey as, the more participants, the more reliable the results.
