Practice Experience Podcast: Clinic Leadership: Employee Benefits and Impact, Part 1

Benefits are a big part of any employment package; you’re probably going to struggle to get full-time employees if you’re not offering benefits that allow your team members to take care of their individual and their family’s physical, mental, and financial well-being. However, rising costs are forcing employers (particularly smaller ones) to look at different approaches to offering employees health coverage and other benefits without taking a serious hit to their bottom line. 

In part one of their conversation on the Practice Experience Podcast, host Dr. Heidi Jannenga, PT, DPT, ATC, Co-Founder and Chief Clinical Officer at WebPT, talks with Dr. Larry Benz, Founder at Confluent, and Dr. Brian Adams, Owner at Adams Sports Medicine, to talk about the evolving world of employee benefits and how companies can adapt to meet the shifting needs and demands of staff and their families. 

On competing with bigger companies

Brian: What we're trying to do is create an environment here in a private practice setting to give any of our clinicians no reason to pursue other employment. We have everything that can compete, at least to a marginal level of what a larger entity can offer… anyone would agree that when you create stability, when you create a happy workforce, it really makes things a lot smoother for everybody.

On the place of benefits within your company as a whole

Larry: I've always taken the position I want good benefits, and I want to treat employees right, but I don't want benefits to trump a good environment where you can flourish and thrive. Because if you do that, you're moving the needle to an incentive-based compensation via benefits rather than the environment that you're trying to create…I was in the military; the last thing you want is employees only staying because you have good benefits. I mean, that does not promote a healthy work environment.

On how companies can understand employee needs for benefits 

Larry: I think if I could really summarize it, though, whether you're a large organization or small organization, you need to personalize three things. One is you need to understand what motivates your individual therapists. We like to use motivational sort cards to understand how recognition as a benefit on top of the monetary compensation benefits works, and what is the driver of their motivation. I think that's important.

I think the second part of that is what are they more sensitive and have optionality over? Do they want paid APTA dues and unlimited continued education? And they're willing to trade off other benefits for that. 

The third point is that you can never lose the pulse of your clinicians because in a time right now of limited resources, shortages of PTs, retention and re-recruiting and understanding is very dynamic of a process and benefits and cop is one component of that sort of multifactorial situation. 

On keeping connection with employees in larger organizations

Brian: Not that Larry can't meet with the leadership and the people that are within his institution, but we have 21 employees. So it's a little bit easier for me to, you know, be elbow to elbow with my staff and find out really what drives them and where the concerns might lie. And that really does; it creates a direct pipeline to that conversation.

Larry: You raise a great point. It certainly is a lot easier for small organizations to have sort of open communication… I think that you can do it; as a larger example, you gotta be incredibly intentional. It is micro pulse surveys, which is what we've used a lot of times for success. 

On helping employees with student debt

Larry: There are some really innovative third-party administrative services that have scaled to this, and they're offering the ability to do it to smaller organizations for as little as $200 per employee per year, is my understanding, which—given the tax consequences of all this—is a very favorable way to do it. So I'm excited about that.

(It) doesn't solve the problem of the escalating tuition and the inability for salaries to stay locked step up with tuition. But it certainly goes a good way toward handling some of the debt angst and concern, and anxiety that a lot of employees have when they come into your organization.

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