You don't lose them over the pay

4 hours ago

4 min read

It's Friday afternoon and what you really want is to go home. Then your best assistant sits down across from you. She has been with you for seven years, and now she tells you, a little apologetically, that she has an offer from another clinic. A bit more pay, and one fixed day off every week.

Notice what you think first. For most of us it isn't what she's missing, but what we'll have to pay to make her stay. That thought is completely natural. It's also where the problem starts.

This is the situation I run into most often right now when I visit clinics. The worry is about holding on to the people who make the day work.

This spring the collective agreement for publicly employed dentists in Denmark landed, with a general pay rise of just over six percent, a flexible benefits scheme, and a third day off for a sick child on top. Whatever it is called where you are, public employers set a floor. And you are standing in your clinic, needing to find the same people in the same labor market.

What you think you are short of

Here is what most owners do. They work out whether they can match the number, add a couple of percent on top, tighten something somewhere else, and hope it holds her for another year.

I want to challenge that premise. When a good employee leaves, pay is rarely the whole story. It is the easy explanation to give, for her and for you, because a number is something you can understand and compare. What makes people stay is harder to put on a payslip: knowing what you are allowed to decide yourself, being able to plan your own week, feeling that your boss sees you.

The missing layer is the working conditions nobody has put into words yet. And this is where you have an advantage over the public employer that you simply are not using.

What a big employer cannot do quickly

A public employer cannot give your assistant every Wednesday afternoon off because she picks up her children. It has to travel through several layers and fit into a staff policy first. You can decide it on Monday.

That is your real competitive advantage. You can shape a working life that fits the person you want to keep: a fixed day off, a say in her own week, a course she picked herself, responsibility for an area she cares about. All of it things you can say yes to over a cup of coffee, while a big employer has to run it through a system.

I learned this the hard way. In my first years as an owner I thought loyalty was something you bought. I handed out raises whenever someone got restless, and then wondered why they still looked around. It took me longer than I want to admit to understand that I was giving them money for a problem that was about something else entirely. They wanted to know where they stood. That does not go on a payslip.

How I would go about it

Start by asking, before anyone resigns. Set aside half an hour with each of your key people and ask one question: what would it take for you to still be here in five years? Then you keep quiet and listen. The answers are almost never "more pay" on its own. Something comes up about the schedule, about being heard, about being allowed to develop.

Take one of the answers and do something about it within a month. Not ten things, one. A fixed day off. An area of responsibility you actually hand over. A plan for the course she has mentioned twice.

And write down what you agree on. Not because it is a contract, but because it makes the arrangement real for both of you. What she might have experienced as loose goodwill becomes something she can count on.

Pay has to be fair, that is not up for discussion. But a fair salary will not hold on to an employee who feels overlooked. A boss who has shaped a working life she cannot get anywhere else makes a far bigger difference.

When did you last ask your best employee what it would take for her to stay, before she was sitting there with an offer in her hand?

Schedules and leadership challenges

This is one of the places where "that is not fair" shows up. The other one is the schedule. I will be writing more about that over the fall.

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