THE MILLIONAIRE DENTIST PODCAST

EPISODE 16 TRANSCRIPTION

Announcer:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Millionaire Dentist podcast, brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. On this podcast, we break down the world of dentistry finances, and business practices to help you become the millionaire dentist you deserve to be. Please be advised, we do speak with an honest tongue and may not be safe for work. Now here's your host, Alan Berry.

Alan Berry:

Hey, everyone. I'm your host, Alan Barry, and I want to thank you for taking a few minutes to listen to another episode of the Millionaire Dentist podcast. On today, I think we have some really, really good tips for you. On the show today, we are going to find out if your HR issues are being managed properly. We have Adrian Twig from Bent Erickson and Associates to help us do just that. For almost 18 years, Adrian was on the front lines of HR challenges as a practice administrator, overlooking 30 plus employees. In her search for the best HR practices, she found she loved the Bent Erickson HR systems the best. So much so, she started to consult for them, which eventually led her to working solely for them. Hello, Adrian, and welcome to the show.

Adrian Twig:

Hi Alan. I'm glad to be here. It's a privilege and an honor to be able to talk with you.

Alan Berry:

Before we get going, I want to tell all the listeners that this will not be a Bent Erickson info commercial. No one is getting paid anything to do this podcast. The reason for this episode is to give you all some food for thought when it comes to your HR practices. And since Adrian is an expert in this area, we think that you will all benefit from what she has to say. Let's start off with a question I think everyone would like to hear the answer to. What is the number one mistake dentists make in the HR department?

Adrian Twig:

The number one mistake that we see is failure to handle wage and hour issues correctly. So when a doctor, for instance, wants to take his or her staff to one of those large conventions where they can go to different tracks and get their CE, the doctors are very generous with their staff as a whole. They will offer to pay for the hotel bill. They will offer to pay for airfare, take them out to a really nice meal. But then when it comes to the days that the staff is actually sitting in the meeting, they don't pay the team while they're sitting in the meeting, or they don't pay them for the Saturday.

Adrian Twig:

Well, the government has strict criteria on how those hours are to be paid. And even though the doctor has been very generous and has paid all these other things, when they find out that the doctor is not paying a wage for that employee sitting in the class, that's where the government gets really strict about it and says, "No, no, no, you have to pay them a wage for sitting in that class."

Adrian Twig:

So when we talk about this to the doctors, they scratch their head and say, "But my staff considers this a mini vacation. They're getting to go to a different town, and had dinner out, stay in a nice hotel." We have to explain, "Well, that's great, but the government doesn't care about that." And the reason is, they don't get any money. Where the government gets their money is on your payroll taxes. They want you to have them on payroll and to pay them a wage. If the labor department comes in and does some type of an audit and they see that you have not paid for that, the penalty is pretty strict and it's pretty severe. So that is probably the number one mistake that's out there.

Alan Berry:

In my research for this podcast, I read in a couple different places that best HR practices starts with a well-worded job description. Adrian, will you tell me why that's important? And what do you recommend?

Adrian Twig:

Several months ago, I had a client call and say that they needed to let an employee go. This employee, English was not her first language. When she would talk to them, the patients were having problems understanding her. The dentist was calling to say, "If I purchased one of the applications that you can buy to learn the English language, can I require her, every morning, to sit and work with this application to improve her skills?" And I said, "Well, yes, absolutely." Because in his job description, one of the things written is must be able to communicate clearly and precisely and be understood.

Adrian Twig:

So it's a lot of soft skills that we will also include in the job descriptions other than just regular duties and responsibilities for each position. Because if a dentist is not happy with the way an employee is communicating, or perhaps has an attitude problem. When you have soft skills built into your job description, that's part of what you are expecting from that employee.

Adrian Twig:

We really recommend that you have a good, solid job description and you use it throughout the lifetime of that employment with the employee. You can use it when they go to hire, when they're interviewing the candidate, give them a copy of the job description and say, "This is what we expect from this position. Is there anything on here that you feel you cannot do?" You can use it when you do an annual performance evaluation. That's the benchmark. It shows what you expect for that job. So it all really goes hand in hand, and there are a lot of different ways that that job description becomes vital to that position.

Alan Berry:

So not only is, does the job description give clarity to what the job is, but it also gives the employers some, I don't know, negotiation later on down the road to show that, "No, we said this is what the job is, not what you think the job is." So it's a two-fold there, right?

Adrian Twig:

Exactly. It all goes back to the documentation factor and having a paper trail, having everything clean. And unfortunately, the employer can feel like I am guilty until I can prove that I am innocent. And one way that helps me do that is with my documentation and the paper trail.

Alan Berry:

It's kind of like another form of insurance. I mean, it's not insurance, but in theory and thought process, it is insurance, it is there to protect you. Is there any tips that you can give some dentists out there as far as just some HR practices that you see time and time again, that dentists don't do?

Adrian Twig:

I think the number one tip is to make sure that you're paying correctly for the wage and hour. A lot of offices out there will not pay overtime. They will allow the employee to just have comp time. Anything over 40 hours a week, you have to pay time and a half. You have to pay overtime for.

Alan Berry:

Even if you're salaried?

Adrian Twig:

Even if you're salaried. Salary is another myth out there about how dentists should compensate employees. They do think, "Oh, well, if I put my practice administrator, my office manager on a salary, I don't have to worry about how many hours she worked." A dentist thinks that he doesn't have to pay them because they're on salary. Well, once again, the government has very strict criteria about overtime issues, and it doesn't matter the method of compensation.

Adrian Twig:

So it doesn't matter if they're salary or if they're hourly or if they're daily. What the government looks at is if the employee is considered exempt or non-exempt. And exempt employees in the dental field are very few and far between, unless you do have a practice administrator, an office manager, that meets the government's criteria.

Adrian Twig:

They have a number of criteria. They have to make financial decisions about the practice. They have to be involved in all of that. They have to have the power to hire and fire people. And there's just a list of responsibilities that that person has to do to be able to be considered exempt.

Alan Berry:

Yeah, like you were saying, the majority of employees are going to be either salaried or hourly. I don't think you get a lot of independent contractors working with the dental practices.

Adrian Twig:

No. And independent contractors is another area where dentists think that they can bring a hygienist in one or two days a week or one or two days a month and pay them an independent contractor. And that doesn't fly either. We go back to the criteria that the government has, and a hygienist does not meet the criteria to be an independent contractor.

Alan Berry:

Is sexual harassment a big part of the handbook? Do you put in a chapter on that? Because I got to imagine that that is something that people could take as a lawsuit, fairly often.

Adrian Twig:

Harassment, in any form, whether it's a hostile work environment, some type of harassment, discrimination, we cover all of those. You have to have a problem resolution section in there that explains to them, "If you feel this is happening to you, this is what you need to do." And it goes step by step that they need to bring it to your attention. You need to fill out some paperwork to get the information. The doctor needs to investigate and show that they have done their due diligence to investigate it. And keep a paper trail of everything that's going on. Because as we're very aware in the last couple of years, harassment of a sexual nature has just skyrocketed that it's being reported now. Having a policy in there about how you would handle a sexual harassment or any type of harassment claim, discrimination, a hostile work environment, is critical to having your manual compliance.

Alan Berry:

And it's part of the crossing the T's and dotting the I's as far as management of your practice, because even if you know that you're not going to do those types of things to your employees, what you don't know is if one of those employees may just make up a scenario where you did. And I got to imagine when you get into the courts, it's going to help you a lot if you show to the court that you had a policy in place. I got to believe that would be very valuable.

Adrian Twig:

It is extremely valuable because one of the first things that a judge will ask, if a claim goes to court like that is, "Well, what did you do to rectify this, to correct it, to take care of this?" Well, if the doctor can say, "Well, judge, we have this procedure in place. And I did A, B, C. Here's the signed document where I met with the employee and we talked about what he or she was claiming happened. Here is my follow-up, who I talked to about it, and what the result was." So having that documentation that you can present does show that you did due diligence and that you tried to remedy the situation the best that you could.

Alan Berry:

I know part of your services is that you provide a custom handbook for the staff of a practice. Why can't I just create my own employee handbook?

Adrian Twig:

It is very difficult to sit down and create a policy manual from scratch for yourself. We have come across dentists that have told us, "I sat down and I tried to do my own policy manual, and I Googled this and I Googled that." That's great if you want to invest your life in Googling your life away. But the thing is, you don't know if you have every policy that you need in there, every law covered, that the information that you have is current, up to date, and if it's correct for you for the state that you're in.

Adrian Twig:

And also there's another layer that goes on top of that, which is the threshold for employees, because there are different laws that come into play with the more employees that you have. So how do you know what the threshold is? Is it if you have five employees, you have to include this law? Or is it 10? Or is it eight? So there's so much that a dentist or an orthodontist, a dental professional, will not know. They just don't know what they don't know. So it is close to impossible for them to come up with a manual that covers everything that has all of the policies required, that is current and up-to-date.

Alan Berry:

The thing about the manual or having an employee manual, it's not just the dental world, it's smart business. I don't think there's going to be a successful business person that doesn't have some type of policy or manual in place for their employees, because not only for the reasons that we spoke of, but there's many reasons why you want these systems in place. And if you don't have that manual there for your employees to refer to, at some point, it's going to come back to bite you.

Adrian Twig:

There are so many situations out there that if an employee becomes disgruntled, if they go to another office and they find out, "Oh, you mean this doctor does this. Well, my other doctor didn't do that." They can make a claim against their previous employer for some type of breach or some type of infraction that the previous employer was doing, unbeknownst to them. And the doctor will find themselves just in a lot of trouble after that employee has left their service.

Adrian Twig:

Having that manual and having it compliant is not just for the day to day stuff. It's to protect them throughout their dental career. The average settlement today for an employer/employee based lawsuit is about $25,000. Now that's not considering any court fees, any attorney fees, anything like that. It's, "Okay to get me out of this, I write a check for $25,000."

Adrian Twig:

Our goal and our aim is to keep the dentist from getting into a situation where they have to go to court about something, or even that a lawsuit is brought against them. The fact is, there are more employee labor related lawsuits brought against dentists than malpractice. Because of that, the insurance that you can get for this type of situation is called EPLI. Employment practices, liability insurance.

Adrian Twig:

Before an insurer will issue you that type of policy, you have to have a current, up-to-date policy manual that is compliant with your state and federal laws before they will even touch you. And one of the first things that they will ask a doctor is, "Do you have a manual? When was it updated? And let us see a copy of it." Because they're not going to insure anyone until they can be sure that they have policies and guidelines in place.

Adrian Twig:

So our job is to keep the doctor compliant, making sure that their handbook, their manuals are up-to-date so that if and when a situation arises, they have a policy that says, "This is how we handled that. This is what we expect." The employees must sign off on it, that they have read the manual, that they understand that that's the guidelines and rules that they're operating under. And then we just work with the doctor to make sure that if and when a situation comes up, that he or she doesn't know how to deal with, they can call us and we help navigate them through that, to keep them handling those situations in the most appropriate way and keep them out of trouble.

Alan Berry:

Let's say we have some folks that are listening and they sound interested, can we talk about fees and charges and get in the ballpark of what something like this would cost?

Adrian Twig:

Okay. So to get the policy manual that we customize, personalize, to get the templates of all the job descriptions, the updates that go out, there's a quarterly newsletter, and then probably the cherry on top of everything is our telephone support. And that support is unlimited. It's not on an hourly basis or whatever with the program now. Telephone support is built into the price. For a one location office that has less than 15 employees, the first year investment is $3,195. That gets them everything that I just talked about for their first full year.

Adrian Twig:

At the beginning of the second year, the only ongoing cost is a support agreement with us, $595 for the entire year.

Alan Berry:

You pay that $3,100, five, 600 bucks a year, and your HR policy manual is covered, basically?

Adrian Twig:

It is covered. Plus you have support. So if you have a question, you have that situation that comes up, you have no clue how to handle it, you call us. We walk you through the situation, making sure that you've got the documentation that you need, making sure that you're asking questions, and maybe even more importantly, making sure that you're not asking some questions, is all included in that. And I agree, it is extremely reasonable for what you get.

Alan Berry:

What pushback do you get? So if you're presenting this to a prospective dentist, and you tell him or her all these benefits to it, the cost. What typically is their pushback of saying, "No, that's okay, we'll just go forward without one."

Adrian Twig:

Some dentists will get hung up on the 3195, because they don't see the value of what we offer until they're in a situation where they need it. They find that they're in that situation where they're either being sued or they've got an employee who's threatening to sue them, or they're having a labor audit or something like that. Well, then they come to us and say, "Okay, so now what do I do?"

Adrian Twig:

Well, okay, let's get your HR house in order. We're not going to be able to do a whole lot about the situation that you found yourself in, but we can certainly help you prevent that from happening again.

Alan Berry:

Adrian, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to day to explain some of this. I'm amazed and just, the minutes that we spent together today, the rabbit hole you can go down. I can only imagine how many more rabbit holes we could go down. So I think you guys are providing an important service. So thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Adrian Twig:

Well, thanks, Alan. It was my pleasure to do it. And as you can tell, I love the HR world, and helping people get their ducks in a row, and run a very successful practice. It's an awesome gift that we get to provide.

Alan Berry:

Yeah. And that's a good point. Getting your ducks in a row. You wouldn't want to do shoddy work on a patient, so you really shouldn't have shoddy work with your employees.

Announcer:

That's all the time we have today. Thank you to our guests for their insight and for sharing some really great information. And thank you to you, the listener, for tuning in. The Millionaire Dentist podcast is brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. To see if they might be a good fit for you and your practice, go on over to fourquadrantsadvisory.com and see why year after year, they retain over 95% of their clients. Thank you again for joining us, and we'll see you next time.