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Episode 177 | Cost Of Employee Turnover with Julianne and Poonam from Level Up Leaders

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WITH Poonam and Julianne from Level Up Leaders

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  • Episode 177 | Cost Of Employee Turnover with Julianne and Poonam from Level Up Leaders 00:00

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Hey Group Practice listeners! In this episode, you’re getting a clip from this month’s expert training in the Exchange Membership where Poonam and Julianne from Level Up Leaders walk us through the cost of employee turnover.

In this episode we cover:

  • The financial cost to employee turnover
  • The workplace culture cost to employee turnover
  • Reasons for employee turnover

This episode is sponsored by TherapyNotes. TherapyNotes is an EHR software that helps behavioral health professionals manage their practice with confidence and efficiency. I use TherapyNotes in my own group practice and love its amazing support team, billing features, and scheduling capabilities. It serves us well as a large group practice owner.

Do you ever wish for a financial therapist who could relieve you from the last few months’ bookkeeping, talk you off the edge when you’re running into issues with Quickbooks, or help you work through a profit plan for growth? GreenOak Accounting does just that! GreenOak Accounting is an accounting firm that specializes in working with group practices. Their value goes WAY beyond bookkeeping; they can help you get on track for financial success. Schedule a free consultation by going to http://greenoakaccounting.com/tgpe

Transcript:

Maureen Werrbach

Maureen Werrbach

Welcome back. So today I’m going to be doing a an expert training clip from a training we have this month with the amazing Julianne and Poonam, from Level Up Leaders. They did a training for our members on how to spot and coach potential leaders while cultivating trust in their group practice. And so what you’ll hear in a few minutes is a clip, a little piece of that training, where they specifically talk about the cost of employee turnover. And I think it was such a great snippet of information around not only the cost of just having to find someone else, and the cost of, you know, potentially creating distress among the rest of the team, when someone leaves, they really went into detail on a lot of the other kind of hidden costs or costs that you might not have in the front of your mind. And they give some really interesting stats on the actual financial cost of an employee turning over. And it’s, I thought much higher than I even anticipated myself. And so it’s, it was a really interesting topic, and you’ll be listening to it in a few seconds.

But I want to chat a little bit about kind of the premise of what they talk about when they’re communicating around the cost of employee turnover, not only being financial. And it’s a much higher cost than than we anticipate, because we have to think about the cost that it takes us in time and actual cost in ads, if we’re paying for application at you know, for job application ads. So there’s the cost of however long it takes us to actually place those ads, search, recruit, interview, and remember, we might be interviewing six, seven people, for every one person that actually gets hired. And you have to count that time, that time that it takes to truly convert an interview to a clinician in your practice. All the time that it takes, it should be calculated from a financial perspective, how much you know, do you–are you charging for your time. Even though you’re not getting paid for it, you expect to get that recouped after a handful of months with an employee being there, right is it recoups your time and effort spent looking for recruiting, researching, interviewing, you know, all these people before you get to this person.

And then obviously, comes the onboarding time that you spend, or someone you have hired, will spend working with that therapist for several months, usually, to support them in just understanding policies and procedures and being able to be an effective employee in your practice. And then comes you know, any any supervision, disciplinary work, that’s all time right? It’s all effort and time that you or a supervisor is putting into that person. And especially if that person is let go, that usually means that there’s a lot of time spent before being let go on your end to help, you know, help them be successful. And then when they leave, you know, they might leave with those clinicians. And even if they don’t, then there’s the time spent needing to recruit and interview a bunch of people and all that fun stuff. And then the idea that, you know, bringing on a new person, again, there’s all of this time that is spent to then get that person up to speed, that if the person that had left had just stayed wouldn’t have been wasted, right? That’s time that’s money that would not have needed to be spent.

And so there is a really large financial costs outside of just potentially the clients that that person was seeing not being seen in the practice, it goes much further out beyond that. But then there is the cost to the culture, there’s a cost to you know, what’s the reason that that person is leaving, there’s obviously going to be a natural sort of shift for people, you know, most employees will come, they will stay, and then they will leave and move on. It’s not something we should be expecting that we have employees who stay forever, right. We, every business has some you know lifers that stay. But it shouldn’t be what we’re expecting out of everyone. It’s not that you know, we’re doing something wrong if we have staff that leave after a few years, especially in today’s day and age, there’s so much opportunity out there that, you know, people get to look around and see if there’s something better out there. Even if they love where they work.

I was just listening to something from Gary Vee, and he was saying this exact thing and it really was something that I just needed to hear again. That sometimes people leave even when they love where they’re at. And it’s just because right now, especially right now, there are so many opportunities. And even if they love where they’re at, even if they love what they’re being paid, even if they love all their colleagues, there’s potentially something else out there that’s a little different, that feels fresh and new, and something that they also want to try out.

But again, looking at kind of the culture of the practice, when when that happens, there is a sense everyone feels of like, you know, what, what am I doing? How am I feeling about where I’m at? How am I feeling about my own career and my trajectory and my movement? How am I feeling about, you know, my leader, the person who leads me and my connection with them, and that all gets stirred back up. And so there’s a potentially much higher cost if you as a leader, or if you have a leadership team, who directly leads those that staff are not creating and cultivating the sense of trust in hiring people who really align with the vision and the values of your business, that when people leave that will spark that sort of, you know, am I am I meant to be here, that’s where I want to be, and potentially has that sort of ripple effect. So I’m going to hand the mic over so you can listen to this clip from the experts. And if you want to watch the whole training, you can go and join The Exchange, going to www dot the group practice exchange dot com. And you’ll see there’s a link on my website to joining The Exchange. Alright, let’s hand it over.

Poonam

So, you know, what you know is that leadership is really complex, we know that it can be overwhelming. We know stress comes and plays a role. And, and all of that, because you might be addressing turnover, hiring qualified employees to take the place of those that have left recently, trusting new leaders, maybe you’re in a situation where you’re growing your practice, or, you know, creating new roles, and you’re trusting people to do the roles that you’ve actually previously done. You’re trying to figure out a way to keep employees accountable, not just to policies, procedures, expectations, but even to be aligned with your vision, purpose and values. You might be feeling isolated in your role, because you are the only one in your role. As a group practice owner, you’re the one who’s responsible for decision making, you’re the one who’s responsible for making your entire practice run, and that is isolating. You might be experiencing decision fatigue. You know, you’re making decisions day in day out to the point where you can’t go home and make a decision about dinner definitely is a challenge in the role of a leader. And and perhaps, you know, we know leaders say is sometimes they struggle to establish a culture of trust, or to establish a culture in which all of our employees are again aligned with the way in which our practice is going. And so as we share today, as we share our framework and help you build trust, our hope is that you can release some of that self doubt that you walk away a little bit more confident. That you will learn some strategies and skills to be able to build accountability or have accountability with your employees while you maintain a positive working relationship, while you stay authentic. That you feel connected to other like minded leaders, that you have a roadmap to support your leadership decisions. So you know, when you struggle and don’t know what the next right step is to maintaining trust that you have a roadmap that tells you exactly how to do it. And that you can cultivate psychological safety and trauma informed leadership into your practice, because ultimately, the way our leadership looks trickles down into the care that our clients receive.

Julianne

So, you know, it’s really common for employers to think things such as compensation, or work life balance, or even perks are what keeps an employee happy. But the research is consistent. Even in a current pandemic, and the great resignation era, it’s showing that employees are still prioritizing relational factors. So they want to feel valued, they want to be seen, they want to know that they’re contributing to something that’s bigger than them, and that they really will be invested in. And so those relational factors is why we know trust has such a relevancy in your practice.

Poonam

You know, Gallup has done so many studies on on the state of the workplace, and what they find is that our employees are engaged the most when that relationship is prioritized. And when it’s not prioritized, it really does come at great cost to you as a good practice owner. So you know, on the left hand side of your screen, what you see is some usage, some like numbers and data, as far as what it costs us when we have turnover. And that happens because of a lack of engagement. The cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one half to two times the employee’s annual salary. That’s staggering. And you know, you can again, you can read the other other numbers here, what we want to talk about is how does this cost you? Or how is this impacting you.

And the way it does is, there’s a recruiting costs that come into play here, right. So all of your advertising, your marketing, your interviewing, your screening, the onboarding costs, when someone starts with you, all the time and energy actually even that is spent in getting them up to speed training costs, so not necessarily training costs for your new employees, but all the investment that you’ve made in your folks who are no longer with you, because they have left. There’s lost productivity, because somebody who’s new and coming on board is not going to get up to speed, and be proficient in the way that somebody who has left just has; it might take them, you know, one to two years, in fact, to really be very productive.

There might be lost engagement. And so employee engagement specifically where, where when one person leaves, it has an impact on other other people in your practice. I remember as a clinician, when people would leave, I would almost actually have a grieving process that occurred, right. And that does have an impact on how we function in our workplaces.

There’s customer service and errors that come up. So you know, our new employees need support in learning our processes. They ask a lot of questions, though, and they do make mistakes, which is okay and reasonable. But it does continue to add to that cost. And then there’s that cultural impact that happens, you know, similar to last employee engagement. When somebody leaves other people maybe start questioning do they need to consider other options and opportunities people start asking why what’s happening within our practice? And so you know, the cost of turnover is really high and what we see what this is, when we don’t prioritize trust, maintaining trust, building trust when we don’t pour into the relationship with our employees. It really does come at great cost to us.

Maureen Werrbach

Alright, what do you guys think? I feel like there are so many juicy nuggets of information around what the cost of an employee who turns over really is. And so maybe take some time today to think about, what does that cost look like for you? Because sometimes that can be the motivation to really looking inward at how you can change your leadership style or your policies or processes or benefit structure or culture in your business so that you can create a space that reduces that an employee turnover. Alright, have a great rest of your day, and I’ll see you next week.

Thanks For Listening

Thanks for listening to the group practice exchange podcast. Like what you heard? Give us five stars on whatever platform you’re listening from. Need extra suppor? Join The Exchange, a membership community just for group practice owners with monthly office hours, live webinars, and a library of trainings ready for you to dive into visit www dot members dot the group practice exchange dot com forward slash exchange. See you next week.

Resources

Here are the resources and guides we recommend based on this episode

Recruiting & Hiring Your Ideal Therapist

Whether you’re a seasoned or a new group practice owner, one thing we all have in common is the overwhelming, sometimes painful process of recruiting, interviewing and hiring of therapists.

* I am an affiliate for some of the businesses I recommend. These are companies that I use in my own group practice, and make recommendations based off of my experience with them. When you use some of these companies through my links, I receive compensation, which helps me continue to offer great free information on my podcast, blog, Facebook group, and website.

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Meet your host

Maureen

Maureen Werrbach is a psychotherapist, group practice owner and group practice coach. Learn more about her coaching services here:

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