The harder you work, the more you make.
The smarter you work, the more you make.
Which is true? They both are. If your medical group’s compensation plan doesn’t take that into account, you’re not only shortchanging your group’s employees or subcontractors, you’re shortchanging your group itself.
When I mention work “smarter,” I’m addressing the work of your group’s physicians to develop new business opportunities and new processes, their role in group leadership, and, perhaps most importantly, their interpersonal conduct in respect of colleagues, patients, referral sources, and hospital staff.
If all you reward is churning out units then don’t be surprised when anything that gets in the way of so-called productivity gets short shrift . . . or worse. Paying only for productivity measured in time devoted or units generated or even some other variant alone, wastes the opportunity to drive behavior by incentivizing it with pay.
Sure, your compensation system has to pay for production. But not all work is measured in hard units. There must be both objective, hard measures, and subjective measures: Attitude, efforts spent on group business and on the group’s future, patient satisfaction, cooperation, and the like.
Yes, there are few to no artifacts along the route to measuring cooperation and it’s easier to count ASA units or wRVUs. But just because it’s difficult to see or to measure doesn’t mean that it’s not real. Take love for instance.
Love your group’s future. Reward for behavior and attitude and action that will increase your group’s chances of having a future.
