Home Health & Hospice Week

A little sleuthing could mean more satisfied employees.

If your pay rate is making it hard for you to recruit and retain valuable staffers, it might be time to dust off your Sherlock Holmes hat.

Home care employees often rate compensation as one of the most important motivating factors in their jobs (see story, Survey Your Way to Successful Recruitment, Retention). If you survey employees and your pay rate scores low, that might be a big reason you're having trouble finding - and keeping - quality staff.

While salary surveys and other benchmarking tools can provide general information about pay rates for different jobs, there's nothing like good old-fashioned detective work to give you the true picture for your specific area, said consultant Betty Gordon in a recent teleconference sponsored by Eli.

This information search will require some "pretending," Gordon noted. Basically, you have a staffer call up a competitor, say she is new in the area and in the market for a job, and ask what the competitor would pay her. The more specifics you gather, the more valuable the information, Gordon said - find out the differential for weekend and after-hours work, if there is one. Also, pay rates might differ for per-visit and salaried employees.

If you're shopping for pay rates for clinicians, be sure to have that specific type of clinician do the calling, Gordon advised. Office staffers often get tripped up by technical questions the competing agency will ask before divulging pay rate information.

Don't feel too guilty about the ruse - chances are your competitor already has done it to you. "Everybody does it," Gordon maintained. But you should put only someone who feels comfortable with the duty on the case.

Your detective work shouldn't stop with pay rates, Gordon advised. If you are in a business where patients pay out of pocket for services or equipment, you should launch a separate information-gathering project for rates billed to the patient.

If your payment rates are too low but your bill rates are lower-than-average too, you can increase both rates without denting your profit margins, she noted.