Findings: Role-based retention
Practices experiencing turnover in a specific role or two will benefit from better understanding what factors those specific roles prioritize, how they define those factors, and how their daily reality stacks up to the expectations they held when they entered the profession.
Findings: Role-based retention
Practices seeking to improve retention across all roles have a clear path: Begin at the base of the column to make the biggest impact on the most team members.
There is still some individualization required, of course—after all, fair compensation for a new assistant will look different than fair compensation for an experienced associate DVM or practice manager. However, the general blueprint is appropriate for a holistic approach to increasing practice-wide retention.
But many practices aren’t facing practice-wide turnover—they’re having trouble keeping specific roles filled. And that’s where these findings can be of tremendous help.
To truly get to the heart of what would be most impactful to different roles, we looked at how the definitions and expectation vs. reality scores from Phase 2 could be used in conjunction with the results from the previous year in Phase 1. This allowed us to draw a deeper understanding of what challenges and solutions work best for individual practice roles.
This is where the three questions outlined in the introduction come into play:
- What factors matter most (aka are high priority) to that role (based on data from Stay, Please Phase 1) when it comes to influencing attrition?
- Which factors score lowest in expectation vs. reality for that role (based on data from Stay, Please Phase 2)?
- How can we use the definition selected by that role to improve the way they experience the factor(s) with high priority but have a low expectation vs. reality score?
Identifying which factors have high priority (meaning they’re most likely to make team members leave, if done poorly) and low expectation vs. reality scores for each role is a simple way to shine a spotlight on exactly what changes a practice can make to increase retention in specific roles.
