Over on my weekly business blog, which you can find here if you're interested in the business of dentistry. We talk about stuff like HR, delegation, vision-setting, finance, strategy, and all that's necessary to build a business, but sometimes it flows into here. Just a little lesson to learn, or things we want to champion, and so a little metaphor in a story here about human resources.
Back in the day, when I worked for the husband-and-wife partnership for 11 years in then mostly NHS practices, I was working in what I look back on as a truly terrible work environment. Upstairs on a terrible street in Nottingham, above a building society where (honestly) one of my patients once threw dog s**t up the stairs at me!
It was the end of a Friday, and I was getting ready to go home (remember, I was an associate, not a business owner). One of the nurses who was really good was hanging around, and I could sense that something uncomfortable was about to happen, so they came into my surgery when there were only 2 of us left in the practice and asked me for a pay rise.
So many things wrong with that to discuss here, not least the fact that I was not in any position to give the said person a pay rise because it wasn't my business. But the whole thing, the ad hoc emotional request, the putting you under pressure, the inference that they might not come back, all of the problems associated with some interchange like that, which should never happen with something so important as someone's salary.
At that point, I vowed that if I ever had my own place, never to put myself in that position, and one of the first things I ever did in relation to human resources, when I had my own business, was to clearly tell people that we talked about salaries in January at appraisals. The reason we did this was that we had to do appraisals to find out what people wanted so that we could budget things moving forward for the financial year: training, wage rises, holidays, time off, etc. And so, everybody understood that if they came to you during the year and asked for a pay rise, the answer was, ‘We talk about pay rises in January'. The next thing that happened is that Hayley became my practice manager, and Hayley is a genius at HR and so then I could go “Hayley talks to you about pay rises in January”.
Catapult on years of building HR structures, policies, procedures, contracts, etc, and then we developed the handbook; a copy is here. I would look at it, download it, and copy it if I were you. It's one of the best pieces of work that The Campbell Clinic has ever done, and it was pretty much done by Hayley (thanks, Hayley).
Once you build a culture like that and continue to reinforce it day after day with vision, values, etc. Then you get to the point where people want to celebrate the place that they work, and that gets to the point at the end of this little lecture.
I opened our Slack group (one of the most important things we ever did in HR was bring Slack into the practice for communication - no fu**ing WhatsApp here).
But what happened next was that the team decided that what would be good every 3 months was to tell the story of what it's like and what's been going on at the practice, just for us, just between us, and so Nancy, who works in our marketing and academy team, runs this part of the project.
I hadn't seen this. It's actually been out for more than a week, but it was sitting in my Slack because I didn't have time to look at it (which is a disgrace). But I got it on an early train to Edinburgh on a Thursday morning and sent it to my wife immediately. I would never send anything like this to my wife, but I was so proud of what these guys had done and so proud of the place that we worked, that I sent it to Alison, and I'm sending it to you here
Blog Post Number - 4350