What Should You Pay Your Practitioners In 2026? | GYC Podcast 370

So Sara, let's talk about something that evokes a lot of stress for a lot of clinic owners, and that is around pay.

Uh, you know, typically they get the conversation initiated by a team member saying, "I want a pay rise." They're on the back foot, then they're wondering, "How do I navigate this?" But I wanna zoom out and get your lens on remuneration structures, how people ought to think about it, have a process for it so that they feel more in control.

They've got a more consistent process for this.

And then let's find out where they go wrong with it, especially on the sham contract side.

You've talked a lot about that with us.

So I wanna make sure that clinic owners leave this conversation having more clarity and confidence about what they can do around pay, pay progressions, and ultimately make sure they get in touch with you and the fantastic team at the People Plug In to support them through this.

So where do you wanna start in terms of setting the scene for pay?

All right.

I think maybe I'll just do a quick context of what we've seen so far-

Okay

... and then we can kind of unpack that.

Right.

So what we're seeing at the moment is clinic owners will come to us and, um, maybe they want to do performance reviews or one of their team members has reactively asked for a pay increase, and it's opened up this conversation.

So the first thing we say is, "Okay, cool.

Let, let's have a look at, at what's going on in terms of pay structure.

What's your, um, like, philosophy on remuneration?" And we're basically getting either verbally or maybe a spreadsheet that is like a bowl of spaghetti, that is just [laughs] like, uh, team members paid very differently.

Um, you know, maybe someone has, you know, started six months ago.

That's fine.

The prior person started two years ago, they've never had a pay increase.

Um, it, it's very kind of ad hoc and sporadic.

So one of the first things we do is kind of step back and go, "Okay, well, what is your pay philosophy?" Because maybe your philosophy is you just want to be paying award or just above award, and you don't want to be promoting your clinic as, "Hey, we pay really, really high salaries." And like that, that's okay if that's what you want, right? Or the other end of the spectrum is like, "No, actually, our philosophy is we want to have really high fixed salaries or, you know, medium fixed salaries.

We wanna have really high bonus structures, and we want everyone in the market to know, hey, if you come to our clinic," [clears throat] excuse me, "we expect high performance, but we pay you really, really well." And maybe that's your strategy.

So first of all, I think clinic owners need to understand where on that spectrum they sit, and then we can help kind of break it down and look at how to actually get there.

It's a really good point, and something that Mick Rist touched on a couple of episodes-

Mm-hmm