As You Grow and Add More Locations and People, HR Compliance Becomes a Pain in the You-Know-What

When it comes to properly running a multi-practice dental office, good HR guidance that is applicable to your specific situation can be hard to find. As an expert HR problem solving-support organization we see small and BIG HR problems spread across organizations that create huge distractions. Seemingly small things can spin up and get out of control quickly. They cost the organization time, money, and brain power. In the worst instances, compliance and HR problems result in threats of litigation and investigations. In this article, we break down the issues into two HR categories. One is about running the business, and the other is about the legal and compliance foundation that must be kept in place and maintained while you grow your business.

If we define overall Strategic HR Business Planning, it will look like the following:

Category one is day-to-day HR problem-solving and includes sourcing, hiring, training, firing, and leading. As you are aware, category one is a moving target that takes up more of your time than you may have imagined. What happens when you go to two or more locations?

Category two is all about compliance and employment laws. Compliance is the underpinning and foundation upon which all of the stuff in category one must rely. Unlike category one, compliance (while not always easy) is much less of a moving target, primarily because compliance is driven by employment laws and known outcomes from court cases. Making sure that your managers continuously update their knowledge and understand how almost every problem is solved when managing employees (category one) is affected by the local, state, and federal employment laws (category two) is critical and often overlooked. This is when access to properly written policies and ongoing expert guidance can pay for itself.

You can imagine, or already know, as you multiply your size and number of locations, HR compliance takes on a new level of gravitas. Whether it is because of the need to add on and rely on middle management or that simple compliance mistakes can become legal issues. When not done well, both can cost your practice hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties and legal fees, not to mention the distraction of defending yourself. Just as you benefit from leveraging your abilities to grow into a multi-practice organization, you can multiply the adverse outcomes of your HR mistakes.

Let's start with two real-world examples of an EASILY avoidable HR problem.

 Example one - A practice grows from one to three locations. They have twelve hygienists working for them both part- and full-time. They researched what they do and spoke to their accountant. The manager understood that hygienists could be paid a commission. They believe commissioned hygienists do not need to track their time or be paid overtime.

What’s wrong with that?

The federal government has a well-established law that classifies employees as eligible for a commission with no regard to time tracking and overtime. It is known as an exempt or nonexempt classification, and hygienists do not qualify for exemption from overtime status. In this real-life example, the practice violates the rules requiring employers to track time because of the misunderstandings of the practice’s manager and owner. When discovered and prosecuted by the Department of Labor, back pay and penalties are high because the practice has no time records. They cannot mitigate the damage.

 Example two - A practice manager is faced with an ongoing issue that, once tamped down, seems to always crop back up and cause problems. The issue is people keep discussing their pay and/or something related to it that causes problems among the team members or, worse, they go online and say something damaging about the practice on social media. The manager, believing they are doing the right thing, searches the internet and asks a few fellow managers what to do and creates and distributes a couple of policies. In short, one policy lets employees know that all matters at the practice are confidential, including salaries and pay, and threatens disciplinary action if anyone violates the policy. The second policy, much like the first one, addresses social media and includes, among other things, that employees cannot comment negatively about the practice on social media.

What’s wrong with that?

In both instances, the policies violate various state and federal laws, and in one example, merely distributing the policy is seen as an unlawful act.

While these were just a couple of the glaring examples of mistakes we’ve seen, there are several other situations that larger organizations need to deal with differently than they would when they could essentially fly under the radar as a single practice. The good news? There are other more effective ways to deal with these issues.

As stated above, “Making sure that your managers continuously update their knowledge and understand how almost every problem solved when managing employees (category one) is affected by the local, state, and federal employment laws (category two) is critical and often overlooked.”

We hope these two glaring examples are something you can use to check your policies. To learn more about other policies that you need to avoid and to update your knowledge on all things related to Multi-Practice HR, please visit our multi-location practice page.