207: Building People-First Cultures to Attract and Retain Top Talent

You got to connect with your people because those relationships are super key to retaining people. Because when these younger generations come in, they're all about relationships. As simple as it might sound. It's so powerful.

Hi, I'm Emmett Scott, and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show, we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problems, and get you the answers you need to face these challenging times and thrive. Welcome deo's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DEO's Growth Secrets podcast. I'm Jake Poole, the CEO of the DEO, filling in for the illustrious Emmett Scott. And with me today, I have the founder and CEO of Connect, Jamie Vermontes. Connect brings more than 25 years experience with Jamie to their clients. So, Jamie, you started your career in recruiting and you built a foundation and passion around connecting people to their employer environment, which is a huge issue right now. Jamie, as you worked your way up in the C suite, serving as chro for several companies, including Forever 21, UCI Health, you helped leaders navigate challenges by removing business barriers and implementing new processes and programs that are still in place today. As established executive, known for creating a culture of engagement and increasing retention rates, Jamie, you hold expertise in all areas of human resources, including food and beverage, finance, hospitality, healthcare, entertainment, retail, and tech. You've worked for both nonprofit and Fortune 500 organizations, including Chipotle, where you served as VP of HR, which is an insane title. Lots of responsibility there, and JP, JPMorgan Chase. So you are an amazing example of the dental industry maturing as a whole. I mean, you're bringing this incredible experience across many industries and brands that we've all heard, and you're bringing those best practices, thank goodness, into dental. Welcome, Jamie. Anything else you'd add as far as your experience or anything else you want the audience to know?

Thank you so much and I'm really happy to be here. That's a great introduction. I don't know if there's much more I can add to that. You said a lot, but I think, you know, overall I just have such a passion for people and I love talking to other, you know, people first leaders that really put the people first. So you'll hear me probably talk about that a lot. And, you know, I've always talked about how being in hr, in healthcare, it's the best of both worlds. Because you're helping people that are helping people. So I'm super excited to be here.

Beautiful. So I've got a bunch of questions on kind of the HR and labor environment that's going on right now inside of Dental, because it's tough. And, you know, folks out there, they're losing team members. Team members are disengaged. There's a whole crazy thing going on with, like, you want to work from home, they want more flexibility. But companies are trying to, you know, maybe even go back a little bit to where it was before COVID And so when we get into all that juicy stuff, just give me an idea of what Connect does. Just off, you know, Connect comes in. You audit their current HR systems, you help them build plans for better engagement. What is, what do you do with Connect? Yeah.

Thank you. So what we do is first establish a really solid foundation, and that's make sure that you have the right systems, processes, and procedures in place, because those are the table stakes of your business. You got to make sure you're compliant, and you got to make sure you're paying your people, you're giving them benefits, all that good stuff. But what we do is take it to the next level. And we want to make sure that we're focused on how do you really build the capabilities of your people, attract the brightest and the best, ultimately to retain your people through engagement and recognition. So bottom line is we offer fractional HR services. We can be either fractional or it could be full blown outsourced hr, depending on the need of our clients.

Beautiful. And I just love, I mean, VP of HR and Chipotle. And so that's just like, we need to know how Chipotle really manage that many team members and bring it in dental. So let's talk about the current labor environment. What are some of the challenges? The current, you know, HR environment. What are some of the challenges? You're hearing is you're talking to dentists, entrepreneurs and leaders who are, you know, managing, let's say more than 12 people, up to 20 people, maybe up to a few hundred. What. What are they seeing out there?

Yeah, the number one thing I hear about is attracting talent. It's definitely a talent war. And it's like, you know, no matter if it's a. If it's another doctor that they need in the office, if it's a hygienist, if it's a dental assistant, you name it, it's just hard to find. And I think it's because, you know, the demographic that's Coming in, they're younger, specifically with DAs and with hygienists. And you know, you have a more mature, licensed professional or a doctor that's, that's, that's overseeing these younger generations. And so one, it's like, how do you attract a different demographic of people? What are the things that are important to them? What culture do you create for them so that they're thriving and they're being engaged as much as possible and doing everything you can to retain them? And then if there's issues that pop up throughout the lifespan of your relationship, how do I deal with that? And you know, how do I relate with this different demographic that is here with me? So, but you know, if not, but, and if you don't do it correctly, then what I'm hearing is that, you know, you're going to lose these people. And we see, we see the statistics all the time of how high the turnover rate is because of that struggle of how do I, how do I first attract them, but then once I get them in, what are the key things that I do to retain them?

Yeah, and I think this is the, the age old challenge, right? Because like business leaders, it takes, you know, 15, 20 years to become a business leader. And then all, all, you know, ultimately there's this gap, there's this generation gap between the business leader, although, you know, well, I want to say we're staying young, but like you're recruiting a lot of folks with a little less experience. And so you have this like generational cultural gap. And then in dentistry you have the doctors who have been around a while recruiting maybe folks, you know, office folks who have non. So, so what are the, if I have, if I'm a group and I, I'm struggling, I mean, losing a few of my team members a year in each office, what, what should I be doing differently? What should I be looking at?

Yeah, this might sound a little funny, me saying this as the CEO of Connect, but literally it's connecting with your people. You got to connect with your people because those relationships to retaining people, because when these younger generations come in, they're all about relationships. And as simple as it might sound, it's so powerful. So they want to know, you know, is the person that I'm coming to work for interested in my long term goals? Is it, is it just all about profits or is it about a relationship in my career? And you may know in the back of your mind, at the end of the day, you're running a business, but in order to run that business, you have to have people, and so you want to put that forward to ensure that they know from day one when you're onboarding them. I'm invested in you. I'm spending the time to make sure that you're onboarding the right way, you have the right tools, you understand how to integrate within my culture. And we're going to talk about this from day one. This being, what is your career path, what's your growth trajectory? And how can you make sure that you're going to not only grow personally, but within my practice? And that's the name of the game. Because if they do, if you do that, then that person's mindset shifts from thinking about what's in it for me to, oh, I want to do everything I can to impress the person that's helping me along the way. And I'm going to perform to the best of my ability. Ultimately, you know, translating to really great patient experiences that, that, that your employee is, is giving to the patients that are coming through your door.

Yeah, I love that. And so it's done through meetings, right? Obviously there's like one on one meetings happening with managers, with leaders. Do you find some of your clients need or have like a career path? I mean, do you kind of like start outlining what a career path is going to look like if somebody comes in, show them in 3 to 5 years? If you do well, like what, how do you think about building that vision kind of thing with them?

Yeah, you know, so this can apply to a practice that's small or to a practice that's large. Because this question does come to us sometimes where it's like, yeah, you know, I get it that that might work for a larger practice where you have, you know, a well built out career path, even if you're a smaller practice, you know, just them knowing, hey, here's, I know that right now you're a dental assistant, but ultimately, you know, you're studying for something different or you want to be, you know, you want to be a, a doctor one day. You know, what can I do to make sure that I am enhancing that experience for you and helping you grow, even if it's, you know, if more of a, you're on the GP side, but they want to learn a certain specialty, you know, how can I help them really learn that specialty and give them visibility to that? So, yeah, just a simple question, just, hey, what are your interests? How can I support you? And just asking that simple question is going to go a long way.

Yeah. Asking it and then eventually Documenting, I would imagine, and starting to have some way to review it again so that when you talk to them again, you kind of know what their path is. Right. They're like building a career with you, with your company.

That's right. Yeah. And a real practical tool is something that we call the four by four. And it's meeting at least once a quarter with your employees to really make sure that you're checking in on that conversation. So, hey, when you started, and let's pretend you're a new hire, you first start. We establish these are the things, the goals that you have for your career. And here are the things that I want you to do from a, from a role perspective and make sure you're hitting these things. Then three months later, at minimum, you're checking in. Hey, remember we had that conversation. Let's check on the progress the next quarter. You do it again. You do it again. So it may feel like it's a lot, but trust me, your employee does not think it's a lot. They are encouraged that you're having such a attention given to them on their career and their performance.

Yeah, I mean, it's really the only

way to do it.

I mean, otherwise you're just going to be losing folks, you know, at a rate that just is too hard. I mean, that's not how you think about this. I mean, obviously you want to make the world a better place. Right. We all have great work environments that people like to go to, but, you know, we also have to think about roi. And so how do you kind of measure or think about ROI when it comes to hr? Because it's so easy to say, oh, it's fine, or, you know, the reason they're not, the reason they're not staying with us is because they got 25 cents more down the road or the reason they're not coming to us is because, you know, we need better benefits package. Those are probably true, but how do you measure ROI on kind of these softer things?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's, it's difficult. Is the bottom line. There are ways to look at, you know, how do you avoid certain lawsuits because you've set things up in the right way. Turnover is a pretty practical number. You know, how many times, how many people do you have as compared to how, how fast of a rate you're losing them? You get your turnover rate. I even look at how quickly you are able to recruit people. So when you post the position to hire, you know, is it taking you 30 days? Is it taking you 90 days, is it taking you 100, you know, 80 days? That indication of, you know, maybe my benefits package isn't great, maybe the way that I'm pitching this isn't great. Maybe people know about our culture not being so great out there. So these are things that you can really use to, to compare yourself to, to the industry.

Do you have any rough number? Like if I'm listening and I'm like, you know, what retention numbers would you say that we should look at those? You know, let's take a second look. Like what, what are the, some of the KPIs you at a high level look at?

Yeah. So if you can be under 20% with your, with your, with your staff, then you're going to be in a good place in terms of retention.

So that's yearly. Right. So you start with, you know, start with a hundred people at the end of the year, those out of those 180 are still there, then you're doing pretty good.

That's right, yes. And what we see is that the, the practices that are considered ADA wise to be doing really, really well are in the 12% turnover range. So that means you really nail it down and they really combine that with, if you have a great culture. Even the AA puts that out there with their statistics and says they've measured practices that have a very strong culture where they're very bold about who they are, what they believe in, can get down to this lower 12 percentage turnover rate and then they also have higher patient satisfaction rates.

Yeah. So if you got 20 people, if you lose 10% as of two people, you're doing really, really well in one year. If you lose anything more than four, then you want to start giving somebody a call, maybe Jamie or you start implementing things. The cool thing is it feels like it's insurmountable, but there's really tactical things that you can implement. I mean, do you have any stories or anything where you've gone into a company and implemented something and then it turned out different and good? I mean you were able to kind of push the results there.

Yeah, well, my background actually in, you know, I spent five years at Smile Brands working with C Built, who a lot of you may know. And when I first joined, the turnover rate openly was 45% and we were just like, you know, GP specialist. That turnover rate was high and offices was super high and we were just what do we do to make sure that we're getting those numbers down? And this what I spoke about, just frequent check ins at the time we didn't call them four by fours, but you know, it was just the philosophy of how do we make sure we have great ability to check in with people and have a really clear career path to help people grow. And long story short, we got it down to the, to the, to the low 20 digits, 20% digits over a period of about a year, year, year and maybe three months. And you know, a lot went into that though. We did look at doctor compensation programs, you know, are we paying our doctors the right way? We looked at, you know, the total rewards package. You know, what kind of benefits are we offering? Do they match what the demographic is and what people actually want? And then, you know, of course, what I talked about in terms of making sure that there's a career, a clear career path and really, really constant check ins.

Yeah. You know, he's talking before about kind of the head and the heart. Right. Which you're mentioning that the head is the real logical, the benefits package, the comp. And kind of making sure that that is alignment, which I'm assuming when you come in and help somebody, you're probably taking a look in that area just to make sure that they're competitive with all of that. You get a good idea. Right. Like who else you do.

Yeah. And so, you know, just being in hr, I say this all the time to my team and the clients that we engage in. At the end of the day, people are people. Right. And so I might be able to go from dentistry to healthcare, to hospitality, to whatever industry. There's gonna be tweaks to how we deliver, you know, different programs because there's different demographics and people want different things generally. But we know that, that at the heart, like you're saying, people want to be invested in, people want to grow, people wanna communicate, people wanna have good relationships with their leaders. And so at the heart, super easy things to do, super impactful, if you do it the right way.

Yeah, exactly. So I love that. So you have the head, which is kind of all that, and then the heart, which is the check ins, the career paths, the understanding, making sure you're hitting on that and that's what's going to lead to retention. And one other thing you talk about is compliance and you know, this idea of like what is table stakes and what is next level hr. How do you think about that? Because a lot of the people that come in and talk to you are probably thinking probably at that first level of hr, how do you think about HR and then how do you think about almost like advanced hr yeah, so

one thing about HR is that I think it's very underappreciated, not, not in a bad way where I'm so offended that people aren't appreciating it. It's more of just like, you know, businesses, they're, they're running a tight ship and everybody's watching their costs. And so I know a lot of times entrepreneurs will do everything we can to take care of these tasks that we call tasks ourselves or have someone do these tasks for as long as they can. And it's enough to be dangerous, they know enough to be dangerous. But then there's gotta be a point where they, where they think, okay, now I need some help. And so we usually get that call when something goes wrong if there's a pending lawsuit or they figure like, oh my gosh, we're in trouble, we need your help. The practices that I find are in really good shape are those that are proactive, the ones that are thinking ahead, thinking, you know what, HR compliance is super important. And yes, it's a table stake to make sure that my policies and procedures are correct. Because I know if I do them wrong, I could have a lot of dollar signs coming my way that's going to come out of my bank account. If I do it right, then that's just, that's the core thing that we need to get done. But the ones that want to take it to the next level are those that want to focus on building, developing

people,

attracting people in the right way, focusing on engagement and retention programs. Those are the ones that are then taking it to that next level. Those are the, those are the teams of practices that I see that really have those lower level digit retention, retention rates, return over rates, I should say.

What is, that is. So your experience in retail, what does retail understand about HR and people management. Right. And talent management that dental doesn't quite understand yet? Like where do you, where have they figured out?

I think they've learned their lesson the hard way too many times that they weren't doing things the right way. They ended up getting in trouble. And so they know, you know, that, that wage and hour lawsuits that come your way can very easily become class action lawsuits because they've seen it and experienced it.

And

because of that, either they've experienced it themselves or they've seen other brands experience it. They don't even mess around. They're just like, you know what? We need a dedicated team that's experts that knows this, that are going to do this job on the dentistry side, it's still in that learn. Oh, I think I can do it. And it's really pushing the envelope of I'm going to do this as long as I can myself because I haven't gotten in trouble yet.

Yeah, no, it's a great point. I mean, you know, we hear a lot of stories where I'm at the DO and there are dental groups who have, you know, been challenged with that, like the potential class action lawsuit. I mean, I think. Yeah, just reiterating exactly what you said. Like any, any, any challenge that you have with one. I mean it's not hard for that to be extrapolated out to like all your team members across, you know, so that's a huge. It's a huge. Yeah, yeah. So anything else? What about as far as managing the talents? You got, you know, you got good people coming in. What are, what are those large brands with a lot of experience? What do they understand about managing the talent? Getting the best out of the talent?

Yeah, so it's, you know, we keep saying this table stakes thing and the compliance, I think, you know, we've kind of, we've kind of drained that I think a bit. They understand the next level. They understand that talent management is about just that, developing your people. And they have very solid development programs in place, whether it be management and leadership, which are very, two very different things. You know, you have your skills training and development, but then they really go into how do we develop the current leaders that we have, but then how do we develop the next leaders that we're going to have and what are those things that career path wise we're going to put in place? But then also what tools are we going to give our leaders so that they know how to lead the right way and that ultimately comes to back to retention.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, I think the way that things have evolved. I think dental officers used to think, like, I gotta attract that person that's already with all the experience. Right. Like that office manager who's the best office manager in my city. And I need to attract them and they're going to come in and know how to do everything. And then I think they realize that like you're much better off just finding raw talent and then building the people. You have to kind of build this machine that builds out raw talent and you just got to find. It's much easier to find raw talent than it is find that like 10 out of 10 gunslinger manager on desk.

Yeah. And I can give a good example of that that I know it's not, it's not this industry, but it could, maybe we can learn from another industry. So, you know, places like a Chipotle as an example that is in the restaurant space, they hire very generic people in the, in, in the restaurants where they say, hey, we're just going to call you a team member and I'm not going to go out and look for a cook. I'm not going to look for whatever it is. Let's just go with that example. A cook. Because you're going to have such a shallow pool of people that are specifically cooks for that particular restaurant space. No, if you find a team member, teach them how to cook and grow them. Now you have someone that you have a bigger talent pool and now you have someone that's more loyal to you because you've helped them grow. And so then your retention rate actually ends up being broader. So you could apply that in dental space where you can, um, you know, where you're, you're teaching certain skill sets and helping them grow. And it doesn't have to be very specific.

I mean, I think that's the. If you're looking for a scalable way, and this is again, what you help people do. Exactly what you help people do. But if you're looking for a scalable system, you're much better off just finding the best people in a very large town pool and just get really good at leveling them up. I mean, people. If, if McDonald's were only looking for people who had already been, you know, a cashier and like there's no one to choose from and they're coming with somebody else's habits already built in, but they're just looking for people who have, or punctual who can figure out, you know, have a certain level of, you know, ability to figure out things, you know, technology and can communicate with people. All of a sudden you have a whole huge pool, level them up. And I think, I think dental's starting to get on us a little bit. But with your help, that's, that's kind of what you help them do.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, you know, and to add on to that, you can be then going after people that really fit your culture more than that specific skill. Because sometimes there's a trade off where you find someone that can do the skill you're looking for, but you're like, yeah, I don't know how I really connected with that person or if they really fit into my culture. So if you kind of turn that around now, you can go after the person that's really, really going to fit your, your culture. And that's going to take you even, even further when it comes to patient attraction and patient experience.

I love that. Well, last question. Speaking of that kind of looking at what the future is, what is the future like, where do you see HR going? Maybe even in dental, you know, there's just, it just feels like it's a bit of a, like a turning point or there's some kind of, it's like the snow globes being shaken up a little bit. As far as the labor market goes, what do you see next? Three to five years?

Yeah, I see that. You know, obviously AI is smacking everyone right in the face. So when it comes to hr, there are some very repetitive tasks that can be handled with AI. And so we're starting to see different companies embrace how can we do that? But practically for the dental space could be recruitment. So you know, how can, how can you filter through, hopefully you have a broader pool of candidates. How can you filter through those candidates through, through asking certain questions, helping with scheduling, different interviews and, and things like that to, to really help you with your day to day tasks. So I see that in the, in the near future, AI really having an impact and I also see, it's interesting, I don't know if you saw this, but Amazon just announced that they're bringing back all of their, their, their work, their staff, five days a week. And all companies look to the big guys like Meta and Amazon to be giving that kind of direction. So I'm going to predict that now we're going to start seeing a lot of other companies starting to bring their people back.

Yeah, yeah. You know, the dental is a, is a people business. When you think about it, you, we are like people are the product. It's not like we're manufacturing, you know, good chairs and stuff. This is like the people show up, they talk to them patients, they move their hands a little bit. Some things happen on patient, that's the product. And so it is absolutely crucial that we are all nailing the HR side of it. So thank you so much, Jamie.

Absolutely.

Yes. Reach out to Jamie, reach out to Connect. If you're looking for any HR help at all, want to improve that, your retention raise with your current team. If you want to recruit better, if you want to make sure you're compliant, make sure you can sleep at night and really kind of take it to that next level similar to these other brands have done all around us. So anything, any final words you leave folks with Jamie?

Yeah. Just make sure again, you're focused on your foundation. But do everything you can to build and attract and retain your right talent. And connect with love to help you do that.

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