My fiancee is a Dental Assistant-turned-Administrator with ~20 years of experience in the field, and I swear most of her bosses have been complete idiots when it comes to running their business (including compliance with labor law). Just in the time we've been together, she's had:
- The first one she worked for after we got together had her working sub-40 hours a week, and whenever she would have to pull overtime because of the increasing number of job duties she was being saddled with, the dentist would split that overtime across paychecks to bring her up to 40 each week rather than pay time and a half. Her bookkeeper was adamant that this was legal, despite the sign in the break room explicitly saying it's not. She also hired a business consultant who taught “The Secret” as a business strategy, and who encouraged his clients to simplify statements into what was “basically medically correct without being too detailed”; all of his examples were simplified to the point of being fraudulently incorrect. That one fired her for telling the boss' daughter (who was in the office because she was sick, and was being allowed to enter the operatories) to please stop throwing a tantrum in the waiting room with a patient who was known to be highly nervous and who was on the verge of leaving in tears because of the girl's screaming.
- The next one had been through court-ordered anger management sessions and was slowly losing his grip on reality. We believe he was blacking out during his meltdowns. At one point he blew up so harshly on a Friday at his daughter (because of course he had nepotism hires) that she quit; come the following Monday, he was genuinely confused as to why she wasn't in the office. He literally had no memory that she had quit. He also penny-pinched all of his materials, literally telling the assistants that if they used a more expensive material than necessary for certain procedures that they would be terminated immediately. Except, of course, for his star assistant who openly flouted every “do this and you're fired” restriction to the point that she was barely doing her job at all, and when she was performing her duties it was solely the way she wanted to. He accused my fiancee of “not being a team player” despite her doing every job duty not being done by his other employees (e.g., she was the only person cleaning instruments most days despite there being a clear rule that everyone was responsible for cleaning the instruments they used, including the hygienists cleaning their own). He accepted her resignation in lieu of firing her for doing more work than anyone.
- After that, she had a bit of a rocky start with the next boss, but they eventually came to terms and had a wonderful professional relationship, especially after he got rid of the office manager who was stealing from him and the practice manager who was covering for every failure of his other employees and lying to claim he was the one refusing to take disciplinary action for faults. She worked her way up from being the hygiene schedule coordinator to office manager of one of his two practices. The head of HR was grooming her to be a proper practice manager / director of Operations / financial coordinator. Then he started making some incredibly bad decisions about associate doctors he brought in after one of his other associates retired, as well as hiring other staff without running them by either my fiancee or HR, who would've weeded them out in the interview process. So he sold the practice my fiancee works at to another dentist, with no warning to anyone that it was going to occur.
- The new owner is psycho woman-child playing at being a real grown-up capital class Business Owner. She brought in not only her existing personal assistant (who works remotely from a different state), but a brand-new Business Manager who's never worked with either the doc's existing practice nor the one my fiancee runs and seems to only exist to play Yes Girl to the new owner. Also her “website person” who lives on the opposite side of the
countrycontinentworld. She claimed during the process of the purchase that she was going to make it her new primary location (a lie; she's staying at her current practice and trying to hire an associate to run the one she bought). She said she was going to be staying on all of the insurance the practice uses (a lie; she intends to drop at least one or two of the carriers, but really wants to make the practice fee-for-service with no assignment of benefits, which will remove 40-60% of the patient base). In the ~2 months she's owned the practice, she hasn't updated the web presence, claiming that the old owner has prevented her from doing so (a lie; she has access to the hosting server and every asset on it). She immediately started implementing cost-cutting measures, claiming that the office can't afford to keep the lights on (a lie; the office was profitable prior to the purchase); in fact, she claims that the office needs an immediate 15% growth from last year's revenue to even be able to operate. The prior owner stayed on as an associate to handle the transition through November; she fired him a couple of weeks ago and lied to my fiancee, saying that he left without notice. She told another associate that she had offered him 30 days but he declined (also a lie, and a mutually exclusive one from her prior one!). She then lied (are we seeing a pattern here?) and claimed that her attorney had advised her not to have any contact with the prior owner – her attorney told the prior owner's attorney in no uncertain terms that he'd said no such thing. Since there is now no full-time associate on duty, just a rotating list of guest doctors, she's losing both patients and revenue because the guest docs won't do high-dollar procedures for liability reasons, especially if the procedure will take multiple sessions. She's also losing patients because there's no guarantee that any given patient will be able to see the same doctor twice. We also think she may have listed my fiancee's current position anonymously.
So my fiancee is looking for a new job, which comes with its own set of insults:
- The first office that bit on her resume is making 20% more revenue than her current practice; he offered her a 20% pay cut. At best, he was willing to offer “performance incentives to bring you closer to your desired compensation”. No dentist in the history of ever has not found reasons to not pay bonuses, even when they've clearly been earned. We cannot afford that degree of pay decrease, and he turned down a compromise of a 10% cut.
- The current prospect runs three practices, one of which has an attached dermatological med spa. She asked my fiancee how much she's making and said that she would have to manage all three of her practices for that amount; she would only offer 70% to run one. One of her locations is currently on track to produce 30% more revenue than my fiancee's current location. My fiancee is going to counter-offer, saying that if she wants to offer 70% for one office, she thinks it only fair that she should get paid at least twice that to run all three, especially since one of the locations is 45 miles from its nearest neighbor (and over 50 miles from home). I'm not holding out much hope, but I'll accept a pleasant surprise if it comes.
- This isn't even including the ones she hasn't applied to because they're asking for someone to do the entire business side of running a practice for 50% or less than her current pay. With the size of a couple of them, the doctor was likely taking home ten times what he was offering for someone to do all of the non-clinical work.
The whole dental industry is in pure Late Stage Capitalism these days – they want unbounded growth without offering compensation commensurate with the amount of work done nor with the growth of the practice, and they call their workers unreasonable for demanding that they not take pay cuts to make lateral or even vertical moves. They offer piddling amounts while going home to their million-dollar condos, weekending at their multi-million-dollar vacation homes, and taking month-long trips out of the country. And they wonder why assistants and hygienists aren't accepting full-time positions when they can make more by temping.
Sorry for the wall of text; it's just a whole effing lot and some days it's hard not to break down from the stress it's putting the whole family under.