7 Great Tips to Help You Bag Your Next Raise in the New Year

1. Start early. Once Performance reviews are done for the year, people tend to put them in a drawer.  Maybe a month before their self-evaluation is due, workers scurry around trying to recall what they accomplished in the last year.

Don’t make the mistake of pushing all thought of your next performance review off our plate just because your evaluation is done and you bagged your raise for the year.  “Planning should start the very next day after you get your last evaluation,” says Francisco Gonzalez, medical staff performance improvement coordinator at Thomason Hospital in El Paso, Texas.

The day after, Gonzalez reviews his most recent review and goals.  He then identifies the information he needs to collect to make his case and gathers the data year-round.  Come performance review time, he whips out relevant data to back up his claims of improved physician compliance with Joint Commission standards and medical staff bylaws.  For his most recent performance evaluation, he pulled out a folder that contained not only data that showed performance on core measures, but also evidence of other initiatives he took.  This approach helped him snag a raise in the 1% to 5% range for 2008.

2. “Ideally,” says one California-based JCAHO coordinator who made $103,000 and got a 1% to 5% raise at a hospital with more than 500 beds, :make some bold goals that are measureable and hit them.  Agree upon them with your manager.”  Tell your boss what you intend to do and ask for support.

3. Eliminate subjectivity as much as possible from your performance evaluation.  If you can, trot out data that you’ve collected and/or analyzed to show how your or areas under your jurisdiction have fared in the past year.  This is all part of a more scientific, evidence-based approach to justifying a raise by showing your impact on patient safety, med management, environment of care, quality and other performance indicators at your hospital.

4. Be able to provide a narrative that shows how well yor’ve met your goals.  The director of regulatory compliance at a Maryland hospital who got a 6% to 10% raise plus a $10,000 bonus did this by discussing the last Periodic Performance Review for the Joint Commission, follow-up on action plans, and how the hospital fared on various surveys.  At the very least, you’ll need to demonstrate and effort made, she said.  Did your or areas under your jurisdiction meet certain thresholds?  What did the department accomplish this year?  Did you reach your goals?  For anyone who manages survey readiness, external indicators such as actual outcomes from survey and performance on the Periodic Performance Review can bolster your case.

5. Invest in more training.  To increase your value to your organization or rise through the ranks, consider more education.  Your might want to add a certification to your resume.  Quality directors or mangers who were Certified Professionals in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) netted a base salary of $99,000, up 38% from $72,000, which their peers without CPHQs got, according to our survey.  The CPHQ-holders includes VPs of quality and performance improvement directors.  Other certifications that turned up in our survey included: ACHE, FACHE, CIC, RHIA and CHFM.

Another option would be to get Lean/Six Sigma training that teaches you how to improve performance by reducing waste or to how to drill down into problem areas to reduce variation and improve quality, says Jim Levette, chair of the Healthcare division at the American Society for Quality.

Finally, at some levels, an executive M.B.A. program might be the way to go.  Some E.M.B.A. programs now focus on health care, officering a blend of general management courses and electives and case studies geared toward the specialty.

6. Know your worth.  Do competitive marketing research to see how much your peers with similar jobs are raking in.  “Be continually aware of what’s happening in the marketplace,” says Paul Dorf, managing director of Compensation Resources, a consulting firm based in Uppers Saddle River, N.J.  Given that healthcare has a fairly high level of turnover, it’s always possible that a hospital will pay new employees more than current employees doing the same job.  Some respondents too IJC’s 2998 salary survey noted that pay equity or “structural” equity helped them get raises.

7. Go after the best raise – the type you get when you change jobs.  One JCAHO coordinator scored a 6%-10% raise that upped his pay to $105,000 by switching jobs and companies.

The best opportunity for your next move is usually either an internal promotion (for example, from manager to director or from director to vice president) or from a small hospital to a bigger hospital, says David Bjork, senior VP of Integrated Healthcare Strategies, a Minneapolis-based health care consulting company that deals with executive compensation issues.  He notes that a move from a subsidiary hospital to the parent is sometimes easier than to a totally different organization because you get preference as an internal transfer.