Insights From Our Editors

Optician Recruitment & Retention Opportunity: Offer Competitive Compensation

March 2, 2016

Are you offering your opticians a salary that is competitive, based on what other eyecare practitioners pay? In the U.S., as a whole, the average annual optician compensation was $45,728, according to Jobson Optical Research’s 2015 ECP Compensation Study. In the Northeastern part of the country, the average annual optician salary was $52,798, while it was $45,091 in the South; $40,183 in the Midwest; and $46,033 in the West.

Click HERE to purchase Jobson Optical Research’s 2015 ECP Compensation Study report.

Staff retention is a core issue for practices. You want to pay your staff appropriately, but you don’t want to overpay either. So, what are reasonable numbers? One way to answer this question comes from the MBA numbers, which are based on almost 2,000 practices nationwide. To determine what are reasonable numbers for your staff payroll, calculate 20 percent of revenue collected.

An example will help. Consider a practice collecting a total of $1 million annually from all sources. Twenty percent of $1 million equals $200,000. This imaginary practice would have $200,000 to go shopping for staff. (This is all the non-doctor, non-in-house optical laboratory staff. Your optical staff, that works in your dispensary helping patients select frames and lenses, is part of the $200,000.)

That $200,000 represents all the money that it takes to hire the non-doctor, non-in-house optical lab staff. It includes wages, bonuses and benefits. If you provide uniforms, then that cost comes out of that bucket of money, as well. If you put money into a retirement account for staff, then that money also comes out of the $200,000. In other words, everything it costs you to hire and keep your staff comes out of that $200,000.

Calculate what percentage of your total gross revenue you paid for your staff last year. This gives you a starting place to think about how much you are paying for your staff. How close to 20 percent of gross revenue are you? Are you paying more, or less, than 20 percent? If you are paying less, you might consider giving your staff a raise or hiring another person. If you are paying more, then the question becomes how much more? We would rather pay a little more for high quality staff than to pay less and have to deal with constant staff turnover.

Take this week to re-evaluate how much you are paying your staff.

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