The Value of Providing Options
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
This blog has a tendency to focus on how Clipboard health goes about its business. We talk a lot about the values we use to build our work culture and what we want that culture to be. We talk about how we hire, who we look to hire and how we try to give them a space in which they can do their best work. We think it’s important to talk about these things not only so people who are thinking about joining us know what they are getting into (we give a lot, but we also ask a lot) but also to keep them front-of-mind for everyone who is already here. Principles are an easy thing to write down and then forget about; part of making them real is making sure we think about them often.
One thing we haven’t talked about as much in our previous posts is why we do what we do. In a different way, it’s just as important as the how; the effect of having the best tactics, strategy and hiring in the world is going to have a limited effect without motivation behind it. People and organizations work a lot differently when they think of the work they do as worthwhile; if the goals they are working towards aren’t perceived as worthwhile, it shows in the quality of the work they do.
Broadly speaking we have two primary motivations as a company, and the first is to make the lives of nurses easier and better. We think this is profoundly worthwhile. In the best of times nurses have a hard job that is both physically and mentally exhausting. They often work long, hard hours on irregular schedules and have to work their lives where their job allows rather than vice-versa. This has been true for a long time, but it’s become especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic that put widespread, visible strain on already understaffed healthcare facilities. Nurses have been pouring out their lives to save ours in a way that goes beyond mere metaphor; we can’t think of a better way to spend our time than finding new and better ways to help them.
The second motivation is to improve the lives of the many people who have joined the Clipboard Health team by building a workplace that’s healthy, worthwhile, rewarding and that promotes growth. We want the kind of workplace where people walk away from a day’s labor feeling that their work meant something and that they worked productively towards a worthwhile goal. We want them to feel rewarded both in terms of recognition and compensation. We want an environment that helps people go further, faster than they could have at other companies. This isn’t “top down” motivation in terms of being driven by the c-suite or management; everyone wants to work in a company like that, and every team member here has a hand in building that environment.
One of the big ways we pursue both those goals is by providing choice. In any situation, alternatives are a plus; the worst case scenario for a person who has an extra choice is that they opt to maintain the status quo. In better case scenarios, having a choice lets someone escape a bad situation for something much better, or have the negotiating power to improve things where they currently are. We want to talk about a few ways we work to provide choice, and what that does to improve the lives of the people who work here, and the people they work to serve.
Nurses without power suffer
In a previous article, we wrote this:
Our country’s nursing shortage is by no means new, and a large shortage of labor usually (and rightfully) results in a large increase in pay. But the confusing bit here is that the increased demand doesn’t seem to drive the increased bargaining power as we’d expect. For instance, here’s a chart showing year-over-year stagnation in wages for all nursing titles from 2019-2020:
There’s some complexity in that article that attempts to explain why wages aren’t going up as you’d expect them to (for instance, money making procedures being performed less), but one thing seems clear - they aren’t skyrocketing, and demand has.
When you combine the fact that demand is ever-growing and that wages aren’t growing to meet it and that this in and of itself didn’t increase “negotiating power”, we are now in a situation where something like an oligarchy is implied - somehow these nurses are worth more than the wage they are getting, but nobody is agreeing to give it to them. It isn’t necessarily true that there’s collusion going on here, but something is; there’s some kind of roadblock keeping the market from acting as we’d expect.
Where demand for a particular kind of worker rises, usually pay rises as well; where it doesn’t, it means something has gone wrong. Our assumption has always been that the mismatch was caused by a lack of choice; if there’s only a few places for you to work where you live, that lack of choice means you have a limited amount of negotiating power. If nurses don’t have alternatives, it’s easy for their employers to say “here’s what we are willing to give - take it or leave it.”
The changes we’ve seen since Clipboard’s founding have only served to support the assumption that choice was the missing piece in this puzzle. Nurses who work at Clipboard Health book their own shifts at times that work for them and at facilities they choose. That’s the kind of big plus that usually comes with big trade-offs, but for our nurses the opposite is true: nurses who opt to find all their work through Clipboard earn more, often 150% or more than what a traditionally employed nurse makes in their marketplace.
This is a huge improvement, and the only difference for the nurse is having a tool that lets them make choices instead of only taking what’s offered. This is what gets us out of bed in the morning: every day, we look for ways to make that improvement bigger and bigger, whether that’s with faster payments or more flexibility or more ways to work.
Remote work means options everywhere
Clipboard Health is a remote-first company; our workforce was completely remote even before the pandemic, and we never plan on tethering our business to one location with an office. We are also a global company who hires the best talent we can find regardless of the candidate’s background or location. This has worked out incredibly well for us. We are able to cast a worldwide net when we look for people to work here, and it’s brought some truly incredible folks to the team.
It doesn’t just benefit the company, however. This is another situation where we can offer choice. For a long time, wanting to work at a tech start-up came with an unspoken assumption that you’d have to pack your bags and move to the bay area. If that was something you could do, it might come with the costs of leaving behind friends and family. Housing would be expensive, and your lifestyle would look a certain way whether you wanted it to or not. If moving wasn’t in the cards, that would mean you just couldn’t take the job; you would be stuck with whatever kind of work and whatever level of pay was available locally.
We aren’t going to lie; we could be fully remote for completely selfish reasons and that would be justification enough. As we said above, we’ve had an enormous benefit in terms of the kind of talent we can find because we work and hire the way we do. But we don’t have to be completely selfish in this way, because there’s benefits on both sides. Having the ability to work for countries around the world plays a big role in leveling out pay ranges between different parts of the world. That’s huge, and it’s especially huge if you can do all that from the place you call home.
We also try to increase choice in other ways. One thing we encourage is for people to think about periods spent in a particular job role at Clipboard Health as tours of duty rather than a permanent, set-in-stone appointment. As individuals become familiar with the company and learn more about themselves, they often see the potential to be more productive by changing roles or changing the definition of their own role. We encourage that. That’s not for purely altruistic reasons, even though we certainly want people to have the flexibility to build a position they can be happy in; we also benefit, because the kind of job-fit people choose for themselves is almost always an improvement for us as well in terms of the kind of output we see. Providing people choices is like that; it can sound like a sacrifice one side is making, but it’s very often something that pushes both parties forward.
There are other ways we could talk about how we change the lives of the health care professionals we serve and the people we work with (and we will talk about them in future articles) but we really do think offering a choice is the biggest. Yes, it has to be a better choice in at least some respects to be useful to the people we are trying to help. The fact that people choose to utilize the service we offer and the feedback we get reinforces that we do offer a better choice, but we still work every day at improving the alternative we provide. But this article is as we stated above about motivation; the knowledge that the alternative we provide really does help people in big ways is the largest part of where we find the motivation to do what we do. It’s an incredible inspiration to have access to; considering that we can get it by simply offering alternatives to the way things have always been, we feel incredibly lucky.
If this article is the kind of thinking you find cool or exciting, we’d love to talk to you. Apply here, and we will be in touch soon!