An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is a unique set of benefits that an employee receives in return for the skills, capabilities, and experience they bring to a company. The way I look at it is that it’s a summary of why people would join us, and stay with us. What makes us different? It’s a hard market out there for Allied Health employers at the moment and it’s not unheard of for even new graduates to have 10+ offers of employment when they graduate. The tables have somewhat turned from when I was a new grad. I remember being told at my first ever interview at a large hospital in London that over 250 people had applied for only 6 positions.

We have worked hard over the years to develop our EVP to ensure that it’s attractive as it can be, whilst suiting the needs of the business. We have made some pretty major changes within the last 6 months to ensure our teams are happy and developing. Some of these include increasing all our new patient appointments to 40 minutes to ensure a better service is provided and stopping weekend services (unless they want to!) to ensure a better work-life balance. We also used to try and provide a service over public holidays for clients, but this has also been reduced to ensure everyone gets a good rest!

Our official EVP is broken down into five areas:

Nowadays, everybody values flexibility and employers must adapt. Full-time, part-time, casual employment, commission-based, salary-based agreements. We have to ensure that we suit the needs of the business and clients, but we aim to provide flexible working opportunities whenever we can for employees.

This is something I strongly believe Health First Group has always done quite well. We provide a structured professional development setup that suits a range of different experience levels. A mixture of clinical 1:1s, performance reviews, mentorship sessions, journal clubs and external speakers means you will always be developing as an Allied Health professional.

We offer a range of different services in clinics that complement each other to provide a holistic service. Along with this, we have a huge number of additional perks for our employees from private health discounts, shopping discounts and course allowances.

Not only do we value better connections within our community, but also have better connections with each other. We operate primarily in regional areas. Moving to these areas can be daunting; however, through our sponsorships agreements, local events and agreements in place with companies located within our towns, it is easy to fit in, meet people and immerse yourselves in the community. We strongly believe that our relationship with these communities is an essential and undeniable strength of the business.

We have over 40 therapists, all with different backgrounds, passions and clinical expertise. If you want to learn about paediatric physio, we can have you spend some time with our paeds expert. If you want to learn about women’s health, you can spend some time with our Women’s Health Physios. Interested in Pilates? Easy. We have such a thriving community of therapists who want to help each other develop and we cultivate this via our intranet system Flo. People regularly communicate through this and ask clinical questions about cases that other people can help with, it fosters an insightful and helpful community who all strive to develop and learn. It’s really great to see and great for clinical development!

It’s important that everyone understands our shared purpose. Almost two years ago developed our Core Values, in addition to further developing our Mission and Vision statements. These were developed by our staff, not us. They participated in surveys and group sessions to help develop our “why?”.
This is an ongoing, evolving process. We know we need to continue to evaluate our processes and why we do what we do. The above is just a snapshot of what it’s like to be a therapist at Health First Group. Hopefully, you found it interesting and if you have any thoughts or opinions, I would love to hear them!