Special Project, Anyone?

The life of a clinical dietitian seems fairly straightforward. We all cover specific floors, attend multidisciplinary rounds, and take on the occasional dietetic intern. However, every few months, your department gets blindsided with a special project or task.

What exactly are these projects? Sometimes it’s a guest speaking engagement. Our hospital often gets requests for dietitians to be on panels for local events or give talks to clubs and organizations. The project may be internal and involve working on a quality improvement project or leading a department in-service. No matter the project, the response to these requests is usually an awkward silence followed by excuses.

Who Wants Extras?

As any clinical dietitian will tell you, she has enough work without taking on additional projects. Of course, there may be some slow times throughout the year, but just the work of seeing patients and keeping up to date on your clinical knowledge is a full-time job. Any additional projects not only increase your workload, they often take time away from patient care and are guaranteed to increase your stress levels.

It’s also worth noting that these additional projects do not come with additional compensation. As most

dietitians work in salaried roles, there’s no financial benefit for doing additional work. A clinical manager may try to persuade dietitians to volunteer for additional work as it will count towards their performance evaluation. However, your performance evaluation only makes a significant difference in your salary during the first 3-5 years of working, provided you're in the same position. With a salary range for a clinical dietitian, a dietitian will receive larger raises during her first few years of working (2-3%) but as she reaches the higher end of the range, even an excellent performance review will result in, at most, a 1% raise. Understandably, a minimal yearly raise does not motivate.

Show Me the Money

Delving a little deeper into financial rewards, money is an area where businesses often turn a blind eye when it comes to motivating their employees. At my first clinical dietitian position, my clinical manager once told our department that we shouldn’t be motivated by money. All I can say to that statement is that it was a lousy volunteer position and I would not have shown up if the paychecks stopped coming in.

Clinical dietitians are not primarily motivated by money. If we were, we would have gone into a higher-paying area. We love medical nutrition therapy. Our field is one of the lower paid professionals in the medical field, especially considering the fact that dietitians complete a four-year college degree, a 1200-hour dietetic internship, and often a master’s degree as well. So, when you take a low to moderate paid professional and ask for additional work without additional compensation, don’t be surprised at the lack of enthusiasm. As Luke 10:7 states, “For the worker is worthy of his wages.”

Generating Excitement

There are some projects and tasks that I genuinely enjoy and will make an effort to complete. For example, our

hospital hosts a “take your child to work day” event and it’s fun for the dietitians and the kids who attend. Participating in this project takes about 15 hours total from the work week of three dietitians though. Other improvement projects that are relevant to the work we do every day also see some enthusiasm. We recently changed some charting forms and our whole department was involved with that task.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a clinical manager, asking your dietitians to take on duties and roles that are related to their daily work is not unreasonable. I might not expect enthusiasm but anything that helps with workflow and falls within normal tasks for dietitians can be assigned.

For everything else, there’s MasterCard.

Or not. You can run your department into the ground while burying your head in the sand and demand unreasonable work products from your team. If you want employee retention and improved employee satisfaction, invest financially in your dietitians. Pay bonuses or overtime for extra projects. You’ll be surprised at how motivating money can be. At the end of the day, it’s not that difficult.