The last 18 months has been incredibly tough. Nobody out there in veterinary land is going to dispute that statement. We, like most of you, have been busy doing the work and we haven’t got to writing about the work. But this post has been brewing for a while. Because as we do the work, as we talk with people and groups and workplaces that are struggling, that are suffering, the same questions keep on coming up.

Both Cheryl and I are trained coaches. At the heart of coaching is the powerful question and the skill of asking the right question at the right time to encourage people to pause and really see what is going on for them or their workplace.

The irony here is that many of us question ourselves constantly. We might ask ourselves; What if I miss something or make a mistake? What if the client doesn’t like or believe me? What if there is something fundamentally wrong with me? What if I am not enough?

Whilst we frequently blame ourselves, it is becoming more and more apparent that the major cause of suffering in our industry is NOT the individuals that work in it. People who work in our industry are amazing; intelligent, hard-working, dedicated to improving animal welfare and fostering the human-animal bond. We make big sacrifices to do veterinary work.

Where is the REAL problem in the veterinary world?

The major causes of the suffering in our industry, are the systems and the context in which we work. It is the workload, the work intensity, the emotional load. This sits in the backdrop of client expectations and the perceived value of animals to society.

People are only able to perform to the extent that the system allows and supports them.

We thought we would play on the irony of the “What Ifs” we can torment ourselves with and take a “What If” approach to the system.

What if it were different?

Here are some of the questions that repeatedly come up as we facilitate conversations around the suitability and sustainability of the systems in which we work.

• What if we thought more about what is right with us than what is wrong with us?
• What if we started with the idea that the system is the problem and worked to create systems that allowed people to thrive? What if we called that success?
• What if the people making the decisions for veterinary workplaces and the industry were representative of the demographics of the people impacted by the decision?
• What if influential people such as leaders and university staff were supported and resourced to role model self-care at work and how to lead a balanced life?
• What if the client wasn’t king?
• What if we thought about how many people we have in our team, how much they can comfortably do in a day, and what they enjoy, and then opened up the corresponding amount of space in our schedules?
• What if we set our prices on the basis of the cost of providing the service? Fair trade veterinary services anybody?
• What if we thought through who we are squeezing when we squeeze a client in?
• What if we measured KPIs such as how people feel at the beginning and end of their working day, what percentage of people had a break or the number of hours worked? And correlated that with productivity and markers of client satisfaction?

We could keep going – but I think you get the idea. It is time to rethink the way we are doing things. It is time to reconsider our definition of success. It is time to have frequent and open conversations around how we do things in the veterinary world.

What if you opened up this conversation?

Cheryl and I love facilitating these conversations – coming in as objective out-siders and creating a protected space where everybody’s voice is equal and everybody feels safe to express their opinion. And guiding the conversation towards taking action to make things different, to make things better for the future. We don’t have all the answers for you or for your workplace. But the answers are generally there, they just need to be uncovered. Small changes can lead to significant shifts that lead to the next small change.

Excellent – you are still with us. Our question now is no longer a what if but a when?

When are you going to take action?

• If you are a leader, you might schedule a conversation in your workplace
• If you are an employee, you might ask for a conversation in your workplace
• Or you might decide that that conversation would best be facilitated by an experienced person with intimate knowledge of the veterinary world. Please contact us to schedule a facilitated conversation in your workplace. It could be on Zoom. Or in Sydney (Cheryl). Or Melbourne (Cathy).

Let’s get this show on the road. It HAS to be different.

Are you tired of putting out the fires?

Would you prefer to invest in your or the teams well-being and avoid a lot of angst, time, expense, grey hair and fire-fighting?

This research has been swirling around us for some time and now it is all captured into a short document specifying the reasons why you want to manage or work in a mentally healthy workplace – as do 91% of your fellow Australians.

• You might think it is the right thing to do.
• You might recognize the advantages to people (yourself, the team, the clients, your family and friends) and animals.
• You might be thinking about the businesses duty of care to the physical and psychological health of their employees.

Click here to view and/or download the digital version.

First of all – CONGRATULATIONS! Your hard work and dedication over many years has led you to this point – the culmination of what for many of us, was a childhood dream – to be able to help animals and improve their quality of life. You will have forged deep connections with your peers and your brains will be packed with all of the knowledge that a vet degree provides. The years ahead hold much promise and excitement for you.

But what now?

Up until this point, your primary focus has been on achieving the big, hairy audacious end goal of being a vet. Whilst you set the end goal, the pathway to achieving it lay in jumping through all the hoops (think exams and assessments) that other people decided were important for you. In the process of hoop-jumping, you may well have created some habits of thinking and behaving that will not be helpful to you as you move into the profession. 

From my point of view, two of the habits that can be dangerous are;

• You may have got into the habit of doing what other people expect of you. This is not a recipe for long-term satisfaction and career success. It is time to make a transition to being self-directed and negotiating a career that has meaning and fulfillment for you.
  How will you do that?
• With your eye on the end goal, you may have got in the habit of discarding or downplaying anything that got in the way of passing the next assessment  – throwing it to the side with the thought that this can be picked back up later. Maybe this included self-care and the development of your non-technical competencies.
  How do you think your habits of self-care will support your transition to work? Do you feel confident that you have the necessary base-line of non-technical competencies to allow you to effectively utilize your clinical skills and knowledge? Or do you have a plan to upskill?

Graduation is now imminent. Later has come.

• It’s time to redirect your focus.
• It’s time to take personal responsibility for your career choices and pathway.
• It’s time to take a more holistic approach to your ongoing personal and professional development.

And as you prepare to make this monumental move into the veterinary workforce, there are some important questions to ask of yourself – questions that are bigger than do I want to go into mixed or small animal practice or do I want to work in urban Melbourne or rural South Australia?

1. What sort of vet do you want to be?

What is important to you? What do you want to stand for as a vet, as a team member, with your boss, with clients, with family, friends and community? What are your values?

2. What sort of work is going to suit you best?

What do you love about work? What do you find easy and energizing? When do you lose track of time? Where can you make the best use of your strengths and interests?

3. What sort of workplace culture will suit you best?

Do you like a big team or a smaller one? What do you want the teamwork to look like? How are people’s contributions recognized and rewarded? Are team members thoughts and opinions heard and acted on? Is work considered to be a part of life rather than being life?

Answering these questions takes time and reflection.  And only you know what is right for you.

Taking the time for reflection helps creates self-awareness and self-awareness is at the centre of the veterinary employability framework created by the vetset2go project. This framework outlines the “personal and professional capabilities that enable a veterinarian to gain employment, and develop a professional pathway that achieves satisfaction and success” (https://www.vetset2go.edu.au/).

Self-awareness allows us to negotiate a career that is personally congruent – one that is consistent with our values and beliefs and the way we want to live our life. It allows us to live a life that matters. It allows us to achieve our own personal ideals of satisfaction and success.

How are you going to grow your self-awareness and achieve long-lived satisfaction and success?

What does your happily ever after look like?

Maybe I am a morbid voyeur? Maybe I am simply weird?

• I don’t know somebody that is sick that is likely to die soon.
• Nor am I in the age group where friends are regularly popping their clogs.
• And no – this is not a recent thing. Reading the death notices has been a regular thing for many years and it is only now that I have reflected on it and thought about why I do it.

So why do I read the death notices?

Picture the scene – it is a peaceful Sunday morning in Melbourne and I am sitting in bed with a cup of tea and my favourite newspaper (OK – so maybe I am also weird in that I still read a hard copy of the paper). I flick through the front part of the paper and read the articles of interest. And then I go to the death notices and do a scan. What is that about? What exactly am I looking for?

Good question. And one that I have been asking myself.

Once I started thinking about it, I realized that there are two key things I look for;

1. Evidence of a life well-lived – I love reading the death notices that talk about a person that has been a great support, friend or mentor to other people and who has made a positive contribution to the world. I am that stereotypical achievement-oriented vet and these notices inspire me to focus on the important things in life rather than filling my life from dawn to dusk with busy and maybe unimportant work.

2. A reminder to put my problems in perspective and be grateful for what I have.  I have problems – doesn’t everybody? But I also have great people and experiences in my life and every day I have the opportunity to enjoy what I do, to live a worthy life and to make a difference. The people I am reading about no longer have this opportunity. They may have died before their time, before they got to realise their dreams or their potential –  that makes me sad.

Reading the death notices makes me realise just how lucky I am.

(Please do yourself a favour and read the blog on luck if you haven’t already done so – I definitely believe that winning the lottery is lucky!)

So maybe reading the death notices is a weird way to be inspired, to have perspective and to be grateful. Maybe going out in nature and marveling at the natural world is a more socially acceptable way of doing it.

But I am going to keep reading them. We only have so much time and energy in our lives and this is a strategy that keeps me on track to make sure that my time and energy counts.

And it gets me wondering;

• What do you do to remind yourself to have perspective and to be grateful for what you have?
• What would you like people to say about you in your death notice?
• What is the change you are wanting to make in this world?

Please share. We would love to hear from you.

There is plenty of noise in the wider world around the way that KPI’s have driven staff behavior – but not in the way that the companies involved were probably envisaging!

The stories that hit the news head-lines are the ones where the focus on particular KPIs has driven unethical behavior harming reputations and/or company value.

Which is your preferred story of woe?

• That Victorian police have been reported to have blown into breathalyzers themselves in order to meet their targets – and to have done this more than 250 000 times.
• That employees of one of the big banks fraudulently activated children’s bank account to meet their new account targets.
• That a prominent and well-regarded car company doctored their cars to show falsely low emissions during testing to sell more cars.

So are KPI’s uniformly bad and what should the veterinary world learn from the transgressions reported in the media?

Fact 1 – KPIs can definitely drive behavior.

Yep, there is no doubt about that.

Well designed KPIs can drive positive change. And they come with other benefits. KPI’s can;

• Provide a succinct snap-shot of the financial health of your business
• Highlight trends in your practice and allow early intervention if there is a problem
• Measure your progress on important goals
• Allow you to set an outcome whilst allowing team members autonomy on how to achieve it
• Identify opportunities for training or coaching
• Assess the response to training and coaching
• Be used to benchmark against similar practices
• Be an objective measure of success and a cause for celebration

You can see why many practices and businesses have adopted KPIs.

But the question is, has the pendulum swung too far on KPIs? Are they driving the right behavior? And are they motivating people and creating positive change?

Fact 2 – Poorly designed KPIs may drive the wrong behavior. 

It is often said that what gets measured gets done. When people feel pressured and unsupported to achieve numbers, they may choose to take the shortest and most direct route to the number that is being tracked – with big effects on other behaviours that may not be measured. You need to consider the knock-on effects when designing your KPIs.

For example, think of the “procedural vet”. They may do a lot of the surgery in the practice and hence their $$/visit are high. But this person does not work in isolation – it takes a team for a procedural vet to be able to get through a lot of surgery – from reception to nursing to other vets who may take on the client interface or the hospital care of the surgery patients. All of these people allow the procedural vet to kick the $/visit goal.

How will these other people be recognized and rewarded? And what is stopping the procedural vet from discouraging the support team from taking breaks or from helping other people in the practice if it interferes with the flow of surgery or from cutting corners which may compromise the safety of the patients? Is the vet profession free from the bad behavior seen in other industries?

Fact 3 – Poorly designed KPIs can be demoralizing and demotivating.

This happens when people don’t believe in the validity of what is being measured. A good example is when a KPI is set around the percentage of dogs in the practice on heartworm prevention in a geographical area with incredibly low incidences of heartworm.

How can a person believe that this KPI is truly about doing the best by clients and their pets and not about making profit?

So, what are we to do? How can we maximise the good and minimise the bad in KPIs?

Here are our best tips.

1. A KPI is only as good as the relevance of what it measures and its ability to create positive change. Your KPIs should include measures of what is important to your practice. Hopefully this is reflected in your clinic values or mission statement. Do your KPIs reflect the fact that you think integrity or teamwork or excellence or compassion is important? Or are these just words you have on the wall?

2. Set achievable targets and support/train people to achieve them. Competition is rarely helpful.

3. We can not all be superstars – Probability theory suggests that the KPI numbers for a group of individuals or teams are likely to be normally distributed. Most of us will fall in the middle of the Bell curve. We cannot make everybody perform at the level of the highest KPI.

4. Be curious about the outliers. Numbers that fall at the top and the bottom are the outliers. Have a conversation and aim to identify what it is that the positive and negative deviants are and aren’t doing. Here is your training opportunity.

5. Set KPIs for the team rather than the individual. Veterinary practice is a team sport. Behaviours that help the team such as being a fun and positive person in the workplace or supporting your team mates or training people or providing feedback will increase the more financially based KPIs for everybody.

6. Compare apples with apples. If you are benchmarking against other practices, ensure that they are measuring their KPIs in the same way and that the practices are similar in their management practices, policies, staffing ratios etc

If it is true that what gets measured gets done, what is getting done in your practice? Are you measuring good performance or are you measuring profit?