The veterinary profession may not have changed in 50 years, but our clients certainly have, and this failure to adapt is a big reason why we can’t keep professionals in the veterinary industry.
I admit to having cheated a little on Episode 4. There’s a chance that I might have taken 4 different reasons and condensed them into a single one. But you know, who would have read the list on the NINE Real Reasons We Can’t Keep Veterinary Professionals in the Veterinary Profession?
This one is a long one, so I recommend microwaving your lunch first, or saving it for a particularly boring train commute, or at least making sure you’re fully committed to procrastinating from the stuff you probably intended to do for the next five minutes. But, as usual, I can at least promise a blunt, no-nonsense conversation about our profession and the reasons we can’t seem to keep our people well and engaged.
If you’re just joining the journey, feel free to check out Part 1: Loneliness, Part 2: Boredom, and Part 3: Poor Leadership. But if you’re on this wee ride with me now, let’s dig in…
Failure to Adapt
The four-in-one REAL reason I refer to as Failure to Adapt.
We’ve failed, as a profession, to move with the times. And not just in an area or two, a bit slow on the uptake, a bit clunky in the progress stakes. Instead, it appears we have remained stuck. We sometimes even wear it as a badge of honour; a quick Google of the history of veterinary practice will tell you that it’s “been around in its current form” for almost a century.
The world has changed, our clients have changed, our teams have changed, and we still carry on regardless.
An industry built for a 1960’s male
The first Failure to Adapt won’t come as a surprise to anyone; we have a profession of women, built for a 1960s male.
We’re designed for a vet who has a wife at home running the household, keeping the kids fed, remembering the mother-in-law’s birthday present, doing the school runs, and manicuring the lawn. Or at least perhaps, a bachelor eating at the local publican’s house most nights, with an elderly neighbour bringing him casseroles out of pity for his anticipated domestic shortcomings.
I don’t have to make much of a point for you to imagine where I’m going with this, right? Simply, this is no longer the profession.
The current demographic of vets has school runs, breastfeeding, or elderly parents who don’t live with them. We have to remember our kids’ friends’ names AND write up our clinical notes on the weekends. We have to buy a birthday present for the mother-in-law and bake cookies for the team-building day. We have to take calls in the middle of the night AND coordinate getting the car serviced.
Most amusingly (though, of course, not isolated to our profession, simply an absurdity that continues to baffle me), we have to work from 8am to 6pm, but we also do school runs at 9 and 3…
We’re running a household, or at least a life, and working full time. How many of the demographic that complain about the “lack of work ethic” in the younger generation, or the “unfairness” of letting mums work school hours, did both things alongside one another? Certainly, no one did them well.
And yet, the status quo remains.
Yet the industry remains steadfast in maintaining the status quo. Perhaps because the majority of the leadership remains male despite the prevailing workforce demographic, and this status quo serves their interests. Or, (probably and) we simply don’t know how to adapt because we believe that it’s too hard, that fairness and equality mean that women must do it all, and that personal problems don’t require workplace solutions.
I recently read an article in a popular veterinary journal that posed questions about the reasons for the ‘problem’ of the feminisation of the workforce, and the ‘solutions’ to this ‘challenge’. Seriously? We’re still talking about this as though the problem is the people who are joining the profession, rather than our failure to provide a way for those people to stay?
The natural cycle of generational shift
Related, though a rant I’m possibly less well known for, is the failure to adapt to the natural cycle of generational shift. It’s hardly a new thing for older generations to believe that ‘these young people today’ have less work ethic, less respect, less stickability; you can find records of old white men complaining about young peoples’ awfulness more than ten centuries ago, well before anyone was advocating for the right to disconnect laws.
However, the argument about whether the younger demographic is soft, has its priorities wrong, or is less committed is somewhat moot. For as long as we continue to accuse and debate about whether, or why, they don’t want to work as hard as previous generations, we continue to miss the point. The point, of course, being that this IS the generation now joining and soon dominating the workforce. How they should or could behave is completely irrelevant compared to how they will behave.
The soon-to-be dominant demographic in our profession DOES prioritise work-life balance over constant accessibility. They WILL choose well-being over working weekends. They CAN set boundaries and demand lunch breaks and reasonable finish times. They DO believe they can have fulfilling work as well as a decent paycheck. They understand that after-hours and on-call work has a measurable, proven impact on life expectancy and health, and that there may not be enough money on offer for them to sell those services.
Right or wrong, personal values are changing in our profession.
So right or wrong, good or bad, inconvenient or unfair, these are the values that will soon predominate in the profession.
And all we do is push back. At best, we have big corporates using recruitment buzzwords like wellbeing, while offering longer opening hours and shorter consultations. We’ve got webinars on boundaries, while making it a job requirement to have Teams on your smartphone.
For the record, as someone in the precarious position of being on the cusp of generations—young enough to be digitally savvy, old enough to resent it—I usually spend a lot of my time working with clinics to help bridge the generational divide. My role is to help different people see each other’s perspectives, understand motivations and strengths, and do it all without weighing in on who’s right or wrong. However, if asked to pick a side, to really put my money where my mouth is, I will give you a straight answer. Just perhaps in a different blog 😛
Failure to acknowledge the needs of different personality types
Which segues nicely into Failure to Adapt number three; personality types. Related, but not directly, to generational and gender shifts, it is true that the stereotype of people joining our profession is not the same as those we appealed to 50 years ago.
We all know the stereotypes associated with our profession, many of which are for good reason, and I’m not going to challenge them. The reality is that 50 years ago, a majority of vets were rurally-raised, practical people who liked being outdoors and hands-on. The extreme intellectual demands of acceptance into the veterinary degree now select for a different type of person. The rigour and conscientiousness required to complete the degree filter personalities even further.
The problem is that our proposed solution to the fact that this stereotype of personality is having a hard time thriving in our profession is to try to select against those types of people. Rather than take a good, hard look at what we’re doing that is not working for these people, we’re just deciding that these people are the wrong people. Why fix the industry when you can just fix the people, right? Let’s get back to ‘the good old days’ when we had country kids who enjoyed being out on the farm, with a line of heifers ready to keep one arm warm at a time.
Our profession may not have changed in 50 years, but our clients certainly have!
Naturally, though, this leads to Failure to Adapt number four. That even if we did decide that it’s the people who are broken rather than the profession, and turned this old boat around and went back to only recruiting the “type” of people who didn’t use to complain so much, those people would look around at our unrecognisable type of work, and hate every minute of it.
Because while our profession hasn’t changed much in 50 years, our clients certainly have.
We’re no longer predominantly on-farm, dealing with individual cow health and/or the odd barn cat. Pet owners want the same level of care they provide to their children. They have access to unlimited information and believe they know as much as we do. Litigation is a genuine and real risk in many places, or at least the threat of licensing board investigations. There are a myriad of ethical grey areas, a distain for ‘good’ medical care, a pushing of life beyond when we should just because we can. There are corporate pressure to cave to clients creating cognitive dissonance and unrealistic expectations, a responsibility for upselling wellness plans, and an ever-decreasing consultation length for an ever-increasing list of things we need to offer, discuss, and cover our butts for.
And nowhere in there is there a nice leisurely 20-minute drive between farms to jab the next pony, gather your thoughts, listen to some music, and eat a sandwich in the sunshine.
We are surprised that our people are struggling to operate, function, and excel in the profession as they once did, when the profession itself is no longer the same.
And what do we offer in return? A centralised payroll service that guarantees no one will know how to help you with your query, and an IT service that responds to your ticket about being able to open your emails by sending you an email on how to reset it…
The challenge isn’t that we have the wrong people…
The challenge of our profession isn’t that we have the wrong people; it’s that we have the right people in the wrong places. It isn’t that ‘these young people today’ or ‘these Type A personalities’ or ‘all these women’ or even ‘these demanding clients’ aren’t right for our profession. These things ARE our profession now.
It’s that we as an industry keep pretending that these things aren’t true, or wishing that they weren’t, and planning on the assumption that we can control the trends and make people see why they’re being unrealistic or unreasonable. All the energy spent resisting this future, protecting the status quo, and reminiscing about the good old days could instead be channelled into embracing what’s ahead. We could be getting ahead of the trends and reshaping the profession to suit the needs of the people we have, rather than trying to change people to fit a profession that no longer exists.
Stay tuned for the final episode of Keeping Veterinary Professionals in the Veterinary Profession: the REAL reasons we keep leaving.
You can read the full series here:
The REAL reasons we can’t keep veterinary professionals in the veterinary profession: Part 1
The REAL reasons we can’t keep veterinary professionals in the veterinary profession: Part 2
The REAL reasons we can’t keep veterinary professionals in the veterinary profession: Part 3
The REAL reasons we can’t keep veterinary professionals in the veterinary profession: Part 5
