Tag: Veterinary

By Rob Marr, Founder – The Lost VET

Attracting and retaining top veterinary talent is crucial for the success of your practice. Given the current talent shortage, a proactive approach is essential. Here are key strategies to help your practice stand out and become a destination for skilled veterinarians.

Develop a Strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

An EVP defines what your practice offers to employees, encompassing salary, benefits, recognition, and career development opportunities. To craft an effective EVP:

• Assess Compensation and Benefits: Ensure your salary packages are competitive and benefits align with industry standards.
• Recognition Programs: Implement systems to acknowledge and reward exceptional performance, fostering a culture of appreciation.
• Define Core Values: Clearly articulate your practice’s values and ensure they resonate with both current and prospective employees.
• Understand Team Priorities: Identify what matters most to your team and tailor your offerings to meet these needs.

By clearly communicating your EVP, you can attract individuals who align with your practice’s culture and goals.

Proactively Seek Talent

Waiting for candidates to approach you may result in missed opportunities. To actively attract top talent:

• Highlight Your Practice’s Unique Qualities: Showcase what sets your practice apart, such as advanced medical technologies, a collaborative work environment, or community involvement.
• Align with Values-Driven Candidates: Many new graduates, particularly from Generation Z, seek employers whose values align with their desire to make a difference. Emphasize how your practice supports meaningful work and professional growth.

Implement Succession Planning

Anticipate future staffing needs by planning for retirements and other departures:

• Evaluate Team Tenure: Identify team members approaching retirement and develop strategies to manage their transition.
• Knowledge Transfer: Create opportunities for retiring staff to mentor newer team members, ensuring valuable expertise is retained.
• Internal Advancement: Assess whether current employees can be promoted to fill upcoming vacancies or if external recruitment is necessary.

Action Steps

Dedicate time to reflect on your practice’s strengths and areas for improvement:

1. Identify Your Unique Offerings: What makes your practice an attractive workplace?
2. Leverage Existing Team Skills: Are there untapped abilities within your team that can be utilized?
3. Prepare for New Hires: What aspects of your practice need enhancement before bringing in new team members?

By thoughtfully addressing these areas, you can create an environment that not only attracts top veterinarians but also encourages them to remain and thrive within your practice.you can transform confrontations into opportunities for growth and improved relationships.

By Rob Marr, Founder – The Lost VET

Avoiding confrontation can hinder personal and professional growth, leading to unresolved issues and strained relationships. Understanding and adjusting your communication style is crucial in addressing this tendency.

Parent-Child Communication Dynamics

Communication often mirrors parent-child interactions, encompassing nurturing, controlling, or critical tones. When adults adopt a parental style towards peers, it can prompt defensive or submissive responses, perpetuating unproductive cycles. Over time, these patterns can solidify, making interactions increasingly toxic.

Assess Your Communication Style

To overcome the fear of confrontation, start by evaluating your own communication approach. Reflect on your interactions with colleagues and clients:

• Identify Your Style: Do you often take on a parental role, or do you find yourself in a child-like, submissive position?
• Transition to Adult Communication: Aim to engage from an adult perspective, characterized by rationality, empathy, and openness.

The more consistently you communicate as an adult, the less intimidating confrontations become, transforming them into constructive dialogues.

Strategies to Shift Established Dynamics

Altering long-standing communication patterns requires patience and deliberate effort:

1. Manage Expectations: Recognize that entrenched issues won’t resolve overnight. Avoid seeking quick fixes through a single conversation.
2. Focus on Personal Experience: Instead of highlighting what others should change, express how specific actions affect you. For instance, say, “When this happened, I felt…” rather than “You always…”.
3. Stay Fact-Based: Discuss specific scenarios objectively. Use statements like, “On [date], when [event] occurred, I felt…” to keep the conversation grounded and avoid personal attacks.

Reflective Questions

Before engaging in potentially confrontational discussions, consider:

• Reality Check: Is the problem based on facts or perceptions?
• Objective Perspective: How would an impartial observer approach this situation?
• Best Self Approach: What would your most effective self do to handle this situation excellently?

By thoughtfully assessing your communication style and implementing these strategies, you can transform confrontations into opportunities for growth and improved relationships.

By Rob Marr, Founder – The Lost VET

If you’re leading a veterinary practice, you’ve probably noticed that your most ambitious team members are also the ones most at risk of leaving. Why? Because high-performing individuals crave growth, and if they don’t see opportunities, they’ll start looking elsewhere. So, how can you keep them engaged and committed to your practice?

Here are three strategies to help your team thrive and stay motivated.

Redefine Career Growth

Many vets and vet nurses don’t want to follow a traditional leadership path, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to grow. Career development isn’t just about promotions—it’s about skill-building, expanding knowledge, and feeling valued.

Start by offering two distinct growth paths:

• Leadership Development: Help team members interested in management develop their leadership and communication skills.
• Technical Mastery: For those who prefer to deepen their expertise, create opportunities for advanced clinical training, certifications, and mentorship roles.

When employees see a future at your practice—whether as a leader or a technical expert—they’re more likely to stay.

Make Career Conversations a Priority

Regular, structured career discussions show your team that you’re invested in their future. Instead of waiting for annual reviews, schedule dedicated sessions focused solely on their personal and professional growth.

Ask questions like:

• What skills do you want to develop?
• Where do you see yourself in a year? Five years?
• How can we support you in achieving your goals?

By taking the time to listen and create tailored growth plans, you’re fostering a culture where employees feel valued and motivated.

Build a Culture of Continuous Learning

A stagnant team is an unmotivated team. The best way to keep engagement high is by ensuring ongoing learning and development are part of your clinic’s DNA.

Some ideas to implement:

• Training & Workshops: Offer online and in-person learning sessions on both technical and soft skills.
• Mentorship Programs: Pair less experienced team members with senior staff to foster knowledge sharing.
• Engagement Surveys: Use anonymous feedback to understand what your team needs and adjust your approach accordingly.

The Cost of Inaction

Losing top talent isn’t just frustrating—it’s expensive. Recruiting and training a replacement can cost anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000. Instead of constantly replacing team members, why not invest in the people you already have?

By focusing on career growth, regular check-ins, and continuous learning, you’re not just retaining employees—you’re creating a thriving, engaged team that wants to grow with you.

Your Next Step Take a moment to reflect:

1. How important is your team’s growth to YOU personally?
2. How do their goals align with your vision for the practice?
3. What changes can you make today to foster long-term engagement?

Start small—schedule one career conversation this week and see the impact it has. Your team (and your practice) will thank you.

I’m reading the Toronto Star article about the incident in the subtitle. The writer quotes a Toronto Humane Society team member about this. “Train your dog to drop items on command.”

I disagree with that suggestion because prevention can be much simpler to train: teach your dog to ignore items on the ground without a cue.

Many dog trainers instruct owners to teach their dogs to “leave it” which is a cue. Any cue tells your dog to do something. Which means your dog is already doing something else. Often, something you don’t want your dog doing.

Have you ever told your dog to sit after your dog jumps up on someone?

Do you see the problem? Think about how you taught the sit using positive reinforcement. Chances are you used a food treat held above your dog’s nose to get the sit. Then you gave your dog the treat.

After the word was added during the education, your dog understood what would get him a treat: you say sit, she plants her butt on the ground and the treat follows.

All cues reinforce the behavior happening immediately beforehand.

Reinforced behaviors repeat (BF Skinner)

Telling your dog to “leave it” reinforces your dog ignoring you to investigate an area for something to sniff and consume. Throughout your dog’s life, you have to be actively be involved in everything your dog does. That is stressful.

I was just consulting with a couple about reinforcement going wrong. The couple thought about this and realized whenever the dog investigates the backyard and picks up acorns in her mouth, the owners ask the dog to “drop it.” The dog complies every time, releasing the acorn and gets a treat for doing exactly that.

In my mind, I could visualize the clients doing this when they recognized what was going on.

(Editors note: As we head into peak mushroom season, think of how dangerous it can be for a dog to investigate and pick up a bad mushroom. You’ll want to encourage the dog to seek you for reassurance before anything!)

I’m glad I had a chance to detail the reinforcement process for them.

Thanks for reading!

Being diagnosed with a chronic disease with no cure can be depressing. However, I am an opportunist.

My opportunistic nature means I will grasp any advantage my condition confers. These advantages may not influence my health outcomes permanently, but they are something to write about and grow my insights to promote the health of many species. I often use these to create short video content on social media to promote animal or human health.

One advantage I have recognized is the temporary symptoms that I might get when I am outdoors walking my dogs during warm weather. Before I leave, I always check the weather app on my cell phone. The data I collect are air temperature and humidity because those impact how well I function (or not).

I have learned the narrow temperature range where I do not experience any distress from MS. Ideally, I prefer being outdoors when the air temperature is 14C/57.2 F.

Coincidentally, this overlaps with veterinary recommendations about safe temperatures for dogs.

Air temperature impacts the surfaces that dogs’ paws touch. There are many social media posts talking about air temperatures and corresponding temperatures on asphalt or concrete. Those are common surfaces that dog paws come into contact with during walks.

Asphalt and concrete can get incredibly hot despite comfortable air temperatures for both humans and dogs. The heat on those materials rise to the point where paw pads get burnt. If you have ever seen any photos about burnt paws online, those are true burns.

Which hurt and require extensive treatment.

Because I am incredibly heat-sensitive, even a slight rise of 1 degree in air temperature means I start experiencing symptoms. These symptoms are temporary and go away when I get myself out of the heat. When I start feeling dizzy or my coordination becomes more compromised than usual, that tells me the air temperature has gone up from when we left the house.

My automatic response is to tell my dog to go onto the grass. This is so that I can place the back of my hand onto a concrete or asphalt surface in the immediate vicinity. The back of my hand remains on those materials for 5 to 7 seconds as a test.

I then take a sip of water and begin trekking back home, because my heat sensitivity has begun telling me the air temperature is rising. Since I always walk my dogs in the morning, I know the day will continue getting warmer. While we are safe then, I am familiar enough with my condition to recognize that remaining outdoors would mean expecting an increasing decline in my cognition.

To the point where I wouldn’t be able to look out for the dogs.

Being heat-sensitive isn’t great, but I can act as a thermometer to take action immediately. That means I still have some cognitive function able to make decisions before I get into trouble or before my dogs do. This condition can be annoying, but I have learned to make it work.

Thanks for reading!