The REAL REASONS we can't keep veterinary professionals in the veterinary profession: Episode 1 - LONELINESS

As you might know, the sole purpose of Unleashed Coaching and Consulting is Keeping Veterinary Professionals in the Veterinary Profession. 

Despite terms like ‘workforce crisis’ and ‘attrition epidemic’ being thrown around for over a decade, we continue to lose vets and veterinary paraprofessionals at increasingly rapid rates, increasingly earlier in their careers, and with increasing permanence. 

But if my whole aim is to keep us here in the profession, and my marketing point of difference is that I try to attack the root causes of the issues rather than window dressing with academics, more research, and corporate psychobabble that doesn’t help anyone in the real world, then how on earth do I decide what 'root causes’ to attack? 

So this is the first article in a series of five, where I will propose the reasons why I think that our profession is stumbling along the precipice of unsustainability, and why I don’t think they’re as simple as ‘burnout’ or ‘inadequate remuneration’. 

Now don’t get me wrong; I know that we have large scale, professionally backed studies that ask questions about why people are leaving (with “disillusionment with the veterinary profession” being the answer for 33% of leavers in the AVA’s 2021 Workforce Analysis Report) – but what does that even mean? If we add “mental health reasons” and the general catchall of “working in a non-vet role”, then the AVA has given us an unhelpfully vague reason for over half of the attrition of our valuable professionals. 

So yes, full disclosure: I have zero veterinary-specific quantitative evidence that I’m right. I have no peer reviewed statistical analysis or industry backing (in fact, generally the industry bodies like to tell me to go away and mind my own business: “we’ve got this” they say, “we don’t need your input unless you’re a member” they say, or my favourite so far: “we couldn’t possibly support a programme that only supports a segment of the profession” as if their entire business model isn’t propped up on exactly that). 

So this article isn’t ‘fact’. This isn’t ‘the why’. This is MY why; MY reasons for getting out of bed in the morning, for leaving my toddler with her grandparents while I travel the country, for taking late night phone calls from vets in tears or leaders in despair. 

But what I do have, is a LOT of conversations. I have coached, mentored, consulted for, or generally been the sounding board for hundreds of veterinary team members over the last decade. A huge chunk of those people have been people leaving, or trying to leave, our wonderful, intense, demanding, fulfilling, crazy-arse profession. And the beauty of conversations over data, is that it allows for nuance. It allows for deeper diving into vagueries, challenging of surface emotions, and quality information that can actually lead to pinpointing what is ACTUALLY going on. 

And the first one on the top of this list, is LONELINESS. 

Yes, you read that right. Soft, fluffy, difficult to measure, shouldn’t-really-talk-about-it-except-after-too-much-gin, plain old loneliness.

THIS is the first reason why I think veterinary professionals are “disillusioned by the veterinary profession”. 

If you're starting to worry that I’m going off in a weird woo-woo direction with this, stick with me for just a couple more minutes to make my case. 

For anyone who is a follower of Brene Brown, you’ll know that she refers often to the importance of building community in our workplaces. And it sounds so nice and fluffy and warm, that it can’t possibly be anything but window dressing right? (Let’s ignore the immeasurable global data she holds on the topic since we know that facts are rarely an effective way to make a point). Why would building a sense of belonging and allowing people to bring their whole selves to work be anything other than messy? Or maybe you’re in the “sure, I’m progressive, I can let people have their funky hair colours and take pride in their neurospiciness, and maybe bring sick kids to work” camp already, so you’ve got this community and connection thing down, right? 

And yet your staff are still complaining of exhaustion, taking sick days, and leaving citing burnout... 

What most of us have already heard is that loneliness is bad for us. That from a health perspective, loneliness is associated with as many poor outcomes as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If sitting is the new smoking, loneliness is the new obesity. 

But the correlation that we’re missing is the one between loneliness and exhaustion. 

Over his tenure as Surgeon General of the United States, Dr Vivek Murthy commissioned many studies into the links between loneliness and the workplace. Most relevant here is the study that found that amongst hundreds of workers who reported themselves as exhausted, when asked questions in a different way and more information was gathered, were discovered to in fact mostly be suffering from loneliness. 

People who are lonely show incredibly low levels of resilience, low levels of energy, and high levels of ‘giving up’. 

But the problem is that we don’t ask that question, do we? We ask how people are and they say ‘exhausted’, or ‘overwhelmed’ or ‘stressed’ and nobody thinks to ask about loneliness. That’s not a conversation for the workplace. 

Except that it is. 

It’s true that western society is losing its sense of community, that mum’s lament the loss of their ‘village’, that digital social lives are not an adequate replacement for real ones, and that the convenience of not having to speak with a check-out chic at the grocery store has removed something vital from the fabric of our suburbs. And so the only time remaining in many peoples’ days where they DO still have an opportunity for connection and community, is the workplace. 

But we focus now on efficiently removing team gatherings since people could read that in an email. 

We prioritise productivity so that no one has an excuse for a watercooler chat while waiting for a computer to be free. 

Customer care demands that we stagger lunch breaks, have an early shift, and never close the doors so we can all attend the same training session. 

Our drive towards availability means that a patient sees the vet who is available, rather than one vet getting to see the same litter of puppies born and then support the families through their passing 10 years later. 

Three separate mums struggle to leave on time to collect their kids from 3 different schools, rather than carpooling them to the office for the manager’s teenager to watch them until close (yes, I’ve seen this scenario work!). 

Ask someone how they’re doing and their response is going to be “busy”, not “lonely”. But it’s not because busyness itself is bad for us; it’s because their busyness feels pointless. It feels Sisyphean. Empty. 

It plays out over and over again that teams experiencing high levels of comradery and closeness report significantly lower levels of exhaustion, even when given much harder (or even impossible) tasks by researchers than people asked to work independently on easier challenges. In the research and in the workplace, people aren’t tired; they’re alone. 

So when the older vets lament a time back when people gave more of themselves to the workplace, the assumption is that workplaces gave an equal amount back. But the truth is, the more ‘benefits’ we advertise in our increasingly competitive race to be the employer of choice (whatever that even means – but that’s a subject of a different blog), the more frustrated we get as leaders because we keep giving more and more and it keeps not being good enough, it’s because we’re giving them the wrong things. 

People THINK they need less workload. They THINK they need more money, more fancy toys, a nicer clinic, another nurse. But the data doesn’t add up. My anecdotal experience certainly doesn’t support this, with many of the best cultures I’ve worked with being in very resource-poor animal shelters and the most toxic culture I’ve ever seen being at a specialty hospital. 

All of this is gap-filling. It's trying to fill the void they can feel but can’t articulate. 

So what do they do? They try a different job, hoping that will help. Occasionally it does, if they find a better community fit. But mostly it doesn’t, and so they assume that it’s the profession. So they leave, hoping to fill that void with an exciting career change, spending more time with family, travel adventures, or more study. Or they do much, much worse. 

It’s the loneliness epidemic infiltrating its tentacles into the foundations of our increasingly productive, corporatised, high-volume, customer-centric, profession. While we sit back and throw more perks, more EAPs, more free pizzas, more culture consultants (yes, I know this is an ironic statement) at it. 

So here’s a question for you: are you exhausted? Probably! 

But the more important question: would you be so exhausted if you weren’t so overwhelmingly lonely? That’s the real stinker. 

Want to know what other data-less, woo-woo, philosophical root causes that I spend my life trying to improve for the veterinary profession? Stay tuned for the next four episodes of Keeping Veterinary Professionals in the Veterinary Profession: the REAL reasons we keep leaving.