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Yep, we're back! And I admit to have 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 just 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 some blunt, no-BS conversation about our profession and the reasons that we just can’t seem to keep our people well and engaged.
If you’re just joining the journey now, feel free to check out Loneliness, Boredom, and Poor Leadership here. But if you’re on this wee ride with me now, let’s dig in…
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 we appear to have simply stayed 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 it’s current form” for almost a century.
The world has changed, our clients have changed, our teams have changed, and we still carry on regardless.
The first Failure to Adapt wont come as a surprise to anyone; we have a profession of women, built for a 1960’s 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 is a bachelor eating at the local publican’s house most nights, with an elderly neighbour bringing him casserole 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.
This demographic of vets have school runs, and breastfeeding, or elderly parents that 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 the mother-in-law a birthday present AND bake cookies for the team building day. 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 8-6 but 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 industry steadfastly maintains the status quo. Perhaps because the majority of the leadership remains male despite the prevailing workforce demographic, and this status quo serves them. 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.
Just last week I 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?
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 right to disconnect laws.
But the argument about whether the younger demographic are soft, or have their priorities wrong, or are less committed, is all a bit of a moot point. 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 beneath how they WILL behave.
The soon to be dominant demographic in our profession DOES prioritise work-life balance over constant accessibility. They WILL choose wellbeing 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 do understand that after hours and on-call work has a measurable, proven impact on life expectancy and health, and that there might not be enough money on offer for them to sell those things.
So right or wrong, good or bad, inconvenient or unfair, these are the values that will soon predominate 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 smart phone.
For the record, as someone in the precarious position of being on the cusp of generations; young enough to be digital savvy, old enough to resent it, I usually spend a lot of my time working with clinics to help bridge the generational divide and help different people see the perspectives and understand the motivations and strengths of the other without weighing in on who is right or wrong. But if asked to pick a side, to really put my mouth where my money is, I will give you a straight answer on who I think is "right". Just perhaps in a different blog :-P
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 that are made our of profession, many of which for good reason. I’m not going to challenge them even though there is some newer evidence suggesting it's not as clear cut as the anecdotes have us believing. 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 selects for a different type of person. The rigor and conscientiousness required to complete the degree filters further.
The problem is that our proposed solutions to the fact that this stereotype of personality is having a hard time thriving in our profession, is to the 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 get back to ‘the good old days’ when we had country kids who enjoyed being out on farm with a line of heifers ready to keep one arm warm at a time.
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 see their children get. 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 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, 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 "this new generation" of people are struggling to to operate, function, roster, and remain in the profession like they used to, when the profession is nothing like it used to be.We're harping back to the good old days that don't actually exist.
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 who responds to your ticket about being able to open your emails by sending you an email on how to reset it…
The challenge of our profession isn’t that we have the wrong people. 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, make people see why they’re being unrealistic or unreasonable. And all the energy spent resisting this future, protecting the status quo, reminiscing about the good old days, could be spent on embracing the future, getting ahead of the trends, and changing the profession to suit the needs of the people we have rather than changing the people to suit a profession that no longer exists
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