Keeping it calm in the vet profession – our practice’s culture

Day one of your new job. You haven’t slept much as, despite best-laid plans for a restorative night’s kip, you’ve been tossing and turning with worry about what the practice will be like. You made lunch the night before, but it’s leaked in your bag and, to cap things off, the dog has just been sick in the hallway.

Your head is buzzing with the normal fears:

• What if you make a mistake?
• What if they don’t like you?
• What if something dies on day one?
• What should you wear?
• What if you get stuck in traffic and are late?

We’ve all been there.

At Pet People, we have had the unique opportunity to do things (we hope) differently. Six months ago, we opened our brand-new, independent clinic with a building designed to unite chilled vibes and clinical excellence, with everything from zen music and low-stress waiting room design to top-notch imaging and surgical equipment.

Our team members get a gym membership as standard and we run in-practice yoga classes to wind down at the end of the day. We have fierce focus on communication within our teams, listening to each other, and we make sure birthdays are never forgotten – it’s the last thing you need when you’re knee-deep in vomited Christmas cake from the latest intrepid lockdown puppy.

We spent the first few weeks pioneering a new approach to induction. We were privileged to be able to start from scratch and, as such, have spent many long hours around kitchen tables exchanging views and ideas about the following:

• Values and goals for the practice.
• In-depth practice management software training (before the client is tapping their watch in front of you).
• Triage training for our non-veterinary staff.
• Roleplay of client and case scenarios through the clinic.
• Sharing novel ideas for best practice, with a big focus on how the day runs most effectively, how we want to reflect on mistakes, how we optimise our client and clinical care, and how we look after each other.
• Creating documents and processes as a team that we can replicate and adapt with new team members, so everyone feels welcomed and confident to start their role, and is aligned and excited with our vision.

More recently, we have worked alongside Keep it Calm, a non-veterinary company founded to improve workplace enjoyment, employee resilience and mental health at work. We’ve run a well-being survey among our team and we are working on initiatives to come out of this.

We’ve already run weekly yoga classes after work – bathing our chi in the hazy, vanishing sun that graces our waiting room – but we are looking to unite this with genuine, honest and novel culture setting in our team, where well-being is discussed and promoted to create happy, productive team members who will tell their friends.

We have had to fight our instincts to “start” as admittedly we’ve done before – throwing team members into the action and seeing as many clients as possible – and we don’t get it right a lot of the time. However, we hope it’s evident we are trying, and this novel approach represents something slightly different and will mean our team feels more united, valued, and competent as we continue this journey together.

Our vets take time to carefully discuss cases with owners and calmly assess their pets. As we know, our pets are super-sensitive and the bottom line is if our clients feel stressed, then we can almost guarantee an element of stress exists for their pets, too. We want to minimise the anxiety our clients and pets may feel by creating a calm, stress-free zone. Watch this space…