As a 33-year career veterinarian and a certified life coach, I’m passionate about creating a positive and thriving work environment that encourages trust, engagement, and a deeper sense of purpose for all. That can be supremely difficult to achieve if we can’t get the caring people we’ve so carefully mentored, to stay!
Staff retention is one of the biggest challenges that veterinary practice owners and managers face. It’s a huge source of stress, and a huge drain on financial and time-resources.
What does staff turnover really cost? First (and often unnoticed), there are the costs of poor performance as an unhappy employee is preparing to resign. Then there are...
Expenses to run job listings
Time to screen and interview new candidates
Decreased team morale as they adapt to the loss of a trusted teammate
Lost money and time from mistakes made during the new hire’s training process (and potential for damaged client relationships!)
Reduced overall productivity while the new hire learns necessary skills, and other team members must be diverted to supervise and train them
Higher stress for other team members who must pick up the slack until the new hire is up to speed
In fact, the price tag for employee turnover can be anywhere from 1/2 to 2 times the annual salary of the person being replaced. And if that employee is a doctor, manager, or lead supervisor, rest assured the cost of replacing them will be at the higher end of that range.
So let’s take a closer look at why good employees leave, and what it takes to keep the people that you’ve painstakingly raised as members of your work-family. They are the lifeblood of your practice. Which means they have a direct impact on your personal and professional sense of fulfillment and quality of life. Because when you’re not happy at work, you’re usually not happy at home either.
1. Emotional Toll and Burnout:
Working with sick animals and distressed pet owners, wrestling with moral objections to treatment decisions, and neglected self-care all take an emotional toll on our empathic veterinary professionals. This leads directly to compassion-fatigue, exhaustion and burnout.
2. Poor Work-Life Balance:
Working in a veterinary practice often means long and unpredictable hours, missed lunches, skipped breaks, and sacrificing after-work plans or family time. Morale begins to deteriorate as resentment builds. Family-life often pays the price for workplace stress. As personal relationships suffer, employees are less able to bring the best version of themselves to work.
3. Lack of Personal Fulfillment
Once basic financial needs have been met, the desire to contribute and feel valued can have an even greater impact than the size of the paycheck. Employees may cite “more money” as the reason they’ve elected to leave a practice, but that’s often an excuse to cover up the real reason: they’re just feeling unappreciated.
4. Strained Team Dynamics and Poor Communication:
Poor communication and toxic team dynamics are among the most common reasons for employee turnover. If team members don’t feel safe expressing their concerns or offering new ideas, they disengage or armor-up to protect themselves. If they don’t feel heard, they may go looking for a more supportive workplace elsewhere.
5. Limited Professional Growth Opportunities:
Providing opportunities for growth is a key element for staff retention. We all joined this profession because we wanted to contribute and do good in the world. But when we reach the limit of how far we can go in our environment, it feels like stagnation.
The points listed above are just the tip of the iceberg. Factors contributing to workplace dissatisfaction are as individualized as the humans themselves. And we haven’t even touched on the individual impact that each team member’s unique personality brings to the overall workplace experience. When people bring home-problems to work, stir up drama, disregard each others’ concerns, or form up into opposing teams... it creates a stressful dynamic that can drive good employees away.
Solving The Problem Of Veterinary Employee Turnover:
It wasn’t until I began my training as a certified Positive Intelligence coach that I began to see how Positive Intelligence (PQ) can help to solve the problem of turnover in veterinary practice. Here’s how improving your team's PQ addresses each of the points listed above:
1. Reducing Emotional Toll and Burnout:
Positive Intelligence builds individual mental fitness that helps people navigate personal and work-challenges more effectively, and with less stress. Through a simple self-command practice that can be used in any situation, veterinary professionals learn to develop resilience, reduce the emotional toll of their work, and avoid burnout. (I’ve been able to reduce my own recovery time to just 1% of what it used to be!)
When veterinary leaders provide for their team’s mental and emotional wellbeing, it creates a more supportive environment that helps everyone build resilience against the emotional stressors of working in a veterinary practice.
2. Improving Work-Life Balance:
The Positive Intelligence tools create balanced boundaries between professional obligations and personal life. By fostering a more empowered and positive mindset, team members learn to stay focused, use their energy more effectively, dissipate stress, and intercept their own emotional triggers before they get hijacked. In this way, they bring the best versions of themselves to work, and the best versions of themselves home from work too.
3. Elevated Personal Fulfillment
Positive Intelligence brings a deeper understanding of what motivates both negative and positive human behavior, leading to greater empathy and tolerance between team members. The typical approach to conflict resolution leads to one or both parties feeling alienated and resentful, but PQ’s approach creates deeper and more trusting relationships. PQ teaches a powerful technique for staying connected to one’s deeper sense of meaning and purpose, leading to a more fulfilling experience both at work and at home.
4. Supportive Team Dynamics and Effective Communication:
PQ techniques enhance emotional intelligence skills and communication. By rewiring the brain for a more positive and open mindset, team members can navigate tough conversations more effectively. This strengthens overall team dynamics and creates a more supportive work environment.
And when practice owners create a collaborative culture that encourages others to share their ideas and concerns, everyone feels like a valued and respected member of the team.
5. Professional Growth Opportunities:
Positive Intelligence cultivates a growth mindset, training individuals to turn obstacles into opportunities for learning and growth. Practice owners can leverage this mindset to help team members rise to new challenges. This keeps the whole team engaged and invested in their careers. This growth-mindset creates a deeper sense of purpose and fulfillment in veterinary professionals and staff alike.
While each team member is ultimately responsible for what version of themselves they bring to work every day, it is the practice owner and leadership team that sets the workplace culture, core values, and rules of engagement.
Positive Intelligence training creates significant improvement in 3 main areas:
Better Workplace performance
Improved Focus
Increased Efficiency
Less Procrastinating
Improved Relationships
More empathy
Deeper trust
Better communication
Personal Wellbeing
Less Stress
More personal satisfaction
Staying aligned to individual sense of meaning and purpose
In the workplace, this directly translates to:
People who contribute to solutions, instead of commiserating about problems
Better stress management skills
Lower risk of compassion-fatigue and burnout
More effective communication
Healthy conflict that leads to stronger relationships
Collaborative and supportive workplace culture
Fostering initiative and innovation
More engaged employees
Stronger sense of personal fulfillment at work
Deeper trust and psychological safety between teammates
And most importantly... reduced employee turnover.
Conclusion:
In the world of veterinary medicine, staff retention is not just a business strategy. It’s an investment in the well-being of the professionals who make it possible to deliver the care and compassion that our patients deserve. By solving the challenges faced by veterinary staff and implementing PQ-powered retention strategies, practice owners can create an environment where talent thrives and stays.
I’m here to help! Let’s identify some doable changes to lower your stress and make your practice the one where everyone wants to work. Schedule a free strategy session with me today, and find out how introducing Positive Intelligence to your practice can take the stress out of running your business.
Good people may come for the paycheck, but they'll stay for the trusting bonds they create with their work-family.
Natalie Fayman is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) and a Certified Positive Intelligence Coach (CPQM), whose work focuses on stress & burnout in veterinary professionals, and building workplace cultures that attract and retain the right people.
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