In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise discusses the critical topic of organizational culture within veterinary medicine, particularly in veterinary hospitals, which frequently lack a supportive environment conducive to career growth. Fundamental elements of a healthy organizational culture include the establishment of clear policies and procedures, utilizing employee manuals, and conducting regular evaluations and feedback.
The podcast emphasizes that individuals can effect positive change in culture by managing their emotional responses and reframing their perspectives on workplace challenges. Rather than perceiving themselves as victims of a negative culture, employees can choose to concentrate on their own actions and contributions.
The discussion also brings attention to the necessity of addressing workplace bullying and ensuring that there are clear policies for reporting such behavior. A well-managed organization should not exhibit cliques or divisions among staff, as these often indicate underlying issues with communication and expectations.
Key takeaways:
- The episode discusses the significance of organizational culture in veterinary medicine and leadership’s role in shaping it.
- Effective leadership is essential for establishing a positive culture through clear policies and procedures.
- An employee handbook is necessary to clarify expectations, behaviors, and feedback processes.
- Employees should not accept environments that conflict with their morals, ethics, or values.
- Open communication with leadership about culture and policies is encouraged for improvement.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos.
Hi there. I’m Doctor Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach and certified quantum human design specialist. If you’re a veterinary professional looking to uplevel your life and your career, or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the Joyful DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let’s get started. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Joyful DVM podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about organizational culture.
And whose responsibility is it anyway? Let’s face it, in veterinary medicine, a lot of our veterinary organizations, specifically our veterinary hospitals, they just don’t have the culture that would support a thriving veterinary career. So it’s challenging for many of us to thrive in veterinary medicine because of the culture that we are embedded in. And as we take a look at this and we start to notice the opportunities and the challenges within our organizations, it’s really easy for us to start to point fingers.
And so today, I just want to rip off the band aid and share with you my perspective on where the opportunities lie to improve veterinary culture as a whole. It all starts with the top down. So, friends, you’ve heard the saying, shit rolls downhill. And I hate to say it, but in veterinary medicine, it’s no different. Leadership has the primary responsibility for creating culture in any organization, and it really starts with some very foundational elements to start off with.
Do you have policies and procedures in place? Many veterinary hospitals and organizations are just kind of flying by the seat of their pants. They don’t have policies and procedures in place. And by policies and procedures, I’m talking about, what is your policy regarding payments? What are your policies regarding work hours? What are your policies regarding client behavior? What are your policies when somebody walks in with an emergency or a good samaritan comes in with a pet that you’ve never seen before, all of these things that we encounter day in and day out should be written out as some type of policy or procedure, so that if there’s a question about it, we can all go back to the same place to see how it’s done.
It takes some time to create policies and procedures, I’m not going to lie. But once you have those policies and procedures in place, they’re very valuable because your team can then go back to those at any point in time to see how they’re supposed to handle any specific situation within those policies and procedures. Once we have those policies and procedures in place, now it’s up to leadership to actually follow through.
So, one of the greatest culture killers in our organizations is simply not even following the policies consistently. So those policies regarding client behavior that you’ve shared with your team, are you actually following through when clients are disrespectful or aggressive? Are you following through with what you’ve said? The policy is regarding payment for services or even pricing of your services. Some organizations have a situation where different doctors discount prices kind of based on how they feel, or maybe an owner will cut prices on a long term client just out of the blue, but not actually condone that for other associates or other team members to do.
And that might seem like you’re doing a nice thing for a long term client, but what you’re actually doing is teaching your team a couple of things that are really unintended. Number one, you’re teaching your team that you’re the what you’re charging isn’t a value that you actually believe in, because if you believe in the prices that you charge, then you wouldn’t feel the need to discount those charges for specific clients.
So it brings into question the value behind your pricing. It’s also showing your team that some people get special service, and if that’s what you’re trying to create, if you’re trying to create a very niche or boutique style practice where the pricing is very independent to the client at hand, that’s a complete different conversation. But most of our organizations aren’t that kind of practice. Instead, the owners start to feel some kind of pressure or guilt regarding what they’re charging for specific clients, especially people who have been there a long time and have probably been through multiple pricing changes.
You’re giving into the pressure of this guilt that you feel, and as a result, you’re changing your prices. And that actually sets a very bad example for your team because of the things that I already shared. It also doesn’t help you to feel any better because it’s not avoiding any kind of discomfort. You’re either going to feel uncomfortable talking about your prices with the client, or you’re going to feel uncomfortable when you have to explain that to your team.
So the better way to do this is just to set your prices, have that be what it is for everybody, and be consistent in your policies and your pricing. Because the more that you get familiar and comfortable with talking about the financial side of veterinary medicine, the more quickly you will start to have less stress around those exact things. Now, aside from your policies and procedures you know, I’ve already shared, do you have those in place at all?
So, policies and procedures manuals and are you being consistent? Another thing that we need to have in place in every one of our hospitals and organizations is an employee handbook. And the employee handbook talks about what we require and expect of our employees. So this is everything from the way that they dress, the time that they show up for work, their behaviors, their communication, what they need to do when there’s a day off.
It also includes the feedback schedule. So how often are you going to be doing evaluations? How are those evaluations going to be communicated to them? And then also, what are the consequences if they’re not meeting expectations? Do you have like a three strikes in your out kind of situation? All of this should be outlined in advance inside of an employee handbook or an employee manual. And then those employee handbooks and manuals need to be distributed to everybody, and at least once a year, they need to be reviewed, and everybody needs to sign off on them.
Again, the reason this is so important is because any little employee issue that you have within your organization, you will already have a way to handle it outlined inside of your employee handbook. But if you haven’t defined what it means to be late to work, or how many times you can be late before you get written up, and how many write ups you can have before you get fired, if that stuff’s not written out anywhere, then these employee issues, which are common to every single kind of business on the planet, these employee issues become super stressful for leadership.
And what tends to happen in veterinary medicine is then we just avoid it altogether. We let people get away with all kinds of stuff that actually doesn’t help our organizations because people are always watching. It’s really important for us to follow up with regular feedback, including positive feedback and the ways that people are, have strengths in the way that they are performing, but then also identifying those learning opportunities for their shortcomings and creating a path forward.
If we don’t do that, then people just tend to continue to get away with behaviors that don’t support the organization as a whole. And like I said, everybody’s watching. So even if it seems like it’s not a big deal, if so and so is late, you know, five or six times or whatever the situation is, or they make some kind of mistake because somebody else just slides in and starts doing that job.
Instead of if we aren’t beholding people to those expectations of their job, then the people who are picking up the slack will start to feel bitter, they will start to feel disrespected, and they will start to believe that that person who is not performing has special treatment that for some reason the rules don’t apply to them. And those kinds of beliefs, those conclusions that are drawn by the people that we work with, those are very normal conclusions for them to draw if we aren’t consistent in our behavior toward everybody that works with us.
So having an employee handbook and then making sure everybody has the same information and that we are then following through with the policies within those handbooks is critical to creating the culture that is supportive for everybody involved. Outside of that, nothing feels consistent and a lack of consistency will create confusion. And it will also open up the door for people to interpret their job in a way that was never meant for them to be able to interpret.
There is individual responsibility that comes into creating organizational culture, and that individual responsibility starts with the leaders themselves. So, leaders, whether you are the practice owner, you are a practice manager, whether you are the lead veterinarian or any veterinarian, whether or not you are a credentialed technician or like a head of all the different technicians and assistants, whatever leadership role you are in, you’ve got to check yourself here, my friends.
What is your attitude like? How are you interacting with your team? It’s really important for you to start to notice the way that you behave when you are at work, because people are always watching. Now, I don’t say that to be pressure, but you are creating an example, even if you don’t realize that you are. So you’ve got to ask yourself, am I barking orders or am I asking kindly?
Am I using words like please and thank you? Am I sitting around and I’m complaining and judging clients about their choices, about their pets, about their appearance, about the way they behaved, about what they did, how much money they spent, how much money they didn’t spend, what they elected to do, what they elected not to do. Am I complaining and judging those clients and having my opinion shared with the people that I work with?
This is one of the most toxic things that we do. The most negatively influential things that we do is that we walk out of an exam room and then we start to talk about the client in there. And I’m not saying it’s just leaders who do this. Staff members do this as well, our team members do this as well. But it’s because they have learned it’s normal from us as leaders.
If it’s not something that we’ve identified in our employee handbook as a non acceptable behavior, and then it’s something that we continue to do, why wouldn’t they do it as well? Another thing that many of us do is that we talk about team members who are not present. So doctors talking about other doctors, managers talking about support staff, managers talking about doctors, doctors talking about managers, leader owners talking about their associates.
Associates talking about the owners. You know, mix this up whatever way you want to. But when we’re looking at a leadership, we’re looking right now at individual responsibility of leaders. What we want to notice is that if you are spending any time within your day talking about people who work with you or for you, with people other than your leadership team, you are creating a negative environment. You are starting to add to the culture that is what is creating what we call a toxic culture, what many of us would then deem a toxic culture.
There is no place for you to be talking about your team members with anybody other than your leadership group. And whatever gets said with inside those leadership meetings stays within those meetings. Anything other than that is simply gossip. Gossip is talking about somebody who’s not there to defend themselves. Two people talking about a situation that has nothing to do with them. And we do this a lot in veterinary medicine, whether we’re talking about clients or we’re talking about each other within our organizations themselves.
So I want you to just notice that if you believe your organizational culture is struggling and any of these behaviors that I’ve identified, you can see that you’re doing them yourself. One of the quickest ways that you can start to shift your culture is just by stopping those behaviors. My friends, your teams take cues from you, and your behavior and mood sets the tone for the entire practice.
So if you’ve had a really bad morning and you bring that stressful, negative, anxious energy with you to the clinic, and you start then interacting with people from that energy, because you will remember, emotion drives action. So whatever your net emotional state is, by the time you get to work, that is the way that you’re going to interact with your teams. And if you don’t take a moment to check yourself and instead you interact with them from that stress, from that anxiety, from that overwhelm, or whatever you’re bringing with you, then just know that your team is going to then react back to you in the same way.
They’re also going to learn that it is okay to bring all of their personal drama to work and to interact with each other from that place. Now, I’m not saying that you don’t have some very legitimate stressors outside of the workplace. Of course you do. We all do. But what is your skillset as far as being able to leave that at home so that you can come to work.
And the flip side of that as well. Leave work at work so that you don’t take it home. The way that we interact with anybody is driven, ultimately, by the way that we’re feeling emotionally. And the way that we’re feeling emotionally, my friends, is always created by our perspective. It’s not the circumstances of what has happened before we get to work or at work. It’s what we believe about it that always creates the emotion involved.
And we always have the opportunity to put ourselves into a different perspective before we walk into the door to work or whether it is walking into the door at home. At the end of the day, every action, behavior, and conversation that you have sets an example for those that you work with. And I cannot stress this enough, because they are taking their cues from you. Especially if you don’t have a defined employee manual and you’re not giving regular feedback.
They’re looking to you to see what is acceptable. So you’ve got to ask yourself, are you holding yourself to the same expectations of behavior and performance that you are holding your team? Are you showing up on time? Are you leaving your cell phone somewhere where it’s not constantly distracting you? Are you staying focused on the task at hand? Are you delegating? Are you micromanaging? So it can go both ways, right?
We can get into the negative very quickly. Are we not allowing people to do their jobs, or are we taking on all of it because we are afraid? Are we always giving all the tasks to one person, which then teaches the rest of the team that you don’t trust them? Or is there another reason, outside of that, that we just need to understand? Or is there opportunities for people to learn so that they can actually contribute more?
We’ve got to pay attention to the way that we are behaving and interacting with our teams, because it is absolutely influencing culture, my friends. Toxicity grows within a culture when behavior and performance expectations are not defined. Or they are defined but not enforced. It’s that simple. It really comes down to those things. Toxicity grows within a culture when behavior and performance expectations are not defined and or they are not enforced.
It always has to start there. Nobody can meet an expectation that they don’t understand. So we have to communicate what the expectations are, and then we have to enforce those expectations. And enforce seems like a very heavy word, but we’re going to visit those expectations through our employee evaluations and feedback and regular opportunities for improving in areas where there are shortcomings. But right along with that, we have to follow through when people just continue to not meet expectations.
And so in some cases that’s going to mean people are going to be fired from their jobs. Do not underestimate the impact that it has if you continue to hold on to somebody within your team that is consistently an underperformer despite your feedback and opportunities for improvement. Because if you have a consistent underperformer, despite all of your efforts, your team sees that that person continues to be employed and what is resulting is a conclusion that it doesn’t actually matter how well you do at your job.
What also is a normal conclusion is that that person who is underperforming but continues to be employed somehow gets special treatment over the other people, and that is not an intended consequence. I know that is not what you’re trying to create, but it’s something that many of us keep creating over and over and over again because we are simply afraid to be down a person, especially these days when it’s so hard to find team members in the first place.
I want to share with you, though, something that I found to be true time and time and time again. Your solid teams, your strong team members, would rather work shorthanded with people who want to be there and are capable of doing the job than work with a larger number of people who aren’t pulling their own weight. Feel free to talk to your teams about these things, but I want you to remember that keeping to your own policies and procedures first and foremost really does eliminate all of this drama.
If you’ve already created an employee expectation through your manuals, your employee manuals, you’ve already delivered that everybody’s been communicated, that they’ve all signed off, that they’ve got it. There’s no drama involved when it comes to evaluating performance making opportunities for people to improve, following up with them, they either improve or they don’t. And if you have a three strikes in your out kind of system, you just work the process.
There’s no drama involved at all. And yes, you are going to lose team members, but at the same time, you are going to strengthen the resolve of the team members who are doing the job that you’ve actually hired them to do. It shows them that they are valued, that their efforts are recognized, and that you are creating a culture where being a slacker or an underperformer just isn’t tolerated at any cost.
So on the other side of this, aside from leadership, what is the responsibility of individual employees when it comes to organizational culture? I would like to share that. I think we all play a responsibility in organizational culture. I do believe that organizational leadership plays the strongest role in creating culture, because if we don’t have strong foundation, then it’s difficult for anybody to lead the way. That being said, every single person within an organization has an opportunity to influence culture and to even lead up in some situations.
So what I want to make sure that everybody understands is that no employee has to wait for an organization to get it shit together before you can take personal responsibility for improving the well being for yourself. So you don’t have to wait for the organization to get all the ducks in a row before you can take leadership over yourself and take control over your own personal well being, it actually is possible to create and protect your personal well being, even when working within an organization that has work to do to improve culture as a whole.
I want to say that again, it really is possible to create and protect personal well being, even when working with an organization that has work to do to improve the culture as a whole. Your well being is never dependent on the overall culture of the place that you work. You are not a victim of your culture unless you choose to identify as that for yourself. Now, friends, there are situations where the job that you are in just may not be the right fit.
And I’ve talked about this many times before. For me personally, there are three deal breakers. And it all comes down to kind of one idea. If I’m working with an organization that is expecting me to violate my own personal morals, ethics or values, that is a deal breaker for me. What that means for me is that if I’m expected to violate my own personal morals, ethics or values, I am going to choose to no longer work for that organization.
I don’t care how much I like the people I work with. I don’t care how long I’ve been there. I don’t care how much money I’ve made of. I don’t care how it’s going to impact the team members that I leave behind or the clients that I’m no longer going to be able to serve. Because for me to be able to thrive in my job, and for me to be able to sleep at night and for me to be able to enjoy my professional life, I need to be with an organization that does not expect me to violate my own personal morals, ethics and values.
And if I’m in an organization that requires that, then that is just not a right fit for me. And so I’m going to leave every single time. Aside from those things, anything else that happens within an organization is something that I can let be neutral. This is a skill to be developed. This is the heart of leveraging the space. This is something every single one of us needs to learn how to do.
Because the truth is that the way that we feel day in and day out in our jobs and in every single aspect of our lives is created only by what we believe about our circumstances. And so if we want to believe that we are being bullied, if we want to believe that our organization doesn’t care about us, if we want to believe that we don’t get paid enough, if we want to believe that Susie slacking off on her job is making my job harder, then we will identify as victims.
Instead of doing that, we can just notice, oh, here’s Suzie’s behavior. Here’s what the organization decided to do. Here’s the amount of money I make. Here’s the hours that I work. Let those be neutral circumstances and then choose a different story for ourselves. Now, I’m not condoning any kind of workplace bullying. Please do not misunderstand. If you’re in a situation where somebody is treating you in a way that is aggressive or considered bullying behavior, then that is something that you absolutely need to take to your organizational leadership.
That is not something that you just deal with. Right? You have to make that stuff known. But within your own organizational policies and procedures and within the employee manuals, hopefully there is a process for you to report those kinds of behaviors. If not, then that’s a conversation that needs to be had with leadership. Somebody needs to be made aware that there needs to be a policy put in place on how to handle concerns between employees.
Because without those kinds of policies in place, what happens? We just stand around. We talk about each other behind each other’s backs. And if enough people are feeling offended or bullied by one person, then that person starts to get shunned, and that person starts to feel their own kind of exclusion. And then that creates another whole, like festering of problems and drama, because that person probably has their own little team.
And you start to get these clicks within organizations, my friends, a well organized, a well managed practice, a organization that has culture well buttoned up, does not have cliques within it at all. Because we’re not there to create social groups. We are there to do a job together, and we can do that together as a team, even if a lot of our individual interests and personalities are very, very different.
So that’s a huge indicator for you leaders out there. If you have a lot of cliques within your hospital, then there’s something amiss in your own policies and procedures and your employee expectations that isn’t getting communicated right. There’s some expectations that still need to be defined and shared because a strong practice, as far as culture goes, does not have those things present. And when they do pop up, they are indicators that there are opportunities to make some adjustments.
But coming back to that personal responsibility, we are not victims of our cultures unless we choose to be so and so I want to empower every single one of you to not be a victim of your culture. Instead, ask yourself, what is right for me? Am I here in this organization being required to violate my own morals, ethics and values? If that’s a yes, I’m going to give you 100% permission to start looking for another opportunity because you’re going to have a very hard time thriving in an environment that requires that of you.
Now, if that’s a no, then there’s probably opportunities for you to have some high value conversations to make some suggestions to leadership. If policies and procedures don’t exist, if employee manuals don’t exist, if people aren’t being held to the same standard, if you’re not getting regular feedback, I know it’s going to be scary to go to your leadership and request those things. But my friends, that’s how we lead up in our organizations.
We identify opportunities for our leaders to be stronger leaders. And that’s not through criticism. That’s through a high value conversation. It’s through a request and setting up that conversation in advance of so that you communicate what it is that you want to communicate and you’re able to ask for what it is that you need. Now, if you have no idea how to do a high value conversation and you’re in our VetLife Academy program, there is an entire section in there on how to do a high value conversation.
So I’ve already got you covered there. And if you don’t, and if you don’t know how to do any of these things, you’re not inside of Vetlife Academy. By all means, jump over to joyfuldvm.com vetlifeacademy and get on our priority list so I can let you know when we open up that membership again. The bottom line here for individuals is that just like our leaders need to be examples for the rest of the team, as individuals, we can be leaders and examples for everybody else that we work with.
One person learning how to manage their own emotional well being, learning how to be emotionally mature in every situation, learning how to not be reactive to their circumstances, and allowing those things to be neutral creates a beautiful example for everybody around you. And so whether or not you are a leader or you are an employee, don’t underestimate the positive ripple effect it will have on the entire team when you start to do this for yourself.
So you don’t have to wait around for the organization to get all of its ducks in a row before you can become empowered in your own job. And you also can have a massive positive influence in that shift in general. So to wrap this all up, as far as organizational culture, whose responsibility is it anyway? We all play a part in organizational culture. I think that’s really important to notice.
We all play a part in it. Individuals can make a positive, massive positive impact just by taking responsibility for their own experience. But my friends, organizational leadership is ultimately the main driver of culture. And if as leaders, you don’t have your shit together, you haven’t figured out how to not be reactive, you’re still bringing your baggage to work every single day. You’re in such a frenzy that you don’t have time to create your policies and procedures, or you’ve created them, but you never enforce them.
You don’t give any feedback to your employees, positive or negative. You hang on to people too long who have taught you time and time again that they don’t have what it takes to do the job you need them to do. I want you to recognize that you are a huge part of the problem. And I say that with so much love because I know so many of you are just trying to do what you can day in and day out to just survive.
But I think you need to just take a step back, take a nice deep breath, and recognizing that continuing at the frenzied and frenetic pace that you probably have been functioning in for quite some time is not going to create a sustainable job and experience for you, let alone your teams. This is not the way that it has to be in veterinary medicine. We have to slow down in order to be able to speed up and to build and to grow our organizations and our businesses as a whole.
If you don’t have anybody to support you in that process, then I definitely recommend that you send us an email@supportoyfuldvm.com. because you may be exactly the right kind of person for our organizational leadership program. This program where we are helping veterinary leaders, business owners to create that positive culture and to support the well being of the organizations. Because when our individuals within the organizations thrive, our practices will grow and our clients will have a much better experience and we will be able to help more animals as a whole.
So in order to learn more as an organization about how we can support you over here at joyfuldvm, jump over and just send us an email supportoyfuldvm.com and we will be happy to talk with you about how we can help you to set this foundation in place for your entire organization and more importantly, you personally, to grow. All right my friends, I hope this episode has been helpful.
If you have found it valuable, I would love it if you would share it with a friend and if you would leave us a review anywhere where you listen to this podcast. Have a beautiful week and we’ll see you soon. Bye for now.