Are Millennials Bad For Your Veterinary Hospital?
At veterinary conferences around the country, numerous consultants tell practice managers and veterinarians that millennials aren’t worth hiring because they negatively affect hospital culture. But before you discount an entire generation of people,
Heather Romano, managing director of staff development at iVET360, a veterinary practice management services company, says to think about the ways millennials can add to your practice instead. At Mississippi Veterinary Medical Association’s Winter Conference in February, Romano gave a talk titled “The New Generation of Culture.” The talk encourages veterinary hospitals to create a culture that speaks to all generations. Romano’s talk provides tangible recommendations for practice managers and owners to bring back to their staffs. Her recommendations include providing routine feedback instead of one annual performance review, changing your managing style to be more like a coach or a mentor and implementing the
lily padding management strategy. Her talk was inspired in part by Google’s Project Oxygen, an extensive research project that involved thousands of interviews and mountains of data. After experiencing high turnover, the company compiled hundreds of thousands of interviews to figure out why employees were leaving. Ultimately, they discovered it came down to managers and management styles. Some of Romano’s tips are adapted from Google’s eight characteristics of a good manager. “Millennials aren’t going to change,” Romano says. “We can’t change an entire generation, but we can change our practices to make them more enticing to this generation. The hospitals that
are adapting are more successful. They’re providing better client service and better patient care (because your clients are millennials, too!), and their employees are more excited to come to work.” iVET360’s experts, like Romano, are available for speaking engagements around the United States and can give talks on all kinds of topics of relevance to the veterinary community. Their talks tend to focus on foundational aspects of veterinary hospital operation, from creating a cohesive and supportive hospital culture, to analyzing your fundamental KPIs, to building a complete hospital budget before budgeting for your marketing spending. According to Romano, these kinds of ever-important, baseline subjects are often left out of discussions from companies that only want to sell practices the newest, hottest tools. iVET360 provides comprehensive marketing, staff development and data analytics solutions for independently owned primary care veterinary hospitals across the nation. For more information about iVET360’s services or to register for their free monthly webinar, visit their website at
ivet360.com.
About iVET360:
Established in 2013 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon, iVET360 is a practice management services company that provides critical support to veterinary hospitals across the nation. Their specialists educate and assist veterinary practices with marketing, staff development and analytics to ensure complete implementation of proven business strategies into the daily activities of the hospital. For media inquiries and media interview requests, please contact our public relations firm at 503.765.6360 or
[email protected].
