5 Essential Staff Development Tips for Veterinary Hospitals

iVET360, a national veterinary management services company, helps private practice and primary-care veterinary hospitals optimize operations, improve customer outreach, and track analytical trends. Here are five team member training and development tips for veterinarians looking to grow their business.

Strategies like these have helped the 90 veterinary hospitals iVET360 assists. In 2015, iVET360 clients saw record growth — an average 17 percent increase in revenue and a 24 percent increase in new client growth.

Experts from the Portland-based company recommend every veterinary hospital use these proven tips to improve efficiency and team productivity.

1. Evaluate or Create Your Culture

Poor culture and a weak environment are becoming the number one reason veterinary employees leave their jobs. Well-qualified employees are harder to find, so practices can no longer afford to ignore staff sentiment.

Money isn’t the only motivator anymore. To compete for the best employees, a practice must look inward and build a workplace people want to be part of each day.

Evaluate your hospital and its culture:

• Have you defined the path you want employees moving toward?
• How is that communicated to the team, and how often?
• How do employees feel about the environment you’ve created?
• Do they feel fulfilled?
• Do they feel connected to the practice and its vision for the future?

Answering these questions — and acting on what you find — helps build a strong, stable workforce.

2. Pay Attention to Appointment Conversion

Every practice naturally loses some clients each year. Sometimes that’s out of your control (clients move, patients pass away). Sometimes it isn’t (a poor client experience).

For a practice to keep growing, the people answering the phones need the training and knowledge to turn every potential new client call into a booked appointment.

Train your staff to use active language and proactively schedule appointments with new callers. This helps you capture more new clients and keep your active client base strong.

3. Address Client Compliance

A large client base means little if clients don’t follow your recommendations. Low compliance leads to worse outcomes for patients — and that affects culture, reputation, and revenue.

Your practice’s average transaction charge (ATC) is the best way to track compliance. Look at your ATC over the past year. If it’s flat or dropped, you may have a compliance issue — usually rooted in communication gaps between doctors, staff, and clients.

There’s no single fix, but small adjustments across your team can move the needle. Start by evaluating how treatments are recommended:

• How are unapproved treatment plans followed up on?
• How do technicians discuss basic needs like heartworm prevention?
• How do doctors and staff handle difficult, high-cost treatment plans?
• Do they assume the client won’t approve it?
• Do they alter the plan based on what they think the client can afford?

Addressing even a few of these points can make a difference. A deeper review of how treatments are recommended can shift both care and revenue to the next level.

4. Improve Team Accountability

Most practice owners don’t enjoy holding their teams accountable — it usually means some form of confrontation. But a lack of accountability is one of the biggest culture killers, especially when employees sense “unfairness.”

This doesn’t just hurt culture. It can hurt patient care and daily operations. When people aren’t held accountable, they stop worrying about mistakes, since there are no consequences.

Accountability doesn’t mean firing people. It means making sure they understand their role, meet expectations, and see consequences when they don’t.

Watch for these warning signs:

• A rise in pharmacy mistakes
• Basic record-keeping errors
• Appointment booking errors
• A growing sense of animosity among staff

If you’re seeing these, you likely have an accountability problem. The worst outcome: your hardest workers feel unappreciated and leave, while the offenders stay — knowing they’ve got a good thing going.

It’s hard to reflect honestly on whether you’re fair to everyone. But holding people accountable — for both good and bad actions — is essential to running a successful, harmonious practice. Ask yourself what consequences people actually face for mistakes, and how often you recognize good work (yes, daily). Adjust your management and communication from there.

5. Develop Supervisor Leadership Skills

This is an often-overlooked part of practice ownership. Supervisors frequently have no formal leadership experience — they moved up through longevity, loyalty, or simply because no one else was available.

Without leadership training, they can unintentionally create an adversarial culture. Owners often don’t notice until there’s been major turnover, with one common denominator: the supervisors.

Communicate your vision for practice leadership to them, then invest time in developing these skills:

• Talk through both easy and difficult decisions, and ask why they think you handled it that way
• Share books and seminars that reflect the management style you want in your hospital, then discuss how to apply it
• Let them make mistakes — but talk through those mistakes the same way you would a medical error

Your supervisors are a direct reflection of your practice’s vision and culture. Investing in their success elevates your supervisors, your team, client service, patient care, and often, your revenue.

“We want to help veterinary hospitals perform at their best, grow, and continue serving their clients,” said Matt Murray, CEO of iVET360. “By providing tips like these, we are able to share helpful insights we have collected over the many years in the industry with veterinarians who are interested in doing more.”

iVET360 provides management services to independently owned primary-care veterinary hospitals, including staff development, marketing, and financial, operational, and customer care analytics.