What's This Episode About?
This week on the podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and Stephanie Goss are tackling a mailbag letter from a technician who is looking around at our field and wondering – How do we compete with other industries? In a time where more and more employees are looking for flexibility in their schedules, in their work environments, in their benefits, and in their roles within companies, how does veterinary medicine redefine ourselves and shake up the status quo in a way that allows us to remain competitive and adaptable to change? Andy and Stephanie both agree that the possibilities seem endless and that the conversation must start with an open mind and a flexible headspace. Let’s get into this…
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Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag
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Episode Transcript
This podcast transcript is made possible thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity across the veterinary profession. Click here to learn more about Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at Banfield.
Stephanie Goss:
Hey everybody, I am Stephanie Goss, and this is another episode of the Uncharted podcast. This week on the podcast, Andy and I are tackling a topic that we got through the mailbag, and we had a technician writing to us asking a very good question that Andy and I would love to talk about as we head into 2022. And that is, is there a way for veterinary medicine to have flexibility that other industries seem to enjoy? And this technician was asking the question in the context of how do we create opportunities for flexibility, whether it's with the schedule, whether it's work location, whether it's hours worked in a week, whether it's tasks being done? How do we create flexibility in all of the jobs that happen in a traditional veterinary practice, so that we can compete with other industries?
Stephanie Goss:
And I think this is a great question and Andy does too. I'm really looking forward to diving into this one with him and hearing you guys' thoughts on this episode, because we can think of a bunch of different ways that we can be creative and flexible, but it all starts with getting in the right headspace, so let's get into this.
Speaker 3:
And now the Uncharted podcast.
Andy Roark:
And we are back it's me, Dr. Andy Roark and Stephanie it's five o'clock somewhere Goss.
Stephanie Goss:
I do like that. How's it going, Andy?
Andy Roark:
It's good. It is good. It is good. I can see 2022 from where we're recording-
Stephanie Goss:
Secretly.
Andy Roark:
And yeah, it's exciting times.
Stephanie Goss:
It's so crazy. This year has just in so many ways has seemed like it's 10 million years long, but also it's flown by. And it's crazy to think that we're almost to January and the new year, and you and I are going to be doing some traveling next month and it's crazy.
Andy Roark:
Yeah.
Stephanie Goss:
It's crazy.
Andy Roark:
We're going to Orlando for the VMX program. Hey, yeah, if you're there and you see us come say hi.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, heck yeah.
Andy Roark:
Steph and I love to meet people who like the podcast so come up and say hi. If you say you like the podcast, we'll be friends immediately. I'll immediately go, “Oh, thank you.” And like-
Stephanie Goss:
I will giggle awkwardly.
Andy Roark:
I'll melt in your hands. Stephanie will giggle, and my head will expand pushing people off the escalator.
Stephanie Goss:
I will giggle awkwardly and turn tomato red.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, not to be missed. All right. So, yeah, that's the plan. You and me going to Orlando next year or next year. Yeah, next year.
Stephanie Goss:
Right? True.
Andy Roark:
This is also next week.
Stephanie Goss:
I know. It's crazy. We have a good one that I think is a good topic to kick off the new year with actually, because it's a question that I know a lot of my peers as managers are wrestling with. And we got a question in the mail bag and it was from someone who was asking about schedule flexibility, and they said, “I think we know that schedule flexibility has been a hot topic as a result of our post-COVID world, and although it is easier to use work from home or work whenever you want, just get your job done schedules in other industries, as a service-based industry like veterinary medicine, this seems impossible to me.” And so this person was saying, “I think that I could see a front office maybe being able to work from home if they had a VPN set up, and a cloud-based practice management software. I could see where a doctor could take telemed appointments from home, but the core work of our patient care team, technicians, veterinary assistants, they can't really do their job from home. Can they?” Is what this person was asking.
Andy Roark:
Right.
Stephanie Goss:
They were saying, “We can't do patient care from our homes, we can't trim nails, we can't talk to clients in the exam room, we can't do bandaging wounds, we can't do the patient care fundamentals from home.” And so they were saying in their practice, the best thing that they have come up with so far is to overstaff so that the team can take days off whenever they need to, including those days when they have to call in the morning of because they're sick or they just need a day off. And so they were saying this doesn't though feel like a long term solution, “And so as a leader in my practice, I am wondering what do you and Andy think? Is there a way for veterinary medicine to have the flexibility that other industries seem to enjoy in terms of working from outside of our clinics?”
Andy Roark:
Yeah. So this is a super good question. Yeah, so let's go ahead and start at a high level. So let's start with some headspace. It's very easy when we start talking about schedules to get myopic really fast. And there's a lot of really important caveats in this question, I really loved the way they laid it. They're not like, “In a dream world…” They're like, “No, when patients come into building, how do we… We don't work from home when they're coming into the building.” But I still think it's important to start with a open mind and a very broad perspective, because if not doing that, it's very limiting. So, let me give you an example, I was reading recently about Blockbuster Video, which I remember as a kid, right? I get nostalgic for… You know what I mean? The blue building with the yellow signs.
Stephanie Goss:
Yes.
Andy Roark:
And every Friday, the place was just packed, right? And so it's absolutely packed. And the biggest frustration that customers at Blockbuster Video in the year 1995 had was that they would go on Friday afternoon to get a movie and rent it for the weekend, and the new releases are sold out, they're gone. And you've got… that was the most frustrating thing, right? They still had the box, but you didn't need the box, you needed the white paper copy of the box that went behind the box, because that's what showed they actually had the thing. So anyway, so Blockbuster Video is looking at their business model and the biggest pushback they get is their target customer, who is the soccer mom who's doing a bunch of things and grabbing a movie for the family on the way home. That's not for me, that's for blockbuster, how they describe it, but the soccer mom was their target-
Stephanie Goss:
Sure.
Andy Roark:
… demographic. The biggest frustration they had is that their kids have looked forward all week to the new release that they have been told is coming out, and they have signs up saying, “On May 30th, this movie will be here.” And then they get there and Finding Nemo is not there and there's tears and they don't want to watch something else and so that was the biggest problem they had. And so the adjustment that Blockbuster made was that they steadily decreased the number of older videos they had in their store so that they could increase shelf space for new releases. And so they shifted from being a store that said, “We have all the things,” to more and more, “We have new releases and we have 80 copies of finding Nemo.”
Andy Roark:
And they even did the guarantee of, “We guarantee we'll have a copy of this when you come in.” I don't know if you remember that, but it was guaranteed or it's free. It's something, “If you come in and we don't have it, we'll give you coupon, you'll have it for free.” That's what's called an incremental adaptation. They took their business model and they looked at it and they said, “Man, these people come in and they want these new releases, and so we're going to shift what we're doing within the framework of what we do to try to address this need.” Now at the same time Netflix is getting started and they have every video out there, and there's no late fees and they'll send them to your house, and this was game breaking. Not only do we not only do we have all the old stuff, we also have the new stuff and no late fees.
Andy Roark:
And they just completely changed the way that people get movies in their house, and now they pioneered streaming and just completely changed the way they did it again. That's transformational adaptation, it is. We're just radically, wildly differently. I bring those things up because one, I get nostalgic for Blockbuster and Netflix, but two, there's nothing wrong with incremental adaptation, right? It's good business. Most of the time and we're talking about technology… Most of the time incremental adaptation is how we move forward. We look at what works and we try to do it better. We look at what our clients like, and we try to serve them better, that's fine. Sometimes it is really good to look, not adaptation or at incremental adaptation, but at transformational and be like, “Let's just put us side are preconceived notions and reimagine the problem.”
Andy Roark:
And I go through all of that stuff to say that when we're talking about scheduling and what will be possible in the future, transformational adaptation is a good place to start and think. I think it's dangerous to say, “Here's our appointment scheduler. How would you do this differently?” I'm like, “Man, by the time you're looking at your appointment schedule, you're already too far down the rabbit hole to really visualize what is truly possible.” I think the letter writer is right on, we're looking at a lot of things right now and people want to work for home. I was talking to one of my friends that works at one of the large corporate vet groups and they were at the main corporate office, and I said, “What's it like now?” The pandemic, it was winding down at the time. I was like, “What is it? What is it like there?” And they're like, “Oh, it's a ghost town here.” And I said, “Are you guys going to have people come back to the office?” And she laughed, and she was like, “Oh no. No one wants to come back.”
Andy Roark:
And so, as a result, they're still largely working from home, and then they have optional days that people could come in. I said, “Well, that seems good.” And they were like, “It's not good because you come in and no one else is here, so you might as well have stayed home because the people you came to see, they're not here, and so it's not working.” The idea that people would just not come to work and that they would work from home, and that there might be some optional days that people could like… That's so revolutionary and we just didn't even think that that was possible.
Andy Roark:
But now the problem for the corporation, they've got this massive building in an urban area and they're like, “What the heck are we paying for this thing for?” And so, there's opportunity for radical change. We look at pet hospice, like Lap of Love, and those guys, love those guys, I'm such a big fan. Their business model is amazing, which is, “Hey vets, you will do hospice care and you'll set your own schedule, and you let us know when people can book you, and then they're going to book you then, and then you're going to go and you're going to do these things.” Dr. Sarah Boston, up in Canada was talking to me recently about a teleconsult business. She's an oncosurgeon and you can use a vet and talk to Dr. Boston and she'll look at your case, and try to help walk you through how to approach it. And that type of access and availability, and she sets that schedule, that's amazing.
Andy Roark:
Anyway, I've got another friend who just went back for a nontraditional radiology residency, and she's going to be reading radiographs from home, and all of these things are real. You and I are big fans of Guardian Vets that have after hours call service, where clients call into your clinic and a registered vet tech at Guardian Vets picks up the phone, and asks them, “What's going on?” And tells them if they need to go to the emergency clinic or book someone an appointment at your clinic for the next day. There's virtual CSRs, “Hey, your front desk is overwhelmed.” You can flip a switch and now someone offsite will start picking up the phones and helping out the front desk. All of these things are… they're real, they're not pie in the sky, they might happen one day.
Andy Roark:
Clinics that we work with in Uncharted, they're doing these things. And so why wouldn't we start to think about what might be possible from schedules, right? Why wouldn't we start to think about what is the sacred cow, that we have had forever that you go, “Oh, you can't do it differently. It has to be this way.” I don't know it has to be that way anymore. And so I think that just starting with this with a very open mindset and saying, “What is possible?” I think that, that's an exciting way to look at schedule.
Andy Roark:
And I do think that as we look at burnout and we look at what employees want. The reason this question is coming up is because in other industries, people are loving working from home and they don't want to go back to the clinic. And we're seeing research on burnout that says, “If somebody gets to work from home for a day, it can have a massively positive impact on their mental health if one day, a week, they just work from home. And they're in their own place and they get this downtime and then they come back in and they're happier in the office.” It's like all those things are real and we should be looking at them, and so I'm glad that people are starting to do so.
Stephanie Goss:
I think part of the headspace piece too, besides the fact that I think this question comes from a place of discomfort for a lot of us, because veterinary medicine is very slow to adapt to change. We are creatures of habit, and if COVID hadn't forced us to make so much radical transformational change over the last two years, I don't think either one of us could have looked at a crystal ball and predicted that we would have practices who would be doing digital credit card transactions, for example, that's a small thing, but it's something that we wouldn't have. So the vast majority would not have even considered pre-COVID because… Or texting with our clients as the primary communication source, we wouldn't have considered that pre-COVID, that truly has been transformational.
Stephanie Goss:
And at the same time, we don't like change, it's scary, and so I think for a vast majority of our profession, this question comes from a place of discomfort because it is scary. It's scary to think about that much transformational change continuing to happen. And I think that a lot of us have spent the last two years looking down the road, thinking at some point, “This has to level out. At some point, this has to go back to normal.” And I think there still are a lot of people in the veterinary industry and industries, this is not unique to veterinary medicine, who are still sitting and wondering, “When does this go back to normal?”
Stephanie Goss:
And so I think that part of it for me from a headspace perspective is we have to accept the fact that it's uncomfortable, and I think your point about starting from a place of transformational vision is really important. And I had this, I had the same thoughts when I was thinking about answering this question. We are a service industry and our job exists in the clinic, however, I will tell you that over the last five years of getting to know people across veterinary medicine, my eyes have been opened to possibilities for the definition of service industry and for the definition of clinic or practice in ways that I never thought I would have comprehended. And so I would challenge everybody, yes, we are a service industry and yes, our fundamental patient care role does exist in practice. But when you're sitting at the beginning of thinking about this question, I would challenge you to think about what truly is the definition of client service and what truly is the definition of practice for you, because there are a million different options.
Stephanie Goss:
You mentioned several of them. We've got mobile practices, we've got end-of-life and hospice care practices that happen in people's homes and that is where the practice happens, right? We've got mobile nursing services where licensed technicians go out and provide patient care in people's homes. There are things that alter on a fundamental level, the definition of being a service industry and our work occurring in the practice. And so I would echo you in saying that when you're thinking about this question, I think this writer very much pigeonholed themselves in a way that I totally understand, because at the beginning of the pandemic, I did it too. I saw things like, “Well, I could have a CSR answer the phones from home, and I could have a doctor do follow ups and telemedicine from home,” right?
Stephanie Goss:
But those were the only two things that I could really see as being ways for the team to work outside of the building. Because I really thought the same way this writer did, which was we are in a service industry and our patient care work takes place in the practice, and you have to have a brick and mortar of some kind or a mobile setup of some kind to be able to provide those services. And I would challenge all of us to really question that, because my belief has shifted. It started shifting before COVID and it certainly has shifted dramatically since COVID, and I think the possibilities are really endless.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. I feel like the… So I want to jump back to one of your earlier points for a second about what does it mean to be in vet practice? The question that I like to ask people right now is, “Are you in the veterinary medicine business, or are you in the pet health business?” Because they're very different. And if you say, “I am just in the vet medicine business,” it's okay, that's fine, but recognize that that is a choice and that's different from being in the pet health business. And I bring that up and I ask that question because there are so many options right now. A lot of people will ask me like, “Well, where do you think the industry is going? Or where do you think practice is going? Or what is the future of practice?”
Andy Roark:
And I think that, that's a really interesting question. And I think when people ask that the analogy in my mind is I remember being a kid, and we had three channels that the TV got, and that you watched those three channels. There were CBS, NBC, and PBS or whatever.
Stephanie Goss:
And you had to get up and flip the dial.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. You had to get up to flip the dial, that's it [inaudible 00:18:57] myself, that's what it was. I was like, “Man, what is this?” And then, cable TV came along and it was more, but it was still the same. It was still like, oh, you watched these things, there's advertisements on them, and that's how it's provided and that's what the thing is. And that's just how it was done, that's what entertainment was. Was TV, possibly movie theater.
Andy Roark:
And I feel like that's the history of vet medicine is like, this is what vet medicine is. Well, now all of a sudden we've had this explosion and I don't have cable and I haven't had cable for you years. I have Netflix and Disney Plus, which are totally different than the… And they don't have advertisements on them. And I watch YouTube, which is just a complete hodgepodge of all kinds of things, and then there's TikTok and there's Instagram stories and all of these are videos, but they are not NBC, CBS and PBS. They are so radically different, and also, there's an endless amount of them. Just entertainment has shattered and fractured, and now you can grab onto weird YouTube channels and just watch thousands of hours of this niche, weird content.
Andy Roark:
The options for entertainment today are endless. I think that, that's what happens in vet medicine, right? I think the pandemic shatters the ball in a lot of ways, and now I don't think that there is a future of vet medicine. I think the future of vet medicine is this fractured wildly divergent series of paths that everybody is able to go on. I look at our profession and where it's going, and I promise it's coming back to the schedule, but you have got the rise of house call vets.
Andy Roark:
There's a lot of people who want to control their own schedule and it's just them or them and they have one technician who is their only employee, and together Batman and Robin, ride out to the house and they do the thing. And then I already mentioned pet hospice, like Lap of Love is a great example, but, “Hey, I'm going to set this time. I'm going to go to people's houses. I'm going to provide this high cost, high value service, and I'm going to give it a lot of time when I go and that's going to be my business model, and I'm going to control this schedule.”
Andy Roark:
And then you've got a VEG Veterinary Emergency Group is one of the examples. Adobe Animal Hospital in California is another one that are open practices where pet owners can go wherever they want inside of the building. And you go, “What?” And like, yes, they can… they are not separated from their pet, they get to go wherever they want. And that's how these very successful practices are running. And people go, “That's so different from what we've done.” There's telemedicine, there's going to be a lot of vets, they already are but there's going to be a lot more vets that are just doing consults to pet owners from their house.
Andy Roark:
And they're going to do… And pet owners want it, and entrepreneurs are figuring out how to pay for it and how to make it an attractive, viable financial model for vets. And so all of these things, I can just keep going and going, going, and there's not a right answer. We looked at practices, working in Uncharted as the pandemic came on and people were having out outages, labor shortages, people getting sick, people were just getting burned out, and we had practices that just decided they were going to be closed on Wednesday. And you're like, “You can't just close on Wednesday.” Yeah, they did. They just said, “In order to have flexible schedule, we're just going to close on Wednesdays.” We had other practices that decided, “I've always hated to work on Saturdays and I've got more business than I can do, and we're a profitable practice. I'm not going to be open on Saturday.” And what happened to them? Do you know what happened to those poor, poor, sad, sad souls? Nothing. Yeah, they do the financial hit-
Stephanie Goss:
You know what happened to them?
Andy Roark:
… but that was fine.
Stephanie Goss:
Their team got really excited because they didn't have to work Saturdays anymore, and their clients adjusted and their clients still come in Monday through Friday.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly. And don't get me wrong. Let's not rosy coat this, right? There's a financial trade off like Saturday is convenient, I'm sure there's people who go to other practices because they're not there on Saturdays. All that stuff is true, but it was not the catastrophic thing of, “You have to be open as much as everybody else is open or else you are going to have this horrible backlash.” That's not true. And so in all of these things, when we're talking about the scheduling was possible, it's fractured, everybody's going different ways and there's not going to be one way that vet clinics work. And it's a beautiful thing, it's a scary thing though, right?
Stephanie Goss:
Yes.
Andy Roark:
Please tell me how to run my practice, please just tell me and then I'll just do it, and then that will be that, but we want that there's a security in that. But at the same time, the freedom to do what you want to do is, it's wonderful, but it's scary, but it's wonderful. And so we are in this wonderful wild west time. And so can you have people work from home? Yeah. You and I talk about that a lot. We're at the practice managers summit that we did last year, we talked a lot about, “I think that there is a very good case and it depends on the practice. It depends on how you work, and where you work, and where you are, what stage of life your business is in, and how developed it is, and how trained people are, and all those things that said practice manager working from home one day a week, doesn't sound like a bad idea to me.” I think that you can make a very good case for a lot of good things.
Andy Roark:
And one of the things that I would say too is practice managers, if they are not in the vet clinic, they would work on the vet clinic a heck of a lot more than they do. How many practice managers do you know go into the vet clinic and spend 85% of their time putting out fires and chasing laser pointers, because people know that they're there and it's [inaudible 00:24:42] thing versus if they went home and were shut off for the day, they could actually do things that mattered. And boy, that business would benefit.
Andy Roark:
And so I think there's a good case for your regular practice manager working from home for a day. And granted, again, every practice is different, it's not a do-it-this-way or no way. As I said, it's all fractured, but I think that stuff is true and real. I think virtual CSRs, I think they make a ton of sense, and I think that, that's a feasible thing that you can do is cycle the front desk, so that all the front desk people get to work from home one day a week. And they're answering phones, but they're working from home and then you cycle through. There's so many op opportunities and so many options. I just think that that stuff is super important to put down and get in that headspace before we start talking about, “What are your options, right? Knowing it's a service business, what do you got to do?”
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. I think that that dreaming piece is really important and I think it's also the most scary, because I think for a lot of us, we don't know what we don't know. And so for most of us, those of us who have been in veterinary medicine for a while, or who have been in our particular mode of veterinary medicine for a while, whether it's GP or specialty or whatever, you know what you know. And so it is scary to think about how do I take this model that I know and think about it from a transformational way? And so I think acknowledging that fear and anxiety that could surround that is step number one in the headspace perspective. And to your point, Andy, I think we have to look at it in a very transformational and visionary way. We have to break it open and think about, “How do we redefine these ideas that we have had as an industry, and how do we find our own place within the fractures as you called it?” Because, I think that's the very true point.
Stephanie Goss:
And it's interesting, because I went to lunch recently with some friends who are our practice owners and it's a husband and wife team, and he's a manager and she's a veterinarian. And we were talking about finding veterinarians for their practice. And we were talking about the fact that more and more associate veterinarians are leaving traditional practice and becoming locum or relief vets because to your point, they want to be able to control their schedule. They want to be able to run their life without the commitment that being a practice owner has, because that comes with different chains and shackles along the way, when you're a practice owner. And so I think it was interesting because we were having the conversation, one of them asked me, they said, “Well, surely we can't… It's unsustainable as an industry to think about all of our veterinarians becoming relief vets. That isn't something that we can continue to support.”
Stephanie Goss:
And when we were having the original conversation, my brain agreed with that because I was like, “Yeah, logically, that makes sense. If every veterinarian becomes a relief veterinarian, then who is going to staff our practices? And I found myself agreeing and the conversation went on, but that stuck with me, and I have been thinking about it ever since we had lunch. And what I realized is that I actually didn't agree with it at all, because I truly believe for that…
Stephanie Goss:
And this brings me to my second point about headspace, that we can be whatever we want and we can do whatever we want. There are consequences to every choice that we make as individuals and as practice, and when we use the word consequence, most often people think about it in a negative context, right? But the true definition of consequence is just the outcome of our choices. It can be good and it can be bad, and so as a practice, I can choose to redefine what my practice looks like, the same way a veterinarian can say, “I want to be a relief vet because these are the things that it offers me.”
Stephanie Goss:
And sometimes those relief vets find those things that they're looking for within the context of one or two regular practices. And maybe they went out with the intention to truly be a relief vet, but then they find a practice or two that suits them, and they essentially become a part-time associate at both practices because that gives them… their needs are being met. And so, the more and more I thought about this, the more I was thinking about the fact that you say this all the time, this is truly a case I think for this writer and for anybody else, who's considering this question of where we have to pick our poison.
Stephanie Goss:
And so I would say, when my friend asked me that question, my mind went to, “Well, of course, if all the vets leave our practice, then we can't serve our clients, and who would we staff six days a week at the hospital with?” Well, who says we have to be open six days a week? Who says we have to be open 07:00 to 06:00? Who says we have to be open evenings, two days a week? All of those questions, the more I thought about it, the more I realized we were taking things that had maybe been normal for a lot of us in our positions of leadership within the industry, and are taking that for granted that it has to stay that way forever.
Stephanie Goss:
And so for me, the second piece of headspace really is, “Look, we can be and do whatever we want.” Really truly, the possibilities are endless for us as a individual practice, within the scope of our field, and for our field as a whole, there are consequences to all of those choices. Some are going to be good and some are possibly going to be not so good. And so this is where we really have to think about picking our poison, and when I thought about it in the context of this writer's question, I initially was like, “No.” I initially thought, “Yes, technicians can do other jobs, but they can't truly be a technician if they're not in the practice.”
Stephanie Goss:
But the more I thought about it, I don't think that's true. That is my brain falling into the trap of, I know what I know, right? And when I think about a general day practice, which is what I have run my whole career, I couldn't run a practice from 08:00 to 06:00 without technicians in the building. But that doesn't mean that there don't exist opportunities for technicians to provide patient care in hospitals in endless ways that are not an 08:00 to 06:00, Monday through Saturday general practice, right?
Stephanie Goss:
So, I think this is really a headspace thing for me in terms of really sitting back and thinking globally, to your point about, “We can do anything we want, we can be whoever we want to be.” And we should let ourselves dream a little bit because if we don't, we only know what we know. And to your point, it's really hard to look at the schedule and think, “Well, how do I change this, right?”
Andy Roark:
Yes. That's a mental-
Stephanie Goss:
This is my existing world.
Andy Roark:
That's a mental challenge most of us are not up to. Once you go that far down the path, you're locking in assumptions, right? Because on the schedule you're looking at, those assumptions are rock solid. We need get back out of it. Hey, let's take a break here, and we'll come back and let's start talking about what levers we can actually pull, and what techniques and possibilities are actually out there.
Stephanie Goss:
That sounds good.
Stephanie Goss:
Hey, everybody, it's Stephanie, I just have to break in here for one second and make sure that you know about an awesome opportunity that is coming up that we do not want you to miss. We are back. We are back in person in April in Greenville. That's right. Our flagship conference in Greenville, South Carolina is happening in person for the first time in three years. And we are so, so excited to be back with you guys. It is happening April 21st to the 23rd, so put that on your calendar now. And if you head over to the website at unchartedvet.com/april, you can find all of the details as we sort them out. You will get to see the schedule as soon as we have it, you will get to see information on the speakers, we've got an event FAQ, you can shop our Uncharted gear. We've got safety information if you're wondering being back in person.
Stephanie Goss:
So if this sounds like something you would be interested in, head over to the website at unchartedvet.com/april and reserve your spots. This event will sell out. We cannot wait to see you, so don't wait to put this on your calendar. You do have to be an Uncharted member to attend. You can find out all the details at the website. We'll see you soon. Now, back to the podcast.
Andy Roark:
All right, let's go ahead. Let's just go ahead and start to put some of the options on the table. So, getting back to our original question of, “Hey, we are a brick and mortar practice.” And so let's put the things down that are not assumptions, they're real. “We are a brick and mortar practice and clients are coming to our building and bringing their pets with them. How do we provide schedule flexibility for our staff?” And so let's just go ahead right now and start to talk about some of the options that we've seen or that we see out there. And some of the things that we could at least start to consider.
Stephanie Goss:
Yes. And I would say for me, it starts one step further back, which is the question that was getting asked here is, is there a way for vet med to have the flexibility that other industries enjoy? And for me, I think part of it is looking at why other industries are doing what they're doing. I think the problems that other industries are having are very much similar to the problems we're having in veterinary medicine, in the sense that, to use your story about the veterinary medicine example, where they stopped going into their office, right? And now they're like, “We don't want to go back to being in the office.” I think that's happening in other industries. And so the why, the flexibility is being created in those other industries isn't because they're not service industries, and because work doesn't have to get done in certain places. But because I think, a lot of businesses are looking at it from a place of, “I want to retain people.” For a lot of them, it's about, “I want to retain good people. So how can I be flexible?”
Stephanie Goss:
And I think that's part of the mental challenge for us is that we think so inflexibly in veterinary medicine. And so when I think about that question, how do we create flexibility? Is there a way for us to create flexibility? I would say yes, because I would say, if you look back to the beginning of the pandemic, and you asked law offices, “Could your people work solely from home and never come into our big corporate fancy office downtown?” Their answer probably would've been no, right? They need to have meetings, they need to have phone calls, they need to do the lawyerly stuff that costs a lot of money and it happens in their building. And I think it's the same for us in veterinary medicine.
Stephanie Goss:
And so for me, the root of answering this question goes to, how do we figure out that way of doing it and how do we think outside the box? And because for me, the answer to the question is, “I would way rather retain good quality people, because I know how hard it is to find new people.” And so to your question, yes, I have a business model where clients bring their pets to me in my building currently. Could I continue to have that business model and also change my hours to meet more of the needs of my team so I can retain the existing team I have? To your point, can we close on Wednesdays if that's the slowest day of the week to give the team a break in the middle of the week where we can do other things outside of the building, right? For me, the answer very much lies in the people, and I have to think about that from a global perspective of my team and also the client's needs too.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. I think to the point of, will we ever be as flexible as other industries? I think the answer is no, as far as any other industry, right? We are a service industry that requires touch. We're in the same category as food service, right? Is there a virtual chef? No. There's virtual cooking coaches and there's quality control, and there's managers, but ultimately the patrons come to the restaurant and they need to get the food, which needs to be prepared. Is there a virtual auto mechanic? No. Someone needs to actually go under the hood and fix the thing. And at the same time, I think your point is spot on that we look at other industries like food service, and they are desperately struggling to retain employees, because other industries do allow people to work from home and things like that.
Andy Roark:
And so I think that the short answer is, “No, we'll never be as flexible as the web designers who have always worked from home. We'll never be as flexible as a marketing firm, but we also very much need to be looking at what we can do,” because throwing up our hands and being like, “That's not who we are, we can't do that,” I think that is going to be very problematic. And that is going to make it hard for us to continue to bring good people into our practices and to retain them. But those things can both be true. You can say, “Well, we're never just going to have everyone work from home.” That said, let's go ahead and figure out the best way that we can do our thing to give that flexibility while still meeting the needs of our pet owners and that's the battle that we face.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. And this is where I think, thinking outside the box is really beneficial. And honestly this is probably an exercise that I would do for myself individually when I think about what you and I have said so far about headspace, okay. I would want to be in this dreaming space and think, “Okay, if I set aside all of those little voices inside my brain that tells me, ‘I might be thinking crazy if I think like this,'” Let's start by looking at what are other industries doing? What are other companies that are not veterinary medicine are doing first? That's where I start, and then I narrow my vision and my scope down from there, because I don't think that the answer… To my friend's point, who was asking the question about relief vets, I don't think the answer can be everybody leaves and goes to work for companies in the pet health space to your point, right?
Stephanie Goss:
Because veterinary medicine at its core is providing patient care, and so in order to do that, there are some things that we have to put our hands on the patients to do, a lot of things that we have to put our hands on the patients to do. And I think it's also not wrong, and is important from a headspace perspective to not not narrow our vision, to a place of fear of like, “Well, all my vets are going to leave me and become relief vets.” Or, “All my technicians are going to leave me and go work for Guardian Vet.” Because when, when we start thinking about those things in the pet health space that are… When we start looking at them solely as competition and not as mutually beneficial relationships is a very dangerous mind space to be in.
Stephanie Goss:
So I would think more globally and look at other industries, having flexible schedules, having parents who are trying to still in so many places, homeschool their kids and have their kids home during the day. As a mom, the ability to be able to work from 5:00 PM to 11:00 PM when my kids… when I have help with them or somebody else can take the evening shift, and I could work so that I could be with them during the day to homeschool them. Having a schedule flexibility like that at the beginning of the pandemic, I would've dropped a lot to take on an option like that.
Stephanie Goss:
So it's about thinking in little ways, outside the box of what can we do to support our team. And so maybe that is taking one of your technicians who's really struggling to keep up with the schedule and say to your point, “Hey, do you want to work from home one day a week?” Or, “Do you want to work in the evenings two days a week, and we're going to create a new job description of things that you are still going to do that are beneficial to the practice, that you wouldn't necessarily be doing if you were here in the building, but that still benefit the team as a whole. And then in turn, benefit you on a personal level.”
Stephanie Goss:
And so for me, during the pandemic, I went through this with some of my team, and that was very much where I started, was like, what are the needs of my immediate team? And what are the needs of our clients? And where are the discrepancies and where are the easy wins? Where can I create some space? Because starting with those little steps makes the big steps feel so much easier, right? And sometimes we just have to get a win or two under our belt to be able to think bigger and more global.
Andy Roark:
I worked a practice, and they ran basically a split schedule, which I thought was great. They worked in the mornings, and then they geared down for about two hours in the middle of the day, and then they geared back up and went into the evening. And that gave a nice… Basically, they dealt in half days, and so you could work half days and you could trade around, and they let people trade their schedules, which was, “Hey, we just need to have coverage. And if you want to trade a half day to this person and you guys do that,” they let employees work that stuff out, and swap around. I will tell just that by itself increases a lot of flexibility, for people to be able to get off, if they can trade with other people, it makes life really easy. So just a split schedule that worked really well.
Andy Roark:
And then what they would do is in order to cover that two hour period, they'd go down to a skeleton crew, but they had one of the vets, and she had kids at kids in school. And so she would come in and start at 06:30 or 07:00 in the morning. And so as soon as the front desk arrived, she would be there. And man, they'd start rocking out appointments at 7:00 AM, and if you think nobody will come for a 07:00 AM appointment, you're wrong. They will a hundred percent come.
Stephanie Goss:
Absolutely.
Andy Roark:
And they will do it and drop that pet back off at home, and they'll get to work at 9:00 AM and feel great about their day. And so she would come in, she's seen appointments at 7:30 in the morning, and fill it up. And so she would work through, and then late morning she would take a lunch break, and then she would work with a technician and assistant, and she would work through that split shift, so she would cover those hours. So if someone burst in the door during the lunch break, we had a doctor that was there, and then as soon as lunch ended, she was off. Her day ended at 02:30 in the afternoon, and she was out, and she went and picked her kid up at 03:00, and it worked for her.
Andy Roark:
That's not rocket science, you know what I mean? But it is just having good conversations about, “What does your schedule look like? And what do you need?” Your point people go, “You can't have someone work from 5:00 PM to 11:00 PM.” Yeah, you can. If you really ran an audit of the things in your practices that needed done-
Stephanie Goss:
So many things.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly. There are so many things that do not need to have other people. You don't need to have other colleagues around for inventory, basic inventory. For ordering, for bill pay, for payroll, for all of these administrative things. If someone can work that time and you can set that up and facilitate it, that stuff is all fair game. We're seeing a lot of practices that are going to four 10s. We see that a lot in Uncharted and a lot of employees really want that. They want to come in, and they want to work four 10 hour days and be done. We have a lot of practices that do it and do it well, and it's really a personal preference. What do you want? But those things can make a big difference.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. And I think a lot of the time… And I sense this from this writer, and I feel it because I've been there. Again, it's easy to think about what we might be able to do for the front desk or for our doctors who can see telemedicine. It's a lot harder for a lot of us to think about the technicians, because we think about their gifts solely from a patient care perspective. And I think it's really important to think about to… And it's very easy. I know this was my challenge as a manager. If I look at Sarah and I think Sarah's an exceptionally skilled LVT and she runs our surgery. And if I don't have her there, surgery doesn't run as smoothly. And I need somebody else to fill in that gap, it's very easy to pigeonhole,
Stephanie Goss:
But there are things that Sarah could do that might not be maximizing her patient care skills, the way running surgery in the practice Monday through Friday can. However, if I can make what might be short term changes, they may also wind up being long term changes. But if I can flex to meet Sarah's needs and retain Sarah as an employee, isn't that far better for me in the practice, in the long run than if I say, “I only see value in Sarah's tech skills, and so I can't think outside of the box beyond having her run surgery during the day, right?”
Stephanie Goss:
We often think about our skilled employees as we have to maximize their skills, and that is true. They worked really hard to put themselves through school, to get credentialed, and we should want to maximize their skills. And it is also not smart for us to not ask them what they want, because we may be making assumptions about what they want and what they need without asking them. And so I was so surprised during the pandemic when I asked some of my Sarahs, “Hey, I don't want to make assumptions about your skills, and I see the value, and I want you to be able to leverage your skillset when you're here. Is this what works best for you?”
Stephanie Goss:
I was surprised at some of their answers, and I was surprised at how, for some of them, the answer was, “I'm really struggling with child care right now. And it would mean the world to me if I could flex my schedule one day a week to make this, this, and this happen in my personal life.” Or, “I'm content with where I am, and I don't want to change.” Or, “Can I be a CSR because I really need to work from home, and if I can't change my position within the company that drastically, I can't continue to be an employee here.” And you bet your ass as a manager, I would rather keep Sarah employed in the short term, doing CSR duties from home and have her be a part of the team, than lose her all together, because as I can't flex to meet her needs.
Stephanie Goss:
And so for me, the thinking outside of the box, I started with looking at other industries, and then I started looking at what were my peers doing in veterinary medicine. And this is where groups like Uncharted in our community is invaluable to me during this time to be able to see what are other are people doing, because I'm one of those people where it's really easy to get pigeonholed into my frame of mind. But if you show me a template or an example, all of a sudden the ideas become unlocked, and I have all of the creative possibility in the world, but getting started is my hurdle. And there are a lot of people that are like that.
Stephanie Goss:
So reaching out and talking to our peers and seeing what are other people doing. And the last piece of that for me very much is asking the team. And obviously you want to do it in a way that doesn't open the flood gates, right? I can't commit to anything without knowing what their ideas are, but I also can't work with them to solve this problem without asking them for their input. And so I started with my hospital leadership team and said, “What do you guys think?” And then we expanded it from there. And I asked the team and I was really surprised at the creativity that came from the technician team about things that they could do that directly impacted patient care, but that weren't laying hands on patients in the practice.
Stephanie Goss:
So we had a technician in my team who switched to doing a lot of the case follow up and client contact, and so they took on making… We had always had technicians do callbacks in our practice, but we were able to take that to a whole other level, and they became the triage point of contact for the doctors. And so all of that patient care contact was run through that person from home, and it freed up the doctor's time to put hands on patients, and it freed up another technician to put hands on patients. And it was something that was so simple that I never would've thought that they would've wanted to do, because I wouldn't have thought that, that would've been maximizing their skills, but I didn't ask them. And it was only until I asked them their perspective and their opinion that my perspective was able to be shifted and changed. Yeah,
Andy Roark:
No, I think that, that's great. I think what I want people to leave this podcast with is a belief that every practice can be different.
Stephanie Goss:
Yes.
Andy Roark:
And there's not going to be a set standard of how we do our schedule, but the scheduling is very important, and we need to be thinking of about what is possible in your practice. And not being bound by the assumptions we made in the past or conventions. It does not do us any good to make a schedule that no one's going to show up and work, and so I think that's really it. So I hope this is just giving people ideas, and I wish I could say, “Here's how you do your schedule.” It's not possible. All the practices are too different. We're all looking at different things. But looking at your own at your own practice, and also looking around and seeing what other people are doing for schedules in other industries, I think that, that's the smart play.
Andy Roark:
Get serious about looking at all the things that happen in your hospital. Break them out, I think Stephanie's point about the technician being virtual is a great one. You go, “But they need to put hands on the pet.” It's like, “Your technicians can be your best communicators, they can be planners, they can be patient advocates, they can be educators, they can be all of these things.” It as possible to have leveraged technicians that are not there in the building, but you have to be creative and you have to be smart about how you build that job description out. So a lot of it is thinking about, what do we really do with our time and can we rearrange these things to maximize flexibility for people? But guys, I think that this is an area that we're going to keep getting better and better at. And I think, the days of, “We all do it the same way and we all scheduled the same way,” I think those days are over.
Stephanie Goss:
I would agree.
Andy Roark:
Awesome. Thanks for doing this with me, Steph, I really appreciate it.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. Have a great week, everybody.
Andy Roark:
See you everybody.
Stephanie Goss:
Well, everybody that's wrap on another episode of the podcast. Thanks so much for spending your time with us. We truly enjoy spending part of our week with you. As always, Andy and I enjoyed getting into this topic. I have a tiny little favor to ask, actually, two of them. One is if you can go to wherever you source your podcast from and hit the review button and leave us a review, we love hearing your feedback and knowing what you think of the podcast. And number two, if you haven't already, hit the subscribe button. Thanks so much for listening guys. We'll see you soon.
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