SPEAKER_02 0:04

Welcome to the Veterinary Culture Lab, where science meets real-world application. I'm Andy Davison.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

And I'm Josh Weisman. Together, we'll show you an evidence-based blueprint for renovating culture in your veterinary team one episode at a time.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Work-life balance is something we talk a lot about in veterinary medicine. And in many ways, we are offering more of it than ever before. So why does it still feel so complicated? And what if the issue's not the policies themselves, but how they show up day to day in the reality of our work?

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Happy Monday, Andy Davison. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Oh, Monday fun day. Wait, that's not it, is it?

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Monday fun day. I mean, it can be. It can be, right?

SPEAKER_02 0:51

I guess that depends on what your definition of fun is.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Of fun is. Yeah. I I have to tell you, um, I I'm a little bit reticent to say this because I just know how just charged it could possibly be for people. But I am gonna say it. For most of my life, um, I had a case of the Sundays, right? Like, you know, Sunday would come and I'd be like, oh, tomorrow's Monday. Uh, how quickly is it going to the week where, you know, is it Friday yet? Is it Friday yet? Right. Uh, until I started Flourish. And some of that is probably because it's like, it's my company, I'm in charge, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I was in charge in the two veterinary hospitals that I ran and I didn't have the same experience. There's something about this particular job. It's not every, it's not every Monday. There are definitely like weeks where I'm like, oh, I could really benefit from just one more day. Um, but most of the time, like I get up on Monday and I'm like, hey, I get to go to work today. That's kind of a cool feeling.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

What puts that spring in your step?

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Um, I mean, if I'm being totally honest, I get to work with the most amazing human beings in veterinary medicine and possibly the whole world. Um, so that's a big part of it. But like, I just, I don't know. I feel like the work that we do, it's like just like really meaningful to me. It just feels like I'm doing meaningful things. Like there's tasks ahead, there's projects that have to be done, but but they all feel like they're there's like a purpose to them and a purpose that aligns with my sense of values and how I want to show up in the world and the impact I want to have. And I that's really cool to get to do that and be paid to do it.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Well, and I think what I'm hearing too is that that purpose is it's a grand purpose, right? Like it's you're contributing to something meaningful that is greater than just you, right? There's this overarching ability to contribute to something that really matters.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Yes. Yes, I feel like a lot of what I'm doing is not actually trying to help me. It's trying to, how do I put this totally off the cuff? To give the same gift to others in our profession that I feel like I have found for myself. Yeah, it feels really good. I really enjoy that. What about you? How is uh how is your week starting now that your boss has just laid that out all out in front of you?

SPEAKER_02 3:05

No, no, no. Starting out great, it is um Mondays. So Mondays for me always seem to be super busy, right? Like there's always stuff to do and there's always things to catch up, and there's always this and that. Um, I I don't dread Mondays. I don't dread Mondays like I used to dread Mondays, but it always seems like the things are gonna happen on Monday, right? Like you've got, oh, let's get all these things started for the week and we're gonna do our like kickoff weekly check-in meetings on Monday, or you know, we're gonna make sure to um, you know, get the hay delivery on Monday, or oh, they're gonna come and deliver shavings on Monday, or it's just always seems like all the things happen on Monday. And so for me, I know this, I've learned this, and I try to set myself up for success, right? So I make sure that all my ponies get ridden through the weekend so that they can have Monday off, so that I can focus on some of the other things that I need to focus on and want to focus on on Monday, right? Like kicking off the work week, getting everything going there, making sure that whatever last minute farm chaos that also inevitably happens on a Monday is it has space, right? So that, you know, I've just kind of learned to balance it. So so yeah, I don't dread them either.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

I love it. I love it. Well, this Monday is kind of special. Um, even though this episode is not coming out this time, it'll be coming out a lot later than this, of course. But this Monday is uh the Monday before Christmas. It is. Um and it's special uh around here because we we do something really um, I don't know if it's unique necessarily, but we do something in particular around Christmas here at Flourish. But I want to tell you a little bit of a backstory, Andy. I'm not sure if you actually know this or not, but way back in the day before we brought you onto the team, before we even knew that you would be applying for this position, we were preparing for expanding Flourish as an organization. So by we, I mean Tess and I. So Tess at the time um did not actually work for me formally, she was not a uh Flourish employee per se, she was a contract employee. So um she did some contract work for Flourish at the time, and we were gearing up to bring her onto the team officially and then hire our next positive change agent, which turned out to be the incomparable Andrew Davison. Um, anyway, so we were talking about like what's this gonna look like from like an HR policies type perspective? And we got to uh the topic of like work-life balance, you know, and all those kinds of things, and we started to talk about PTO. And my immediate reaction was well, the flourish ethos demands that we have an unlimited PTO policy that like anybody who works here should be able to take any time off whenever they need it for any reason. Uh, and Tess actually pushed back on that. And I was a little bit surprised because I thought, like, you know, if anybody in this world is on board with that kind of stuff, it's Tess Warner. Uh, and she was, she was actually on board with it, but she was pushing back from a pretty intelligent and thoughtful perspective. Tess shared with me some literature that suggested that organizations that have uh unlimited PTO policies actually have people who take less vacation, which is at first glance like a little bit odd, right? Like, wait, what? How is that possible? You think if people had unlimited access to vacation, they would take more, but actually they seemed to take less. And a lot of it, um, I think will be uncovered in the paper that we're going to talk about today. I uh I read this paper and I found myself thinking over and over and over again if work-life balance policies exist, but people can't safely and consistently use those policies, they're not actually a benefit. We call them benefits, we call them perks. They're not, they're just lines in a brochure. It's marketing, right? And that's what this paper is really about. But before we get into the paper, Andy, I had a question for you. When you hear the phrase work-life balance, what does that actually mean to you? What does work life balance mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 7:10

The phrase itself means for me the ability to focus on work and your personal life in a way that feels balanced, right? In whatever, whatever it is that you need, that you're not being expected to give everything you have to work, that you're also recognized for being a human being that has other things going on outside of work that also need your attention. And so I think that concept of work-life balance is the ability to give an equal amount of attention to the professional things in our lives that demand it, as well as the personal things in our lives that demand it.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Um, I will often talk about life as a pie. I'm trying to think like Christmas, what's Christmas pie?

SPEAKER_02 8:07

I'll say what kind of pie? I need to know.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Would Christmas be like pecan pie? Like, what's what's a common pie around Christmas?

SPEAKER_02 8:15

I mean, I feel like pumpkin pie carries over. It's fairly Thanksgiving-y, but it's that time of year.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Okay, I mean, I don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna push back on that. I am a massive fan of pie in general and love pumpkin pie. By the way, Christmas, I gotta tell you, I love Christmas, but it's strange to me how everybody seems to get a little bit sentimental. Ah, that was bad. That was bad. Anyway, as I'm listening to you talk, as I'm listening to you talk about your definition of work-life balance, I'm I'm thinking back to this idea of pie, right? Like, so if if your whole being is a pumpkin pie, right? It's a limited resource. There's only so much Andy Davison that you can give to the world. Um, work-life balance for you is about like looking at that that pie of of who Andy Davison is and determining like this is how much of the pie I want to be able to give to stuff that has to do with work. And this is how much of the pie I want to give to stuff that has to do with my life outside of work. And as long as like the the divvying up of the slices of pie actually fits what you want it to look like, that's work-life balance. I think that's what I'm hearing.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

Yeah, well said. Okay, and it involved pie, perfect.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Perfect, always perfect when there's pie. Yeah. Okay, so I want you to imagine for a moment, um, the average sort of veterinary professional, right? Just like the typical person in vetmed. Let's say that this particular typical person is your typical credentialed veterinary technician. So she's just like, you know, Eve St. Thomas' typical veterinary credential technician. No, she's interviewing for a job at a local veterinary hospital. It is a very typical practice and a very typical town offering, very typical services. Okay. She sits down with the interviewing manager who tells her, Hey, Eve, I want you to know we have several work-life balance policies here at our ABC veterinary hospital. We've got things like generous paid time off, we've got paid holidays, we have, you know, family medical leave, all that kind of stuff, right? When this typical anyone technician is sitting in that interview and hears that from the interviewing manager, here's our work-life balance policies. What do you think Eve St. Thomas, typical credential technician, is actually thinking when she hears the list of work-life balance policies?

SPEAKER_02 10:32

The very first thing she's thinking is, yeah, that's great, but am I actually going to get to use it?

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Yeah, not surprised. Not surprised.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

And then I think the second thing she's gonna think is, and when I do use it, how heavy is that guilt trip gonna be?

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Yes. Oh, the guilt trip. We've all we've all felt the guilt trip. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

You'll hear uh at some point today, I think a story of me actually delivering said guilt trip to your typical credentialed veterinary technician. Not my most shining moment in veterinary leadership. Um, I I think you're spot on, Andy, and I totally agree. And that's really what this paper kind of covers. So uh the paper that we're gonna talk about today is titled How Effective Are Work Life Balance Policies? The importance of inclusion. Uh, this was um the authors were Casper Hyde Smith Amir Kamali, I think is how it's pronounced. That's a fun name, yeah. It is a fun one. Um A-M-I-R-K-A-M-A-L-I. I apologize for butchering that name. Uh, and Wayne. This was published in um the annual review of organizational psychology and organizational behavior in 2025. The authors wanted to understand why it is that work-life balance policies frequently have minimal positive impact on team well-being and performance? That is, why is it that all these organizations have all of these work-life balance policies, but they pretty consistently fall short in employee experience? So, to answer this question, the authors conducted what's called a narrative review of decades of work-life balance research, including some large-scale meta-analyses as well. Um, a narrative review is it's a special kind of review. So it's not like a systematic review. Um, a narrative review is where researchers essentially synthesize decades of studies into a coherent story. They're like looking at all different kinds of research in a particular area and they're trying to weave like a story. What is the story here? What are the things that we know? What are the things that we don't know? Where are the gaps? Where are the patterns? And then from that, they combine that into a way that gives us like um uh, I don't know, a clear baseline or some sort of a structure, right? Like this is the story that the data tells us, essentially. It's a little bit different than what like a meta-analysis or a systematic review might be. Um, the authors looked at these studies and then they they basically framed effectiveness. So work-life balance effectiveness is showing up in two buckets an employee well-being bucket and an organizational effectiveness bucket. So they were looking at outcomes like um, you know, does work-life balance policies predict, say, less work-family conflict? As you can imagine, Andy, if uh if it feels like we are pulled to our work constantly and we can't actually get away from it, so there is no work-life balance, that might in fact, in fact, impact family life, right? So they were trying to determine if organizations have these work-life balance policies. Does that predict higher or lower work-family conflict? Does it also predict things like employee well-being, career growth, and outcomes, and organizational citizenship behavior, which is basically a fancy way of saying people go above and beyond to help each other out, right?

SPEAKER_03 13:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Well, here's here's the the key findings. Work-life balance policies can actually be quite beneficial for all of these outcomes. If, and that might be like an all-caps, bolded, underline, we'll even add italices and and even highlight it if you want to, if people can actually access and use them, which harkens back to what you were saying when I asked you what is that tech going to be thinking, right? Yeah. And using them doesn't come with stigma or some form of punishment. Oh, what a shocker, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:20

Guilt trip.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

So yeah, exactly. The guilt trip. So the authors ended up identifying eight barriers that seem to block people from feeling like they can actually utilize work-life balance policies and practice their form of work-life balance. You might imagine this like filling a prescription. All right. So you're Dr. Davison now, and you know, Josh comes in with Rue, and Rue's got some sort of infection, and you put him on Cepho, you write the script for me, and I take the script over to my favorite pharmacy, and I hand it to the pharmacist there. And the pharmacist looks at me kind of side eyes and says, This drug is out of stock. And for us to order it's going to require three approvals. And then they hand it over to the uh to the actual attending pharmacist who rolls their eyes like I'm being all sorts of dramatic and needy by even coming in and asking for this drug, right? That's what work-life balance policies tend to feel like to employees in many workplaces. The prescription exists, but access barriers and judgment make it essentially inaccessible. So, what are some of the big meaty takeaways here from this narrative review? Well, I'm going to share just a few. This is a big paper, and I encourage people to read it. I'm just pulling a couple things out of here. The first one is that work life isn't just about family. It's actually about detaching from work and having real recovery time. I think far too often in organizations, when we are crafting and talking about work-life balance policies, sometimes implicitly, sometimes more overtly than uh I think people might realize, we're sort of referring to these as family time, right? Like we're sort of thinking of work-life balance and all the policies that allow you to use it as time to spend with family, which means that we're accidentally designing work-life balance as work family policies, or in worse cases, parent-centric policies. I think of like um my wife uh worked at a large biopharmaceutical organization many years ago, and they had a policy in place that people were required to be on site between, if I remember correctly, it was like the hours of 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. So they had flexibility with their schedules outside of those hours. You could show up at 10 and work till 5 if you wanted to. You could show up at 8 and work till 3. It was up to you, right? But you had to be on site between the hours of 10 and 3, unless you were a parent. And then you got special dispensation to leave early or to show up late based on your kid's schedule. That's what I mean by that, right? Like if if that if those kinds of uh, you know, tweaks and policies and procedures are in place, that starts to send the message that what's really important here is family, and it's not, it's not just about it's not about detachment recovery. But that's the thing. Work-life balance is actually very much about recovery and detachment. Family is one way that people detach from work and recover, but it is not the only way, and it is not necessarily the best way for everybody, right? This is something we actually touched on earlier, Andy. If you remember back in episode two, we talked about the drama needs, my favorite kind of drama. And and two of those needs, two of those important psychological needs for well-being, for all sorts of outcomes, beneficial outcomes for employees, are detachment and recovery. So if we only legitimize family needs, what we quietly do is delegitimize recovery needs. The research is clear here. The absence of detachment and recovery is a high-speed train to employee burnout. Andy, when you think back on your time in clinical practice, I don't know, take us back to your like technician manager and large animal hospital days, right? What did real detachment and recovery actually look like for you after a hard work day?

SPEAKER_02 18:06

For me, what I needed in order to truly detach was to be alone and be with my horses. So for me, true detachment and recovery was time with my horses alone, where I would, you know, get to ride, go out in the backfield and hack around, go to the barn, be able to really immerse myself in that time. And the most powerful recovery would come when I got to do that alone. So, you know, it wasn't me and six of my horse friends, which don't get me wrong, I enjoy those times with me and six of my horse friends. But when it comes to truly recovering, it was most powerful when it was me, my horse, and quiet.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

So, so you just got done with like a 13-hour day of pure insanity and you were completely exhausted. You're not, you're not looking to go hang out with friends. You're looking for quiet time out in the barn, maybe out on a hack with one of the horses, no rush, no pressure, no sense of obligation, just you out in the quiet of Florida um on top of one of your horses.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Yeah, that totally makes sense. Um again, taking us back to those days, did you always get to have that? Or were there things that maybe got in the way from you getting to experience that real sense of detachment and recovery? And and if so, what were those things that got in the way?

SPEAKER_02 19:35

I rarely got those moments. And the biggest thing that got in the way was the fact that the team that I managed. So the situation that I was in is that I managed a team of 20 plus technicians, which is great. Except you have to remember when you're working at a big academic hospital, it's a 24-7 hospital. And so the technicians on my team were working 24-7. I had awesome humans that I was responsible for 24 hours a day. And I was their first line of communication. I was their first line of defense. I was the one that they would go to when they needed something or something wasn't lining up, or you know, they whatever. When some dumpster caught on fire, I was the first one that they called. And they called me or texted me often. Now, I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. However, it absolutely interrupted those times. So when I would come home after that 13-hour shift, there was still a whole team of techs at the hospital. And when they needed something, they called me or they texted me. And it would interrupt that time. It would wake me up when I was sleeping. It would pull me away from my time at the barn where I had to get my phone out and answer those text messages, which was expected of me. It was expected of me to be available to my team 24-7. And that got in the way.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

So structurally, you were not the only person in management or leadership at the organization, but culturally, you were expected to always be available for the rest of your team. Nobody else in the building could actually help or support them.

SPEAKER_02 21:29

Correct. And that's because I was their manager. And they had one manager for the team of 20 plus technicians that worked 24-7. And being one human being, I couldn't be at work 24 7. And so when I wasn't, I was still their go-to person. And it didn't really matter what time it was.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Um, that sounds all sorts of fun. It yeah, it's a lot.

unknown 21:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:58

Um, I'm really sorry you went through. That. Um, I'm I'm even more delighted now when I see stories on Instagram of you on the back of Boston or Marshall out on a hack. That makes me happy. Okay. Um, the second meaty takeaway here, uh, for me at least, was that in practice, policy is actually rarely the problem. It's not that we don't have the policies in place or that we don't have enough or the right kind of policies in place. In fact, most organizations have pretty decent work-life balance policies already. I I honestly don't know of very many veterinary practices that don't have something like this in place. The problem isn't that the policies aren't there. The problem is that access isn't. As we discussed earlier, having work-life balance policies is just marketing. Like if if you just have it, but no one gets to use it, it really is just marketing on a brochure. For it to be have a real benefit, it has to be accessible and it has to be free from psychological burden. It's got to be guilt-free, right? The organization has to make it easy for people to use those policies, and they have to support them in doing so. Instead, what we have is this weird, like, we must be fully staffed at all times mentality, or the manager must be accessible at all times mentality, like you experience, right? And then leaders end up acting as gatekeepers, and then there's this stigma around use. In fact, sometimes we see this up. I know you've seen this, I've definitely seen this. We end up martyring people who never take a day off. Like Andy's always there, she's so reliable, she's always accessible, right? Like we turn them into martyrs and heroes, and then we view people who use the benefits as like less committed. If you've ever heard or gasp, been the person to utter a phrase like this, must be nice to take some time off, Andy. You're actually seeing the brochure effect in real life. Like that's exactly it, right? When I got to this point in the paper, I thought back to a time like I literally did this, and I I can even picture, I'm I'm like, I've got my eyes closed because I can see myself in my office at the last hospital. I was the managing partner of us. This is a practice in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I'm sitting in the office, it's first thing in the morning, and I get a ding on my phone. Hey, so-and-so tech is on the line. She wants to talk to you. And my heart drops because I know why she's calling. She's supposed to be into work in five minutes, right? And I pick up the phone and she says, Hey, I'm really sorry. I've been up all night with GI issues. I really don't think I can make it into work today. And no shit, my response like was exactly like this. All right. I mean, I guess I can help out on the floor. Thanks for letting me know. Like, how shitty is that? Right? Right. How shitty must she have felt? How horrible must she have been feeling sitting there the whole day, either just like feeling guilty like she's letting the team down, or worse, feeling angry and what an asshole boss she has. And like, I mean, just terrible, terrible response. I was contributing to that. Like, that's that's how I would approach those kinds of things. Yeah. But here's the thing, Andy, I I think you'll agree with me. I hope you will. Hopefully, in private, you would agree with this. I'm not a villain, and most veterinary leaders aren't. Most people in leadership positions in veterinary medicine, I think, are really good people just doing the best they can with the tools they have under the circumstances that they exist. Uh, I think that applies to me. I think that applies to you. I think that applies to the vast majority of people that we've met. I think most of the time what happens is that we get into these management positions. I imagine you probably felt this way when you were the technician manager at a 24-hour facility. You feel trapped by the burden of your role and the obligations that come with it, right? That's how I felt. Andy, what do you think when when you've got somebody who's in a leadership position, they're a good person, but they're feeling trapped. Something is contributing to their sense of fear. What do you think is making them afraid to make the work-life balance policies more usable?

SPEAKER_02 26:10

I think fear is a fantastic word to use here because there are a couple of fears that I know I experienced when I would get that early morning phone call or late night phone call, right? And it was always a phone call. Like you knew they had to call in sick. They couldn't text in sick, they had to call in sick, right? And you knew it's like you said, your gut would drop and you'd be like, oh no. And the fear would kick in. And for me, it was a couple of different reasons. First of all, I'm terrified because now we're gonna be even more short-staffed than we already are. I'm also terrified because the technicians that did come in or that were on shift at that time were gonna be overwhelmed, pissed off that so-and-so wasn't here, that they had to pick up the extra work, and they were gonna make that known. And then the morale of the shift was gonna tank because it's oh, we're already starting out short-staffed. I think another fear that I felt that I really had to like sit with and be okay with, because it was really there, and I didn't talk about it a whole lot, was that fear that like I was gonna have to go out and cover for them. Right. Like I was gonna have to put down all the things that I needed to do that day and go out on the floor and cover for them because I didn't want my team to get overwhelmed. I didn't want them to get upset. I didn't want the morale of the of the shift to tank. Okay, fine. I had to murder myself out and go cover for them. And that was a fear as well, because that it just didn't make for it didn't make for a confident sort of experience.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

Yeah. I I you've you've hit the nail for so many of the things that I felt too. I was always like, I mean, in that moment, as I was listening to that technician tell me that she had these GI issues and she wasn't gonna be able to come in. And uh what I was actually thinking behind what I was saying, what I was actually thinking was, I'm gonna have to go tell the team now. They're all going to be pissed off.

SPEAKER_02 28:13

All gonna be mad. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

And then I'm probably going to have to go on the floor and help them, which was a fear for two reasons. Because A, it meant that I was gonna be behind on the work that I needed to do at my desk. But more importantly, bigger for me was I'm not a credential technician and I'm gonna have to go help them out. And I'm like, I'm terrible. Like I'm terrible at these skills, right? Um, so yeah, there was another thing that you said that really stood out to me um that I think speaks to a lot of the ethos of this particular paper. Um, you said that they had to call, they couldn't text. What do you think about the thing? What do you think was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well what do you think was the like intention behind that policy? Why call and not text?

SPEAKER_02 28:54

Um, the official intention had to do with the like reception of the calling out, right? So in order to ensure that your manager knew that you were not gonna be there, you had to have like an exchange in conversation. Oh, you couldn't just send a text and assume the other person got it. However, nobody likes to make a phone call. That's really, really scary, right? And you better think good and hard before you pick up the phone, call your damn manager and tell them that you're not coming in today. That takes extra courage. That takes extra. And it may talk some people out of calling out sick if they have to actually pick up the phone and make the call.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

Exactly. I think you're spot on. Yep. It it's um it is a way to psychologically discourage people leveraging, utilizing the benefit of work-life balance policies. Yep. Yep, 100%. Yep. Um, the third big takeaway that I wanted to share, Andy, is that work-life balance is a bigger burnout prevention tool than we might actually think. Andy, we've talked about this before. Burnout is more than just a workload issue. We tend to simplify it too, like you burn out because you're working too much, too long, too hard, whatever it is, a workload issue, right? But in fact, we know from research that people can work 10 hours a week and still burn out. Mozlok and Leiter teach us that there are actually six areas of work life that on the upside can potentially contribute to real professional satisfaction, but on the downside lead to burnout. Those six areas, we're not going to go into them deeply here, but we will share a link to a paper on these six areas in the show notes. The six areas are workload, yes, but also control, fairness, community, values, and reward. Effective work-life balance policies can actually be a lever, a balm in all six areas. Workload is the obvious one, right? Like if you have work-life balance, then you know you can manage workload. But control. Control could mean allowing people to actually have influence over their own schedule. It's not just dictated to them. They have a voice in it. Fairness, fairness could come from equitable access to work-life balance policies across roles and tenure. Community. Community might be actually elevated when work-life balance usage becomes normative and it's supported throughout the entire team. Values. Values are shown when work-life balance policies prove to people that people matter here. Your well-being is important, right? And then reward. Reward can come from work-life balance enhancements, such as uh giving extra PTO for tenure or for uh bonuses, things like that, right?

SPEAKER_02 31:36

Well, hello there. If this conversation is landing with you, I'm willing to bet you're not alone. Why not follow the podcast or share this episode with some of your fellow vet crew? Together, we can all be part of a community that believes that thriving in VetMed is possible and actively works to build the profession that we all deserve. Now, if you're ready to take the next step, check out our upcoming Flourish Academy masterclass to support your positive leadership skills. It's linked in the show notes. Now, back to the culture lab.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Okay, so a veterinary leader comes across this paper, is just listening to this episode and says, Hey, you know what? I I'm into this. I want to renovate the culture in my organization so it can be more inclusive and offered a more equitably utilized work-life balance policies. How do I do that? Well, we've got four ideas here to share. Let's see if we can get through them today. Uh, the first one is to create what I'm I'm thinking of as recovery standards. So this would be like a document, okay? In this document, what we're doing is we're basically we stop treating work-life balance like a perks menu and we start actually treating it like recovery infrastructure. I think that sometimes in vetmed, the biggest non-work need often isn't actually family time. You and I already talked about this. It's detachment and recovery so that people can come back with a full battery and give what they need to give to the next work shift. So, what we need to do is we need to build norms that protect off time. You could think of these like shared agreements. They're non-urgent things like a rule that says uh after hours, if somebody's off the clock, they're not here. Uh, the only texts that are allowed are, you know, these kinds of specific emergencies, or the only phone calls that are allowed to them are these kinds of specific emergencies. Or we just don't contact people after hours, period. Right? Sort of like some organizations have like a no-email rule or something like that. It could be that it could be things like that. Or we actually mandate breaks. Like we determine what the break schedule is going to be like in advance and we hold to it as if it is sacrosinct. Uh, we have a culture where stepping away isn't a character flaw, or we actually mandate that. Like we we speak that out in in meetings, it's written down, it's in our employee manual, it's part of our training, that we give people ample opportunities to step away from work throughout the workday and beyond. And we don't treat this as a character flaw, we don't guilt this. In fact, we celebrate it. One example that I thought of here is um you and I actually both know of this practice. It's an emergency hospital that has two really cool work-life balance policies that they mandate, trained into their leadership development, and they stick to it guaranteed every single shift. The first one is that everybody on shift, every full-time employee working a certain number of hours, gets a mandated one-hour lunch break. Like it is scheduled, it is stuck to. Everyone in the hospital, Andy, it's 11 a.m. You're on your lunch break now. Bye. And you go away for an hour and you can leave, you can do whatever you want, right? The other one is, and this one is really cool because it's actually informed by literature from human medicine, in which they determined um across multiple studies in human medicine that a significant increase in medical errors occurs after people work 10 consecutive hours. And so in this particular hospital, they have a mandate that says no one ever works more than 10 hours, and they stick to it. Like literally stick to it. You know what, Dr. Davison, you're at 10 hours. This doctor's gonna step in and take over this patient now. Bye. Wow. So yeah, I think those are really cool. Yeah, so these are recovery standards, right? So if we want people to thrive, recovery cannot be optional. It can't be like a a side perk that you get to do if there's time. It has to be designed in to our organization. Andy, when you think of like a recovery standards document, what are one or two rule rules that I maybe haven't shared yet that you think should be included in pretty much every veterinary hospital's recovery standards?

SPEAKER_02 35:36

Um, I have a couple of thoughts here. The first one, it's again something that I experienced, right, when I had my team of amazing technicians that when they wanted time off, it was expected that they were the ones to be responsible for finding the coverage. And that it was, you know, their sole responsibility. And if they could come to me with somebody already lined up to cover their shift, oh yeah, cool, no-brainer. Now, one of the tweaks that I made when I stepped in was that I encouraged them to do that first. And if they couldn't find or, you know, nobody else was available, then I would help them because time off was a really big deal to me, clearly, because you know, I knew what I knew, I knew what I was missing out on and I didn't want them to miss out on it. Um, but that idea, right? That like it's the it's that person's sole responsibility to find coverage. No, it should be a shared responsibility. They should have a resource, a person, a a manager, a database, something that gives them resources to help find coverage with options so that it's not this like black or white thing. The other thing I think that should make its way into recovery standards is the encouragement to use your time off for good days. And the best way I can think to describe that is yeah, we'll call in sick. We'll call in when we have a migraine. We'll call in when we feel like our head is exploding and we can't possibly get off the couch because if we get behind the wheel of the car to drive into work, we're gonna throw up all over the dashboard. We will call in for those reasons. But what I would love to see is the encouragement for people to call in when it's been 500 degrees for the last three months. Yeah, and it's finally cooled off and there's a breeze, and you have the afternoon to where you could go out and ride your horse.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:51

And you wouldn't sweat, and it wouldn't be like, oh, it's so hot. And that that would be an acceptable reason to call out as well.

SPEAKER_01 38:00

Yeah, I'm gosh, this is I love this idea. Okay, so I'm there's a couple things that I'm thinking of. I'm gonna try and get out here really quickly. What this sounds like to me is like it's almost like mandatory time off, right? So this goes back to what I said earlier when Tesla pushed back on us having uh an unlimited PTO policy because people don't use it. And so what we ended up deciding to do is that we were gonna have a generous PTO policy of multiple weeks off. But in addition to that, as an organization, we would shut down twice a year, uh, the week of the 4th of July and the week and a half between Christmas and New Year's, and that that time would be completely shut down. The whole company at Flourish is shut down. So nobody has to worry about, oh, but Kelly's still working and she might need help. And it's paid time off. And so this is setting aside good time, right? Is kind of what you're after. And then this is making me think of like, you know, some of the stuff that we talked about in prior episodes, the importance of, especially in a management or a leadership position, uh cultivating high-quality connections with your team members and knowing that like if I'm your manager and riding horses is something that you do that's really important to you, it's very central to your life outside of work and what nourishes your soul. If I know that, and I know that it's been 105 degrees for the last two weeks, but next Tuesday it's only 78. Guess what I can do? I don't even have to wait for you to call in on a good day. I can go to Tess and Kelly and say, Hey, do you guys mind covering for Andy next Tuesday? Because she hasn't gotten to ride her horse in quite some time, and Tuesday looks like it's gonna be a great day for her to go do an extended ride. And then I can go and just give you the day off. Talk about work-life balance, right? Um, yeah, those are great ideas. I love that. Yeah. But the second culture renovation idea here is to make access visible and fair. One of the things about work-life balance is that confusion breeds resentment and favoritism really kills trust. So creating a simple like access map by role. Things like what flexibility exists for all the different roles in the hospital and what doesn't. You could think of this like um kind of like a list of work-life balance buttons that people can push all on their own. Things like how they can swap shifts without management approval. Um, things like PTO request procedures, like exactly what that looks like, how it how it looks, and what are the things that you can do to maximize approval for PTO requests? Um, things like uh what kind of work they could do remotely. I know, shocking, right? Wait, in a veterinary hospital, that makes no sense. We all have to be in the practice. That's not necessarily true for every role and for every uh task that every role has to do. And so, like publishing those things, giving those clear rules of the road so that people aren't guessing who gets what or relying on back channel favors to take advantage of their work-life balance policies. This is how we can improve fairness and community, which are two of the biggest drivers of burnout that have nothing to do with workload, by the way. The third idea here is to redesign staffing assumptions from fully staffed to reliably covered. I'd really like for us to challenge the sacred belief that the hospital must always be, quote, fully staffed. First of all, I think that's a nebulous term, and I think it's meaningless most of the time. What does that even mean? The fully how are you gonna determine that? We are not building widgets in a veterinary practice. Veterinary practice is by its very nature variable and unpredictable. And so what does fully staff mean? I have no idea who's coming in tomorrow, what the cases are gonna be like, what emergencies are gonna show up, what unexpected issues we're gonna have with patient A versus patient B. There's no way to ever be fully staffed. So let's let's get rid of that. I know it sounds noble, but it often turns time off into a guilt trip and makes policies very unusable. Instead, I think what we need to do is aim for reliably covered. Now, this could mean cross-training a few tasks, making sure that people uh have multiple skill sets, building in a float shift, capping same-day add-ons, making coverage plans predictable. I I think the coverage plan one is actually a really big one. I think what what I see most of the time out in the wild is people being like, oh shit, someone called in. What do we do now? And they freak out and they react, right? I don't think it should be that way. I think we should have a plan in place in advance. So that's what a coverage plan can be. It's a pre-agreed set of procedures that a team's gonna follow when call-offs happen because they will, they inevitably happen all the time, right? So let's plan for those in advance. And when they happen, this this coverage plan allows people to respond predictably instead of panicky, guilt trippy, or just improvising on the fly, right? So maybe we'll have a coverage ladder in our coverage plan. And this is like a list of questions. So, okay, hey, Andy called in sick today. Here are the three questions that we're gonna quickly review as a team in a quick huddle in less than 10 minutes before we start our day. What are the things that we can't get off of our plate today? What are the necessary things? What are the things that maybe feel urgent, but actually can be kicked, you know, that can be kicked down the road to the end of the day or to tomorrow? What are the things that we can viably reschedule to free up some resources for today? Right. Like we could do that as a team, as a huddle, once the once it calls in, once somebody calls in. It's basically like triaging the day, right? This restores control, by the way. So people can plan their lives. And control is one of the six areas of work life that can help us reduce burnout. So it can reduce the PTO penalty that quietly fuels burnout.

unknown 43:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:30

The other thing that jumps out to me about this is this is um what the resilience literature will kind of support, right? It reminds us that this is a way to boost our resiliency in challenges, chaos, adversity, all of that. If this happens, right? So if so and so calls out sick, then I will I will ask these three questions to my team so that we can triage the day. I will see who's here that's been cross trained in. Anesthesia, so that we can make sure that all the procedures are still happening. And it exactly works because of the restoration of control. It keeps our mind chatter from going, oh God, the world's ending. All the dumpsters are on fire. We're never going to get it done. This is terrible. To no, actually, we do have some control over this. And we are going to be able to work together through this challenge. And we will come out a better team because of it. And that's like my resilience bells are going off because look at that. Look at that. It can contribute to resiliency as well.

SPEAKER_01 44:33

I'm I'm listening to you, and all I hear in my head is it's the work-life balance shuffle. Um, Andy, as you know, I'm a football fan. Um, and back in the day, so this is probably I'm gonna guess in the early 90s, um, the Cincinnati Bengals had a running back who was pretty well known. His name was Icky Woods. And Icky Woods, when he would score a touchdown, would do the icky shuffle. And I'm thinking like, you know, like the 30-second dance party, right? Like, okay, all right, tech technician Susie's called in. It's time for the work-life balance shuffle. Bam! And we all do the dance where we triage the day and figure out what we're gonna do to um to get through the day as well as we can with some resilience. Yeah, I love that. I love that. It's like group resilience. The last idea that I had here was um to train leaders to kill stigma. Because it turns out that when it comes to work-life balance, managers are actually one of the strongest levers here. I think we have to train leaders to eliminate the stigma. Supervisors are the gatekeepers of whether these policies are real or just marketing blabber. Leaders need to model use, right? They need to normalize it, and they need to be very careful of their language, their nonverbals, their responses. No must be nice to get the day off, no eye rolls, no punishment, no heavy sighs, no like implied guilt tripping, right? For being human. We also need to do quick stigma checks, I think, right? We need to check in with our team and with each other. Uh are there people here that are actually re afraid to request time off? Are there people that are afraid to call in sick when they really probably need to or should? What do they think would happen if they did? Because here's the truth if a polyxy exists, but you can't safely use it, it's not a benefit, it's a brochure. And leaders have to play a critical role here. Now, there's one person that I know that I think actually does practice pretty good work-life balance. I think, Andy, I think you might have an example of that for today, don't you?

SPEAKER_02 46:31

I don't know if balance is the word I would use.

SPEAKER_01 46:34

Perfectly imbalanced. How about that?

SPEAKER_02 46:36

Right, right. There we go. Perfectly imbalanced, entertainingly imbalanced. Because this week's Florida Man headline is hilarious. Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm so ready. I can't, I can't even. I'm just laughing already. Florida man goes to bar instead of hospital after shark bite. After shark bite, of course. Yeah. After shark bite. So apparently, this Florida man, yeah, it's it's priorities, I guess. But this particular Florida man um was out surfing and shocker, got bit by a shark and came in onto the beach, and his buddy was getting excited with him about the fact that he had been bit by a shark, and they decided that if they went to the bar, everybody was gonna buy them drinks because after all, he had just been bit by a shark. So, gushing blood, this particular Florida man hoofs it off to the local bar to take advantage of the fact that he just got bit by a shark so that everybody will buy him drinks. Did he ever end up at the hospital? Do we know? Um, we don't know. We don't know. Nobody knows.

SPEAKER_01 47:45

Oh my gosh. Yep. I've checked it all Florida. Which one of the two is is more Florida man? The one who had the go to the bar to get free drinks idea, or the one who got bit by the shark and agreed it would be a good idea.

SPEAKER_02 47:59

I mean, this is definitely like a Florida man cultural app, right? We always talk about modeling the behavior and celebrating the behavior that you want. This is this is this is this is an example of that. Maybe not in the best way, but this is definitely an example of pure gold.

SPEAKER_01 48:16

Pure gold. Well done. Well done, Florida man. Well, that brings us to the end of another episode of the Veterinary Culture Lab. Thank you all out there for listening to this episode. Um, please be sure to like, to subscribe, share these episodes with your colleagues and friends, uh, and we will look forward to being with you on the next episode. Take care and be well.

SPEAKER_02 48:38

See y'all next time. Thanks for hanging out with us in the Veterinary Culture Lab, powered by the science of workplace well-being, and brought to you by Flourish Veterinary Consulting. If today's episode sparked an idea, made you smile, or got you thinking, hey, I should totally try that. Let us know. What do you think? Be sure to subscribe, share, and remember a thriving veterinary culture is possible, and you don't have to build it alone.