Managing a busy veterinary practice is extremely challenging with so little time and so many different tasks simultaneously competing for that time. In general, veterinary practices tend to be inefficiently run, with poor rates of compliance and poor business performance. Activity is often confused with productivity. These problems are compounded by the ever-present and increasingly worsening employee recruitment problems. When employees are recruited, more often than not, they become disengaged with both the work and the workplace. This leads to continuous recruitment costs, practice uncertainty, frustration and unpredictable performance. This at least was my experience and something that I had face head on and overcome!
So it is easy to see why employee learning, training and development are often neglected, procrastinated over, and placed on the back burner. Practices are just too busy dealing with the chaos of practice life and worrying about revenues, profits and keeping everyone happy. Time is a very scarce resource in the busy veterinary practice. But as practice owners are now discovering the painful way, the costs of not comprehensively training their employees far outweigh the costs of taking the time, spending the money and making the effort, to do so. You just need to start. I know you’re busy, but if not now, when?
The veterinary team is THE factor that has the highest impact on practice performance in terms of revenues, profits and fulfilment. Employee training and development programmes are the thus the cornerstone for achieving higher performing veterinary practices.
Creating, implementing and maintaining training programmes is often seen as burdensome and daunting, especially as time is always in such short supply in practice. The majority of practice leaders know that they should do this. However, most training efforts are doomed to fail because the person doing or implementing the training does not really know what to do, or does not really want to do it. They don’t know where to start, and if they do start, they do not know how to continue. This is where Key Points Learning comes into play. If you focus on the truly vital few, rather than the trivial many, you can start to see how this can begin to get done.
You do only that which matters most. Life is too short to master everything. By focusing on mastering the few Essential Points of the most IMPORTANT things, then you stand a really good chance of achieving goals that previously seemed so out of reach.
If you could discriminate between what’s worth doing and what’s not. Focus on the vital few, rather thanthe insignificant many. If you could simplify Implementation, show people HOW to TAKE ACTION, and give practices a clear pathway to success. If you could show them how to do the CORE things REALLY WELL, the things that clients REALLY WANT – ALL ofTHE TIME! Then surely that would transform practices!
It’s really about Key Points – the Essentials if you like.
The idea is to focus on the pragmatic rather than scholarly. To train that essential knowledge, those essential skills and those essential behaviours that make a profound difference in the practical aspects of the day-to-day realities of veterinary practice. It’s not about the theories, about learning things just in case, about knowing stuff to pass exams, stuff that justifies a degree, a qualification, but that doesn’t translate into reality, or even at all, into daily work practices.
Also, by focusing on only the few Key Points it is much easier to gain excellence, to become really good at the essentials.
Key points training is similar to executive book summaries. I don’t need to read the whole book to get the key lessons, the critical facts and figures, and understand the relevant concepts. Most people forget the details in the books they read, the courses they complete or the conferences they attend. Hopefully, they remember the key points though. In fact most people forget the details of their lives, but they remember the highlights, those memories that made an impact.
Given the time constraints that busy practices already face, by focusing on ONLY the things that really a matter, the things that give the desired results, training can more easily be worked into an already busy schedule and save a ton of time, effort and money.
In the words of Simon Sinek,“Life becomes better when you start to realise that you don’t have to know everything, and you don’t have to pretend that you do”.
You just have to know few essential things that get the results you want …. And know them really well.
The VETT® Method is a Key Points learning and training system with simple, done-with-you implementation plans and systems that reliably get training and learning DONE quickly, efficiently, and effectively to develop a competent, knowledgeable and engaged veterinary team performing with maximum productivity. It resolves continuous employee recruitment and retention worries and their associated costs, and increases revenues, profits and satisfaction levels.
The Vett Method will help create, implement and maintain learning and training programmes which engage the team leading to high performance and productivity.
Using a collection of comprehensively documented job roles, tasks, protocols, processes and systems, The VETT method will teach and train the practice team on the essentials of what they need to know to achieve both personal and practice goals.
