Episode 21- Innovative Approaches to Recruitment and Leadership

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In this week’s episode

• Recruitment Challenges Worldwide: Veterinary practices face significant hurdles in recruitment globally, with extortionate costs highlighting the ongoing struggle.
• The Importance of Leadership: Olly emphasises the role of leaders in fostering an environment where employees feel heard, valued, and engaged.
• Flexible Working: Personalised contracts are key to supporting diverse employee needs and lifestyles. Shifting from traditional full-time-only roles to more adaptable structures can enhance retention and satisfaction.
• Employee Experience: Small, meaningful changes in workplace practices, such as responsive communication and fair consideration of requests, can greatly impact morale and engagement.

In this engaging episode, Jack Peploe welcomes Olly King, founder of The Meraki Initiative, to explore the evolving dynamics of workplace culture in veterinary practices. Olly shares insights on tackling recruitment challenges, the importance of leadership, and the need for personalised approaches to workplace roles.

Transcription

Jack Peploe:

Coming up on modern veterinary practice,

Olly King:

People want to matter. And I think that need and the pressure of work is where people are coming to work and they’re wanting to seek even more greater fulfilment and purpose, almost like an accentuated in vocational professions. When that is not being met, then it quickly creates a bit of a us and them and a bit of a, nah, I’m not really engaged, I’m not disengaged. And that’s when people start looking elsewhere, they start wobbling and that’s when I think there’s a real hidden costs, which is phenomenally hard to measure in terms of business. Bottom line. Welcome to the

Jack Peploe:

Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast. I’m your host and veterinary IT expert, Jack Peploe. In this episode, I’ll be welcoming Olly King to the podcast who will talk to us about innovative approaches to recruitment and leadership within veterinary practices. Olly, a veterinary leadership coach and founder of the Meraki Initiative will share his insights on improving workplace culture, employee retention, and creating more fulfilling career paths in the veterinary field.

Olly King:

Yeah. So I’m Olly King. I vet leadership coach and founder of the Meraki Initiative. I graduated from Glasgow Vet School in 2008 and had a bit of a career in small animal equine, wanted to scratch the equine itch, did an internship, a certificate, travelled and worked overseas. A bed in Singapore, Australia, actually the other way round Australia and then Singapore at the Turf Club. Came back, had another five years at an equine hospital here, and then had a bit of a change of priorities and somewhat a little bit frustrated in the role I was in. Could see others leaving the profession and just wanted to do something to give something back in a different way. And we sometimes don’t necessarily choose your colleagues intentionally and so people can perhaps find themselves in a wrong matched culture, a wrong environment for them, that sort of concept of the round peg square hole. And I wanted to devise a way to help employers attract the right people, build out their right brands, and also try and keep people in the profession for the right reasons through no fault of ending up in the wrong workplace themselves. And so that now fuelled what has become the Meraki initiative and the focus of the work I do now alongside, I’ve moved back into small animal work alongside that just to keep my hand in. So that all keeps me very busy and loving what I do at the moment.

Jack Peploe:

That’s awesome, Olly. Well look, you are quite right. I can’t believe that this is the first time we’ve met, but hey, at least it’s a start and hopefully we’ll be able to catch up. But anyway, thank you so much for coming on the Modern Be Practice podcast. It’s obviously wonderful to have you with us today. How have things been

Olly King:

In general or for Yeah, well we’ve just had a nice bit of hot weather. So I think we’ve had our three days of summer just been and gone. So the paddle board has been out in general. I moved down to Top Mess where I live now from the Midlands in just a year before Covid. So moving to an area where I love being outdoors. Used to play lots of hockey, not so much now the hips have said no. So a bit of sea swimming, river swimming, running around the local estates. So when the weather sun is shining, we’ve got a beautiful Dartington estate behind the office space here. It’s great, it’s great work with Meraki is going really well. We just recently exhibited at BVA. Live engagement is always building every time we show up and having really great conversations with users interested in what we’re doing and in particular workplaces realising that there is a different way that they can recruit, build their employer brand and stand out to students and professionals who are considering who’s the right workplace

Jack Peploe:

To them. Nice, nice. So keeping busy both with work and play, which is awesome.

Olly King:

You have to. Yeah, you have to.

Jack Peploe:

Yeah. So going to the episode then today I kind of thought we could explore innovative approaches to recruitment and leadership within veterinary practices. Obviously with your extensive background in veterinary medicine and as a leadership coach, I have a feeling you’re probably going to have a wealth of knowledge that you can bring to these topics. So if I could start, could you share a bit more around your journey from working as a vet in various international settings to focusing on leadership and workplace culture in the veterinary shield?

Olly King:

Look, I don’t think it’s been, it’s so widely talked about in the reasons for poor retention in the profession. And I think along the lines of one of the more recent statistics of was it 45% leave the profession within four years, burnout is about 50% of the profession. I think there’s maybe a US publication within five years. I mean these are start and concerning statistics and for my personal experience of feeling, I was working really hard to equine certificates under my belt and I still felt like I didn’t belong in the workplace experience. I know where we work in busy environments and that hamster wheel kind of connotation and not having enough time to down tools and to regroup as a team, feedback giving from leaders, line managers, employers to their team members has always been something the veterinary profession has honestly held their hands up and say, we’re not very good at this.

These appraisals challenging conversations, just having that support, which is very well and getting more clearly and rightly so articulated for those new graduates coming in on the vet GDP. But I think for those mature professionals it can be quite easy to perhaps drift and not feel appreciated, not feel valued. And the only time you have a conversation with your line manager maybe when on an occasion of course conflict or grievance happens with the clients and it just gets a bit monotonous and you just think, I’m working so hard here and a bit of positive encouragement or support for who I am so I can help bring more energy for a profession. It does take a lot from me. We all know that compassion fatigue and people are coming to the workplace, especially with the current, not so much austerity now, but just the cost of living and just having to work harder to sustain the same level of wealth.

People are coming to work just a bit more depleted than we have ever done and we’re still being asked just to give just a little bit more, just a little bit more. And it’s going to snap eventually. And for me, seeing a different way to highlight that there are workplaces that they’re not all the same and everyone has had positive experiences at a workplace, you think the grasses and those who haven’t have left thought the grass could be greener somewhere else. You are mistaken and you hear a stories that people go back to where they were because they realised what they had before was actually a good deal. So there’s a bit of an expectation piece in there as well. And so my experience of wanting to help people make more informed decisions from an employee point of view for seeing an insight into a workplace, the colleagues, the peers, your mentor who you might be working with, how the leadership team set out their workplace and how they try and create what a great workplace looks to them, how things get done.

And a sense of being able to imagine yourself, immerse yourself in that workplace as part of the, I guess candidate from the recruitment language, the candidate experience for how you consider where you want to work and in the long list of hundreds of jobs that are currently out there and often reams and reams of it, how are you going to decide which ones you want to put effort into? And we wanted to make that decision making process clearer. And so I put my experiences into that, into what I would want to know about a workplace before I applied and working with employers in designing and getting feedback for what do you want to tell people about your business to help attract and pull out the right people so that people have a clearer expectations of who you are and what you offer. So it just creates a more meaningful, more purposeful interview candidate relationship building process that begins way before you need to recruit.

And so that was kind of my journey to try and design a better system that empowered employers to have that more control, have that more strategic, long-term proactive planning rather than I need someone right now I’m paying disproportionately to because I have to now use a head-hunter and pay their fees for what they are. I have to have ads on the most expensive jobs boards out there. You get lost and there’s nothing differentiating. So we wanted to devise a news tech to make it more strategic, more personable. Employers can shout about themselves, people can make more informed decisions and can make, do I want to be more selected in where they put effort into which roles And hopefully the outcome from that will be great teams where people love to work and people just onboarding quickly, becoming more productive, dangerous word, but just kicking on and that just in turn drives business success.

Jack Peploe:

No, that’s very cool and it makes complete sense. So you mentioned a number of different challenges and I’m guessing they’re challenges that you experienced first-hand yourself when you were in practice. And I suppose two questions is have you seen much of a change since Covid with regards to these challenges? Have they sort of been exasperated, are they getting worse? And what about a variation from a country by country basis? Is this the same across the world or is this just the UK thing?

Olly King:

On the latter, I mentioned one paper that I had in preparing as a student talk for one of the universities. I looked a little bit about the rates of burnout and things. And I think they are echoed for sure in a lot of these Western countries. I think a lot the vet schools over here, especially London, Edinburgh, is really diverse, cosmopolitan, lots of international students. But these overseas employers from, and there was one at the Royal College Careers Fair Sugar Careers Fair, a couple of, for the last two years I think it was just a one hospital clinic had come over with a team of three or four people. They weren’t part of a corporate, they’re an independent hospital. I think they maybe had 15, 18 vets there in total. But they had invested in spending sending a small team over to one careers fair at a university that they know become a VMA accredited if they do their Natalie exam.

So countries overseas are spending just as extortion amounts of money in their recruitment as we are. So I think that says just how challenging it is all over the place. And in terms of pressures from or have things improved, I think everyone just feels busier than ever and I really hate that busy word and you get a sense of it now in now I’m kind of pivoting, still doing front face clinical work and some of that is both out of ours, emergency work and daytime. So I’ve got quite a diverse insight into relationships with clients at different touch points and different team environments working in different clinical contexts.

But things aren’t changing. I think the talk is there and people know what they should be doing, but finding that time to prioritise the team, meeting the one-to-one, to gather the feedback, I think that is almost, I don’t want to say it’s getting worse because I don’t know that, but I certainly don’t see it changing quickly enough for some of the persistent cynicism and the cynical mindsets and attitudes that seem quite pervasive. And when they’re pervasive in teams and people are getting frustrated that things aren’t changing and a lot of these changes aren’t mind blowing, whole new systems processes of way, they’re thinking about doing things, they’re just small little things that have an impact that’s actually, say I’ve voiced, and it could just be simple as an annual leave request, but the time delaying people being heard for whatever they feel is a personal issue to them just seems to be very slow and it’s then hard to not feel valued or appreciated and it just pushes people away.

And they don’t necessarily utterly. But that engagement piece and that translating, if you have a really amazing employee experience, which is then the collective of those experience then is what the measure of output of the engagement that is very easy to, is what everyone aspires to is that how do you engage your people? It’s like, well, what are your priorities and what are the greatest needs of your people? And until I think those in charge of practice and those leaders who are responsible and accountable for these people’s lies and for then accountable for how these people return home to their families at the end of the day, that’s a huge responsibility for people in leadership. And I don’t want to get too bogged down with everyone’s a leader in a workplace. You’re just focusing on the decision makers, the real people who can have the most impact quickly.

So hopefully that doesn’t sound too traditional and outdated, but the back does have to start there. And as those leaders I think show up more and create those touch points, that could just be a coffee catch up. And again, it doesn’t have to be a big sit down formal appraisal. You’re a multi-branch practice. You’ve got however many people to do one-to-ones with your current system has always been you doing the one-to-ones. I mean some of them, the self-imposed expectations I think leaders are putting under themselves are very unrealistic and setting themselves up, setting themselves up to fail. So there has to be an element of taking a step back and just I think looking at quick wins and what can you do. And when people can start to feel that they’re being heard and just the simple things are being done, then communication just flows a lot better.

People turn up a bit more energised, they’re confident that things are going to get done, they have more energy to put into their clients and their cases, better communication with colleagues, less things are going to get forgotten about patient care, client satisfaction improves. And that’s kind of key to then high performing teams, buzzwords that lots of other people think about. But it does start from the culture and the ethos of leaders having time for their people and people not then feeling just like a means to an end. People want to matter. And I think that need and the pressure of work is where people are coming to work and they’re wanting to seek even more greater fulfilment and purpose, almost like an accentuated and vocational professions when that’s again, dangerous expectation or when that is not being met, then it quickly creates a bit of a us and them.

And as I say, not quite disengagement, but a bit of a, nah, I’m not really engaged, I’m not disengaged. And that’s when people start looking elsewhere, they start wobbling. And that’s when I think there’s a real hidden cost, which is phenomenally hard to measure in terms of business bottom line. And so what I try and do now then with Meraki is try and draw attention to that. And one of the tools we do is focusing on measuring that employee experience just as a real barometer what’s happening right now and what are the things we may need to focus on within the vet team, within the nurse team, within the reception team, how does this fit with the collective priorities of the business? And the other challenges, which may be more in a corporate setting and the practice managers and the CDs there may feel they don’t have as much autonomy to make decisions, but you have to start somewhere and having those conversations. And yeah, there’s never been a more better time to start being a humble leader and not having all the answers, but being open to helping your people shape what they need and to make them feel listened. And so that’s kind of a key part of the work I do with Meraki.

Jack Peploe:

That’s very cool. And so if we were to look at the future trends in veterinary employment specifically, what do you anticipate will shape the future of employment and workplace culture in veterinary practices over say the next decade?

Olly King:

The need for flexible working has always been increasingly there. And with the

Jack Peploe:

What’s but what do you mean by flexible working? So obviously this is a term that’s branded around quite a lot.

Olly King:

Okay, so flexible. Okay, so the better word for that is just personalised. Okay. So it’s just personalised contracts and that work around your life. And I think it is very outdated to, and I think it still commonly exists, we’re only going to advertise for a full-time employee. I haven’t got the headspace or the capacity to be intervene for part-time roles and creating a blended series of three or four contracts for different people to cover one and a half FTE roles kind of thing. But that is just the reality. And if it’s people wanting and that arises for different, it doesn’t really matter how it arises, but it arises not just because of the pressure of raising families. I think people after Covid are prioritising different values and that good enough just being self-sufficient and people want to have a richer life. They want to explore these other personal identities. And whilst we appreciate we’re in a vocational qualification, there is a strong undertone of people not willing to sacrifice themselves anymore in the workplace. And that’s not to say we don’t care about our patients or our clients, that is far from it, but we have to look after ourselves first. And all of those cliché sayings pouring from an empty cup isn’t the best place to start putting someone’s your own oxygen mask on before others and all of those.

And I think with that, there just has to be a degree of openness for all of your roles. And I think you do commonly see it flexible working considered, but it’s almost every job application out there just needs a job share sticker on. And you invite as many applicants as you can. Just like with, we try and encourage practices to put themselves out there so you can generate those leads and people approach you because they know you exist and they want to connect with you and then rather have that positive problem of having. And that really then I think will become powerful with people returning to work after parental leave and actually finding there are lots of opportunities out there for that job share, use of word, personalised contract for gaps when they don’t have family childcare, childcare at a nursery or what have you.

And so for some people the early shift or the late shift may be the most horrendous shifts to fill, but for some people and for the work life of their partner or when their mother can come and help with their child’s grandmother, grandfather help with childcare, that could be the best shift for them to cover. And I think with that kind of personalization, and that needs to be done in a fair way, perhaps with people who already exist, which is maybe a little bit of a conversation, but I think it’s not equal. And if a business is struggling to fill a particular role or a particular shift pattern, then the value of filling that particular role, if it’s an early shift or a late shift of those examples, then they may have to command potentially a higher wage. I mean, the out of hours night shifts are obviously more than a day shift, but if your business needs and the challenges covering the early shift, yes, it’s the same role that someone is potentially doing during the day, but no one wants to do it.

So you then just have to reward that. And it’s not then unfair pay because well, you can do it, but you can’t do it or won’t do it then I think finding that, having discussion around that I think is going to become even more important. And so that people can bring themselves to work, they can work, make their work life that. Yeah, the architects of job crafting and designing their own work life. And I think within that job, crafting people how they spend their time at work might start to even get more according to their skills and people valuing, being the mentors, people diversify receptionists, people upskilling in areas and marketing and just client marketing and employee branding, marketing, the work that we’re doing. I think there’s a lot of under utilisation of the skills within teams, and that’s a great way for people to diversify their roles and feel, I’m not just a vet nurse, I’m not just a new graduate vet, I’m not just a receptionist. And that creates a bit of a career progression. I think those things will be key as well for personalising and making people feel empowered and developing their careers and across all job roles.

Jack Peploe:

That’s very cool. I can’t believe it and time has flown Olly, but thank you so much for such an insightful and enlightening session. I really, really appreciate you sharing your expertise on creating better workplace environments and of course the importance of leadership in veterinary practice. Now, before I sort of close off the interview, if people do want to get in touch with you, how can they go about doing so say,

Olly King:

Our website is Meraki Initiative.com and I’m on LinkedIn, Olly King, we do have on Instagram, we are there. So you can please do follow us there. The Meraki initiative. I’m sure there’ll be links in the show notes, Olly at the Meraki initiative if you’d like to get in touch. But yeah, please do check out the work we do. We’d love to support practices that have got lots of shouts outs about themselves and want to get their name and brand out there. We’re here to help.

Jack Peploe:

Awesome. Olly, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. It’d be

Olly King:

Lovely to chat to you.

Jack Peploe:

Thank You.

Jack Peploe:

Every week we ask professionals and experts to suggest a best business resource for our listeners. This week’s recommendation is from Snoots very own Jonathan Moyle.

Jonathan Moyal:

So everybody on my team is forced to read a book, which is terrible. I always swore I would never be that CEO. And yet here I am. It’s a book called “Unreasonable Hospitality”. It’s written by a guy named Will Gadara, who used to run 11 Madison Park, which is a Michelin star restaurant in New York, and he’s a restaurateur. And I think the biggest struggle with people that I talked to in this industry is that I fundamentally believe that we are in the hospitality business. And most vets don’t want to hear that. And it’s challenging. And we’ve had challenges with working with the kind of inbuilt mentality that the customer is always wrong. There’s this distrust that’s been built over the last 10 years, right? The prices go up, the customers get pissed, the vets get pissed because they feel like they’re being targeted unfairly, which is true.

And the end result is it’s just a bad experience for everybody. And I think we forgot somewhere that before medicine, we are in the hospitality business. It obviously matters that we do good medicine, but if you’re not doing it and delivering it in the right way, it doesn’t help. And that book in particular sort of brings hospitality. It takes the ick out of hospitality, it brings it back to the sort of joy that comes with great giving, great service, as opposed to this feeling that in order to give great service, you need to be this subservient person that’s like, oh, sorry, the customers. That’s not what it’s about, right? It’s about how amazing it is to create a magic moment for a customer. So for me, a hundred percent, it’s the book that everybody reads on my team, and I think it’s a must read if you’re trying to do something different.

Jack Peploe:

Coming up next week, we welcome Chloe Hannigan, a veterinarian and founder of Vet Yogi. Chloe shares her journey from practicing as a locum vet around the world to becoming a yoga teacher and one as advocate for the veterinary profession.

Chloe Hannigan:

So I really had to look at ways of dealing with the stresses and challenges of working as a vet often by myself. And that’s where time on my yoga mat and time spent in meditation really helped me. And I just thought if it was helping me, and when I say that, when I first tried yoga as a 16-year-old, I absolutely hated it. It was a load of nonsense. So I thought if someone like me can be convinced that this is actually a really powerful practice, the Navy, I’m the right kind of person to bring it to other veterinary people.

Jack Peploe:

That’s it for this episode. All links and recommendations we talked about are in the show notes. Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast if you found it useful. In the meantime, thanks for listening and see you next time.