Creating a Toxic-Free Practice Environment

Veterinary teams commonly face challenges in the practice, such as communication breakdowns, ambiguous roles, unrealistic goals, and unsustainable workloads. If any of these factors are not addressed, a toxic work environment can be created, leading to dissatisfied team members, incivility, turnover, fragmented client relations, and poor patient care.¹

This article reviews research published in 2015 in Frontiers in Veterinary Medicine, titled Exploring the Impact of Toxic Attitudes and a Toxic Environment on the Veterinary Healthcare Team.¹ The researchers identified practical recommendations to put their findings into practice and optimize team performance.

Toxic Attitudes

Toxic team attitudes include disrespect, resistance to change, lack of motivation, conflict-avoidance, chronic negativity, and desire to be the go-to person. Such mindsets negatively impact the team and result in relationship struggles, task conflicts, poor team performance, and decreased satisfaction.¹

Toxic Environments

Toxic environments form when toxic attitudes become contagious and when broken communication and tension between staff members occur[s] because of underlying issues, including employees lacking the requisite confidence, skills, or knowledge; employees not feeling appreciated; difficulties coping with turnover; and dealing with conflicting demands.¹ When team members feel helpless, frustrated, and angry, the workplace becomes more toxic.

Finding a Remedy

Toxic attitudes and a toxic environment negatively impact day-to-day team function. Addressing toxic attitudes to detoxify the environment is daunting, but an efficient, successful, satisfied team can be created by²:

• Maintaining effective communication

• Ensuring clear roles

• Setting achievable goals

• Divvying up the workload

Crucial Communication

Toxic environments arise from failing to communicate expectations, ignoring incivility, and sending conflicting messages about workplace roles.¹ Clear communication is critical. (See Open Communication.)

Clear Roles

Resentment among the team builds when team members are unaware of others roles and unsure of their own.¹

Prevent resentment from building with these actions:

• Provide explicit roles, tasks, expectations, and a system of accountability to ensure firm guidelines and clarity and reduce conflicting demands on team members.

• Provide a copy of job descriptions and workplace procedures, and explain how each role fits into the team.

• Reinforce details in day-to-day conversations and during team meetings.

• Create a poster that maps out relationships and hang it in the team meeting room so individual team members can appreciate how their work impacts others.

• Review and update job descriptions as responsibilities change.

Understanding how the team works together enables buy-in and builds a stronger commitment to goals.³

Achievable Goals

Unattainable goals and unreasonable expectations set team members up for failure, disappointment, and bitterness. When overloaded, team members feel like they cannot provide the level of client and patient service they wanted to, or were expected to.¹ Having individual goals as well as team goals helps break the workload down to a manageable level.

Set goals during annual performance reviews and check in quarterly with team members to measure their progress. Take time with each team member to recognize accomplishments, redefine challenging goals, identify resources, and provide support.

Shared Responsibilities

When team members see the benefits of sharing responsibilities and tasks, the focus shifts positively to the attributes each team member brings to the table. Share the positivity by highlighting examples of the team working well together, reading client comments at team meetings, voting on a team member of the month, offering prizes for nominating a team member who went above and beyond, or sending notes of appreciation.

From Toxic to Team-Focused

A veterinary teams effectiveness is maximized daily through action. The road to a healthy practice environment will be filled with detours, accidents, and flat tires, but maintaining frequent, open team communication, clarifying roles, and emphasizing sharing the workload detoxifies the practice environment and helps create a team that can meet any challenge.