U Is for UNDERSTANDING: What Does ‘We Work as a Team’ Actually Mean at Your Veterinary Clinic?

Almost every veterinary clinic can say, “We work as a team.”

A vet or nurse reading your job ad still has no idea what will happen when they ask for help, disagree with a colleague or find themselves holding the fort at the end of a shift.

Those are the things they’re trying to understand before deciding whether your clinic could be Their Kind of Clinic.

Episode 289 is the sixth episode in my 16-part REAL•CULTURE•STORY™ series. It explores U for UNDERSTANDING: whether people outside your clinic can understand how your team works, communicates and makes decisions. REAL•CULTURE•STORY™ is my framework for helping clinics identify, formulate and test credible culture stories.

Key Takeaways

• “Collaborative” can accurately describe clinics whose teams work in quite different ways.
• People already inside your clinic know its unwritten rules. Someone researching it from the outside doesn’t.
• An unresolved problem isn’t a positive culture story. What the clinic does next may become one.
• Asking team members what a familiar phrase means, and when they last saw it in action, tests whether it has a shared meaning.
• If your clinic has changed, the people who experienced that change can help others understand how it works now.

Why “We Work as a Team” Needs an Explanation

Your team may understand exactly what “we work as a team” means. A vet or nurse considering a role with you has to guess.

Can a nurse challenge a vet directly? Can a new graduate interrupt a senior vet to ask for help? When a shift turns to custard, who resets priorities? Does anyone check on the last person still working before everyone else goes home?

The answers may be obvious to people who work together every day. They aren’t obvious to someone reading a job ad.

That’s part of the Job Application Decision Gap: the space between a job ad catching someone’s eye and their decision to apply. During that time, vets and nurses look for evidence that helps them picture the working life behind your claims.

A phrase such as “supportive team” gives them a starting question. A specific experience can help answer it.

Two Clinics, One Description

In Episode 289, I describe two clinics that could honestly call themselves collaborative.

In one, a vet might call across the treatment room, “Can I borrow your brains for a minute, please?” A colleague stops, looks at the case and offers another possibility. A nurse might add something the client mentioned. Nobody gets precious about whose idea it was. They agree on the next step and carry on.

In the other clinic, vets usually manage their own cases. They ask for help when they need it, but the accepted way of working is to stay within their own caseloads unless help is requested.

Both can use the word collaborative. The working experience is different.

A vet or nurse needs to understand what collaboration means here. What happens when they ask for help? What happens if they disagree? Will this way of working feel natural to them?

The aim isn’t to make one clinic sound like the other. It’s to give people enough information to recognise where they might fit.

The Unwritten Rules a New Team Member Discovers

Imagine a vet or nurse who has recently joined a clinic. After a while, they notice that some long-serving vets seem to leave before the end of their rostered shift. The new person keeps finding themselves holding the fort.

Nobody explained that arrangement during the interview or when they joined. Among the established team, it may simply be “how we do things around here”.

The clinic told the new team member their working hours. It gave them no way to understand the unwritten rules around those hours.

Now they have other questions. Can they raise what’s happening? Who should they speak to? How will management respond? If the arrangement changes, how will the long-serving vets treat the person they assume spoke up?

At this point, there isn’t a positive culture story to tell. There’s an unresolved problem. What happens next determines the story.

When a Difficult Change Becomes a Culture Story

Suppose the new vet raises the issue. Management discovers an arrangement it hadn’t realised was happening, agrees it’s unfair and takes steps to change it.

That takes difficult conversations. Some long-serving vets may be unhappy about losing their early finish. The person who spoke up may feel distinctly unpopular for a while. The clinic has to work through that tension and make end-of-shift responsibilities clear: who stays, who leaves and who is responsible for work still happening.

Only then does the experience show an outsider something useful. A team member raised an unfair situation. Management listened and acted. People worked through a difficult change.

That’s a more credible culture story than saying, “We listen to our team.” It shows what listening required when the issue was awkward.

There’s another reason to tell it. If the clinic changes the arrangement but never shares what changed, an older reputation may keep travelling: That’s the clinic where the long-serving vets leave early and the newest person gets stuck holding the fort.

I discussed that problem in Episode 276: a reputation can travel everywhere except the job ad. People outside the clinic cannot see its current working practices unless the clinic gives them a way to understand what has changed. The people who experienced the change should be able to describe it in their own words.

Test What Your Culture Claims Mean

Choose one phrase your clinic already uses in a job ad, on its careers page or in a social post. It might be “we’re collaborative”, “we support each other”, “our vets have autonomy” or “we value learning”.

Ask two or three people separately:

“What does that mean here?”

“Tell me about the last time you saw it happen.”

Listen to the experiences they describe. They might recall a difficult case when three people stayed to help, a nurse whose question during a procedure was welcomed, or a vet who tried another approach, shared what they learnt and changed how the clinic does things.

If people give similar answers and can describe something that happened, you may have found a culture story worth exploring.

If their answers differ completely, or nobody can think of an example, you’ve learnt something useful too. The phrase may sound good online without yet having a shared meaning inside your clinic. Work out what it means to your people before asking outsiders to rely on it.

Spot It. Source It. Share It.

Once you’ve tested the phrase, use the process from the episode:

1. Spot it: Identify the phrase and where its meaning shows up in an ordinary shift.
2. Source it: Ask the people involved what happened and what the experience meant to them.
3. Share it: Let their account show vets and nurses outside the clinic what the phrase means at your clinic.

Don’t turn someone’s experience into a tidier claim than it supports. The detail is what lets another person form their own view.

A Culture Story Centre gives those accounts a place vets and nurses can find while researching your clinic, including when you aren’t advertising a vacancy. It can help someone move from recognising a familiar phrase in a job ad to understanding the people and working practices behind it.

Help People Understand the Clinic You Are Now

U for UNDERSTANDING asks what a vet or nurse can learn about your clinic from the outside. Can they understand how colleagues respond to one another, how decisions get made and what happens when a working arrangement needs to change?

Those answers won’t stay fixed forever. Clinics change, problems are raised and teams learn different ways of working. Your Culture Stories need to keep up so an old account isn’t the only one people hear.

Start with one phrase your clinic already uses. Ask your people what it means here, and listen for an experience that helps someone else understand.

Listen to Episode 289 of Veterinary Voices. If you’d like help telling your team’s Culture Stories, you can also explore Culture Story Centres or email julie@vetclinicjobs.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does UNDERSTANDING test in REAL•CULTURE•STORY™?

UNDERSTANDING tests whether vets and nurses outside a clinic can make sense of its people, behaviours and unwritten rules. It asks what an experience tells them about how the team works.

Why isn’t “we work as a team” enough in a veterinary job ad?

The phrase doesn’t tell someone what happens when a colleague asks for help, disagrees or needs support during a difficult shift. Specific experiences give it meaning within your clinic.

Can two clinics both be collaborative in different ways?

Yes. In Episode 289, one example involves colleagues discussing a case together as it happens. In the other, vets normally manage their own caseloads and ask for help when needed. A vet or nurse may have a preference, but the word collaborative alone doesn’t explain the difference.

Should a clinic share a story while a cultural problem is unresolved?

The episode’s early-finish example is an unresolved problem until management addresses the unfair arrangement. What management does next, and how the team works through the change, may become a useful story to tell.

How can I test whether a culture phrase means the same thing to my team?

Ask two or three people separately what the phrase means at your clinic and when they last saw it happen. Compare the experiences they describe. If answers conflict or nobody has an example, work on the phrase’s meaning before sharing it as a culture claim.

Why share a story about a problem the clinic has already fixed?

An older account of the clinic may still be circulating. Hearing from people who experienced the change gives vets and nurses a way to understand how the clinic works now.