A new client relations hire is asked to triage an after-hours case on day three. No training, no authority, no script. Across the clinic, an associate snaps a curt reply and walks out feeling guilty about it. They both go home wondering if they are burned out, and whether the answer is a wellness app or a different career.

It is neither. According to a new analysis published in dvm360, authored by organizational researchers Matt Albrecht, PhD, Mark Albrecht, DVM, and Pam Hale, DVM, MBA, JM, the problem is the practice, not the people.

Burnout Is an Organizational Disease, Not a Personal Failing

The veterinary profession has invested heavily in individual-focused burnout solutions: counseling hotlines, mindfulness workshops, wellness stipends. These resources matter. But a meta-analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine found that organizational-level interventions produce meaningfully stronger outcomes than individual approaches alone. The Mayo Clinic reached the same conclusion: addressing burnout is the shared responsibility of both the individual and the organization they work inside.

That finding has not yet reached most veterinary practices. The upstream conditions driving burnout are specific and identifiable: production-based compensation that rewards volume without accounting for emotional weight, scheduling systems that treat a dental cleaning and a euthanasia as equivalent time blocks, role definitions so vague a new hire ends up triaging patients without training, and credentialing hierarchies that undervalue technician expertise while depending on it in every room. These are not personal failings. They are design choices, and they produce predictable outcomes.

The Gap Between What Leaders Think and What Teams Live

Here is the uncomfortable part. Most veterinary leaders genuinely care about their teams. That is not the problem. The problem is visibility. Practice owners experience a fundamentally different version of the workplace than their staff does.

The open door policy may feel real to the person whose door it is. But a technician who watched a colleague get dismissed for raising a scheduling concern six months ago has already learned the door is open in theory and closed in practice. When an associate suggests a protocol change at a team meeting, gets no response, and watches the agenda move on, they do not experience a neutral moment. They receive a clear message: that kind of input is not welcome here. Six months later, leadership wonders why nobody brings ideas to meetings anymore. The connection is invisible because the system did not produce a visible event. It produced an absence, and absences do not show up in generic engagement surveys.

This is survivorship bias operating in real time. The people who respond to optional surveys and speak up in team meetings are not representative of the full team. They are disproportionately satisfied or disproportionately vocal. The quietly disengaged, the people already planning their exit, these are the ones whose signals never reach the inbox.

Aggregate data compounds the problem. An overall engagement score of 7 out of 10 might feel reassuring, until you learn that DVMs rated psychological safety at 9 and technicians rated it at 4. Or that tenured staff feel connected to the practice mission while staff under two years feel interchangeable. Averages flatten the differences that matter most.

Diagnose Your Culture Like You Diagnose a Patient

The authors propose a reframe that will resonate with anyone trained in clinical medicine: stop accepting "the team seems fine" as a diagnosis. You would not write that in a chart and move on. You would run the bloodwork. Culture measurement works the same way.

Structured, anonymous assessment using validated instruments, broken out by role and tenure, across dimensions like psychological safety, workload fairness, communication trust, and scheduling equity, gives leaders an actual picture of organizational health rather than the socially safe version their teams perform when leadership is watching.

Edgar Schein, professor at MIT Sloan, described culture as operating at three levels simultaneously: visible artifacts (policies, space, stated protocols), espoused values (what leadership says it stands for), and underlying assumptions (what gets rewarded, tolerated, and punished). In vet med, the gap between what is espoused and what is assumed tends to be large, and largely invisible to the people at the top.

A practice with generous benefits and low psychological safety is still a practice people leave.

What This Means for Your Practice

  • Audit the design, not just the people. Look at your compensation structure, your scheduling logic, your role definitions. Which were designed intentionally and which just evolved? Vague role definitions, production-only pay, and emotional caseloads that go uncounted are upstream causes of downstream turnover.
  • Disaggregate your data. If you collect any team feedback, break it out by role and tenure before drawing conclusions. An overall average can mask a critical gap between how DVMs and technicians experience the same workplace.
  • Build structured pathways for concern. Burnout research consistently shows that the absence of safe channels for raising issues is as damaging as the issues themselves. This does not require a formal HR department. It requires a consistent, predictable way for staff to surface concerns before they become resignations.
  • Watch for absences, not just events. When someone stops contributing in meetings, stops asking questions, stops engaging in training, that is data. Create conditions where you are likely to see it early.

Culture is not a pizza party or a mission statement. It is the set of unwritten rules that govern how your team actually operates under pressure. The good news is that it is measurable, and once you can see it, you can improve it.

Build a Culture Worth Staying For

The practices that retain great people are not the ones with the highest salaries or the fanciest equipment. They are the ones where staff feel psychologically safe, where their expertise is valued, and where they can raise concerns without consequences.

Rally by Hound is built to help veterinary practices strengthen the team experience from the inside out.

Source: What Your Team Won't Tell You: Why Good Intentions Aren't Enough to Understand Your Practice Culture, Matt Albrecht, PhD; Mark Albrecht, DVM; Pam Hale, DVM, MBA, JM. dvm360. June 26, 2026.