The problem is the practice, not the people, according to a new analysis published in dvm360 by organizational researchers Matt Albrecht, PhD, Mark Albrecht, DVM, and Pam Hale, DVM, MBA, JM. Two small scenes make the case. A new client relations hire is asked to triage an after-hours case on day three, with no training, no authority, no script. Across the clinic, an associate snaps a curt reply and walks out feeling guilty about it. Both go home wondering if they are burned out, and whether the answer is a wellness app or a different career. It's neither.
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. Mayo Clinic's own physician wellness research points to a similar conclusion: addressing burnout is a shared responsibility between the individual and the organization they work inside, not something an employee is expected to manage alone.
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.
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.
Diagnosing and Redesigning What's Actually Broken
Start with the design, not the people. Look at your compensation structure, your scheduling logic, your role definitions, and ask which were built on purpose and which just evolved. Vague role definitions, production-only pay, and emotional caseloads that go uncounted are upstream causes of downstream turnover, and no amount of individual wellness support fixes an upstream design problem.
Whatever feedback you already collect, disaggregate it by role and tenure before drawing conclusions from an average, since an overall score can mask a critical gap between how DVMs and technicians experience the same workplace. Build a structured, predictable pathway for people to raise concerns, one that doesn't require a formal HR department, only a consistent channel that gets used before a concern turns into a resignation, the same instinct behind fostering psychological safety in a veterinary practice more broadly. And watch for absences as closely as you watch for events: when someone stops contributing in meetings, stops asking questions, stops engaging in training, that's data too.
Culture lives in the unwritten rules that govern how your team actually operates under pressure, not in a pizza party or a mission statement. 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 the ones where staff feel psychologically safe, where their expertise is valued, and where they can raise concerns without consequences, regardless of salary or equipment.