So You Want to Support Your Team's Wellbeing: Where Do You Actually Start?

A veterinary team during an on-site Get MotiVETed session

There are a few moments in a veterinary career when wellbeing demands a real conversation: when you're a new grad drowning in imposter syndrome, when you step into your first leadership role, and now… when you're the one responsible for a whole team. Yes, you read that right.

You might be thinking that a major benefit of moving into management or ownership is finally having more control over your day. But it turns out the thing you now have the most influence over isn't your schedule — it's your team's culture. And if you're reading this, some part of you already senses your team needs more than another "self-care Sunday" flyer on the breakroom fridge.

Team members are still absorbing compassion fatigue, client conflict, and staffing pressure right up until the day they hand in their notice. That resignation almost always feels sudden to leadership — but it almost never is. The conversation about wellbeing needs to start long before anyone looks like they're struggling.

Research consistently shows that as workload rises, investment in wellbeing tends to fall — exactly when teams need it most. And while many practices white-knuckle their way through busy seasons, unaddressed chronic stress carries real costs: turnover of your best people, medical errors, client complaints, and the quiet erosion of the culture you worked so hard to build. Fortunately, our own assessment data shows that structured burnout preparedness measurably reduces risk. Long story short: a wellbeing system can be one more tool in your leadership tool belt — and protect your team at the same time.

At Get MotiVETed, we hear a lot from leaders who pause their wellbeing plans for a variety of reasons — they're short-staffed, budgets are tight, the team "seems okay right now," or they simply think burnout won't touch their practice. That's exactly when a structured approach is most useful. Think of it, in essence, as preventative medicine for your culture.

The Wellbeing–Culture Connection

"Team wellbeing" refers to more than whether individuals are coping. It's the shared capacity of your practice to handle the demands of veterinary medicine — the euthanasias, the angry clients, the short-staffed Saturdays — without those demands slowly hollowing people out. Throughout a normal workweek, stress rises and falls with each shift. But under chronic pressure, it doesn't reset in a smooth, orderly way. Instead, it spikes and climbs like a rollercoaster on the way up — until someone hits a wall.

Burnout doesn't follow a predictable timeline, either. For some team members it builds over years; for others, one brutal quarter is enough. And here's the thing: while all of this is happening, your team is still showing up, still smiling at clients, still saying "I'm fine." That's where knowing the quieter signs comes in.

If a few of these sound familiar, don't panic — and don't wait, either. The goal isn't to diagnose your team. It's to get ahead of the curve. Let's review the options.

Your Starting Points: 5 Ways to Begin Supporting Team Wellbeing

Just like there's no single right wellbeing plan for every person, there's no single right entry point for every practice. What matters is matching the approach to your team's size, budget, and readiness.

1. Start with yourself (yes, really)

Culture flows downhill. If you skip lunch, answer emails at 10 p.m., and push through illness, your team learns that's the standard — no matter what your wellness poster says. The lowest-cost, highest-leverage first step is modeling boundaries and openly practicing the skills you want your team to adopt.

2. Appoint a Well-Being Advocate

Most wellbeing efforts die because they're "everyone's job," which means they're no one's job. The Well-Being Advocate (WBA) Program trains one designated team member to carry the flag — with a structured system, a leader toolkit of ready-to-use templates, and ongoing resources.

3. Enroll individuals in burnout preparedness certification

The Certified Veterinary Burnout Preparedness (CVBP) program, built on the P.R.E.P. framework, trains individual team members in the skills that produced the outcomes in the chart above. It's the right fit for teams of one to three, or for supporting a specific team member who's asked for growth — preventative by design, valuable across the whole spectrum.

4. Train your team together with CVBP Team Access

For teams of four or more, cohort enrollment changes the math entirely. When teammates learn the same frameworks at the same time, they develop shared language — and shared language is what turns individual skills into culture change.

5. Bring us in for a live seminar or workshop

Sometimes the fastest way to shift a team's energy is together, in one room. Live seminars and workshops — in person or virtual — are interactive by design, built around proven, practical skills your team can start using the same day. They're a natural fit for team meetings, staff retreats, CE days, and conference programming.

When Approaches Might Be Combined

These starting points aren't either/or. In fact, the strongest results we see come from pairing them: a practice enrolls the team through CVBP Team Access and designates a Well-Being Advocate to keep the momentum alive after certification. The cohort builds the shared skills; the advocate sustains them. Another popular pairing: teams host a live workshop to spark the momentum, then enroll in the self-paced programs to keep it going. Everyday practices on the left side of the chart cost next to nothing — but without the structured training on the right, they tend to fade within a quarter. Together, they reinforce each other.

And if you're starting solo, the natural path is individual certification first, then bringing the case for team enrollment to your leadership. You don't have to walk into that conversation empty-handed — download the forwardable one-pager we built for exactly that moment.

Learn from educators who've lived it

Get MotiVETed's programs are built by veterinary professionals with decades of combined experience in clinics — partnering with your practice to build wellbeing that sticks.

Renée Machel & Quincy Hawley, DVM

Co-Founders of Get MotiVETed · decades of combined veterinary experience

Work With Us

[email protected]

What Teams Are Saying

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Individual skills matter — that's why we teach them. But individuals practice those skills inside a culture, and culture is shaped by leadership and systems. The most effective approach works both levels at once: personal preparedness skills plus a team environment that supports using them.

Short-staffing is the reason to start, not the reason to wait. Burnout-driven turnover is what created the staffing crunch — and every departure costs far more hours in hiring and training than a structured program requires. The programs are self-paced and online specifically so they fit around clinic schedules.

Lead with outcomes, not sentiment. The assessment data above — elevated burnout risk dropping from 24% to 4% — reframes wellbeing from a "nice to have" into a retention and patient-safety investment. Download the forwardable one-pager below and bring numbers to the conversation.

Honestly? Good. They've probably sat through a lunch-and-learn that changed nothing. Skepticism usually means they've experienced wellbeing theater — posters and pizza — rather than skills training. Preparedness certification is concrete, measurable, and built by veterinary professionals, which tends to win over the skeptics fastest. Or, if you choose to bring us in for a workshop or training, it's not one-way information — we share proven, practical steps anyone can begin using straight away.

Before the warning signs, ideally — that's what "preparedness" means. But the second-best time is now. If you're already seeing the signs above, starting with a cohort plus an advocate gives you both immediate shared skills and a sustaining structure.