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Veterinary Practice News Editorial Blog:
Friday, August 7, 2009
The Meerkats: Always on Alert and Causing Trouble!
By Katherine Dobbs, RVT, CVPM, PHR
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 Now that we’ve had our snack, let’s get back on the bus and on with the Safari. As we near this next exhibit, you’ll notice quite a few little animals scurrying around, popping up, bopping down, and basically running about in a rather chaotic manner. These are meerkats, and they are a particular breed of veterinary technician. These little guys and gals like constant entertainment, even at the mercy of others. If there’s a way for them to have fun, they will risk getting in trouble just to increase the level of chaos and mischief around them.
Their best weapon of chaos? Gossip.
As fast as they move from one place to the next, it’s easy for them to lay the traps of gossip and then scurry off to another locale. That way, it’s very difficult to track down exactly where this mischievous line of gossip started. Even with a policy in place that “prohibits” gossip of this nature, how in the world do you enforce such a policy when they have left the scene of the crime without so much as dropping a crumb of evidence? What complicates things even further is that in an effort to track down the culprit, you risk sending up dust storms of trouble in your path…asking the wrong person about the gossip only serves to make you a spreader of the gray cloud.
On top of that, tracking down the culprit depends on how weak the ties are between your team members—will someone turn in their colleague as the original source of information?
While you may want them to take this initiative to help you clean up the prairie of gossip, you also want there to be a strong enough attachment between these critters that they will back each other up during the tough work they do every day. So it’s quite a conundrum, how to encourage the seeking of truth while discouraging team members from “ratting out” each other.
The best method of cleaning up the gossip seems to be a massive sweep approach…you first implement or reinforce the policy, then you wait by the trap for these critters to capture themselves in essence. When gossip starts to infect the exhibit, you bring in all the technicians who seem to be a part of the web and lay it on the line—gossip will not be tolerated, no matter who started it. If you’re involved in the gossip talk at all, you’re putting yourself at risk. This may only start with a verbal warning to the group, but the hope is that peer pressure will also help curb the gossip in the practice—they will all remind each other that no one wants to get shipped out from the exhibit so it is best not to take place in the gossip at all.
As the sun sets on this meerkat exhibit, they do seem to be settling down and ducking into their dens to rest. After all, they have to recharge their energy for more scurrying about tomorrow!
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