You may have seen ‘quiet quitting’ splashed around LinkedIn or the news in the last few months. If you’re like me, it seems to have rather negative connotations, the term ‘quitting’ isn’t something that people like to be accused of, especially in healthcare professions which involve a serious amount of training, care and compassion. People aren’t quitting, they’re just getting the job done, no more ‘above and beyond’.
Just doing the work that you’re paid for should be the standard, not an act of mutiny.
Tayo Bero from the Guardian
So maybe quiet quitting isn’t so bad, maybe the current workforce are starting to get their priorities straight, and maybe when you resort to quiet quitting, you just need to start locumming instead!
Read on to see if I can convince you…
So, what does quiet quitting really mean?
Quiet quitting is essentially fulfilling your job description, without going above and beyond. Extra unpaid duties? No thanks. Staying late to finish something off? I’ll do it tomorrow.
Recognised as a trend mainly in the US compounded by the Great Resignation, quiet quitting employees are taking the reins and driving better working conditions. This is forcing employers to have a real good look at work-life balance, wellbeing at work, employee engagement and avoiding stress and burnout.
For a long time, employees (and that certainly goes for vets and RVNs), have only ever known ‘above and beyond’ as the way they work.
Why do people quiet quit?
There is huge debate currently about whether ‘quiet quitting’ comes from a resentful employee or rather from an employee who enjoys their job, but who just values their life and free time more than their work.
The main reason why people are quiet quitting is their desire to avoid high stress and burnout by taking work/life balance into their own hands
Employees might also start quiet quitting, not because they dislike their job, but maybe because they don’t feel compensated or appreciated for any extra unpaid labour, they’d normally offer to take on pure ‘just to help out’.
Many of the most common reasons for vets and RVNs to resort to quiet quitting are the following:
- Low pay (and would still get the same pay despite taking on extra duties or overtime here and there).
- Lack of opportunities for advancement (if the practice doesn’t invest in you, why should you in them?)
- Feeling disrespected at work (disrespected and unappreciated employees aren’t motivated)
- Childcare issues (staying late to do the rota isn’t an option when you need to do the school run)
- Lack of flexible hours
- Not having good benefits
It is common for vet nurses in particular to take on extra duties such as cleaning, ordering drugs, maintaining equipment and organising the rota. Many people will not be given extra time to carry out these roles and certainly no compensation.
Add in the compounding effect of a chronic veterinary staff shortage, and what might have once seemed like a small task when asked, might now lead to an overwhelming amount of pressure.
High-intensity jobs can easily lead to burnout and many people are leaving their permanent roles because of this. They still love being a nurse or a vet, but they just can’t take it anymore.
Quiet quitting and locumming?
Why might members of the veterinary profession become locums? A lot of the reasons correspond to and resolve the aforementioned issues:
- Choosing your own hours to fit around life and childcare
- Charging a rate that includes their bills, worth and profit
- Able to remove themselves from practice politics
In addition to this, locums have the opportunity to join amazing communities around the world which offer benefits like CPD, support, job satisfaction such as the Management for Locums community created by a locum RVN!
A job which lets you leave for the day without lingering pressures and duties, no requirement to go above and beyond your job description, you aren’t going to be late picking your kid up from school again – sounds too good to be true? Sounds a bit like a locum to me.
How lives improve with locumming
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of cons to locumming but when people give locumming a chance, they can reap rewards when it comes to time freedom and feeling valued.
Locums provide a crucial support system to practices which not only allows clinics to maintain good patient outcomes but also to relieve staff of stress, allow people breaks, and let them go home on time.
This value they provide can provide locum vets and nurses a lot more job satisfaction and especially if a practice is very vocally supportive of their work. Proper appreciation leads to increased motivation and therefore superior job satisfaction than what they might have previously had in permanent roles.
Can we achieve locum life in a permanent role?
This all begs the question, why can’t people achieve this lack of stress, flexible work hours, good pay and room for growth in permanent jobs?
People shouldn’t have to resort to locum jobs to achieve the work-life balance they want, but they often have to in this current climate. If practices embraced and accommodated people having lives and commitments outside of work that were non-negotiable then we might have a lot more vets and RVNs still happily in practice.
In my opinion, it’s the locums that these practices need to engage with in order to understand what drove them away from permanent jobs, which then enables them to build better and more sustainable permanent roles that people actually want.
ThisVetCan 