One to One Meetings in a Veterinary Practice: The Twenty Minutes That Prevents a Resignation

Last updated: 5 September 2026

TL;DR: Appraisals happen once a year and catch almost nothing. One to one meetings, held monthly for twenty minutes, catch the small problems while they are still small. Most veterinary resignations are not sudden. They are the visible end of something that had been true for months and had nowhere to be said.

Why do resignations feel sudden?

They rarely are. By the time someone resigns they have usually been unhappy for months, applied elsewhere, been interviewed and accepted an offer. The resignation is the last step of a process nobody at the practice saw.

What makes it feel sudden is that the practice had no routine place for the earlier steps to surface. There was the annual appraisal, which is too formal and too far apart, and there was the corridor, which is too public. Between those two, nothing.

One to one meetings are the thing that fills that gap. They are not appraisals, they are not performance management, and they are not a chat. They are a scheduled, private, predictable twenty minutes where the honest answer to “how is it going” has somewhere to go.

What is the difference between a one to one and an appraisal?

Frequency, formality and purpose. An appraisal looks backwards and produces a record. One to one meetings look at the next few weeks and produce actions.

• Appraisal. Annual, formal, written up, often tied to pay. Backward looking by design.
• One to one. Monthly, informal, brief notes only, never tied to pay. Forward looking, and mostly the other person talking.

The mistake practices make is running one to one meetings as mini appraisals. The moment they feel like assessment, people start managing their answers, and the whole value evaporates.

How often, and how long?

Monthly, twenty minutes, in the diary, with the same person each time. Every part of that sentence is doing work.

• Monthly is frequent enough that nothing festers and rare enough that it is sustainable in a practice that is already busy. Quarterly is too slow to catch anything.
• Twenty minutes is short enough to protect and long enough to get past the first answer. An hour sounds generous and gets cancelled.
• In the diary matters more than anything else. A one to one that happens when there is time never happens.
• The same person because these are cumulative. The value is in the fourth one, not the first.

For a practice of fourteen people that is about five hours a month spread across whoever line manages. It is genuinely cheaper than one resignation.

What do you actually ask?

Fewer questions than you think, and then silence. The most common failure in one to one meetings is a manager who fills every pause.

1. How has the last month actually been? Then wait. The first answer is always “fine”. The second answer is the real one.
2. What has taken more out of you than it should have? This is the question that finds rota problems, difficult clients and the colleague nobody wants to raise.
3. What is getting in the way of doing your job properly? Usually equipment, systems or a process, and usually fixable.
4. What would you like to be doing more of in six months? The retention question. People rarely leave a job where somebody is visibly interested in where they are going.
5. Is there anything you have been meaning to raise? The catch all, asked last, when they are warmed up.

Notice there is no question about performance. If there is a performance issue it needs its own conversation, and burying it in a one to one poisons the format permanently.

What to do with what you hear

This is where most practices lose it. People will tell you things once. If nothing visibly happens, they will not tell you twice, and the meeting becomes theatre.

Three rules cover it. Write down only the actions, not the conversation. Do one thing before the next meeting, however small, and say at the start of that meeting that you did it. Where the answer is no, say no with a reason rather than letting it disappear.

The point is not that every request is granted. It is that everything raised gets a visible response, which is the difference between being heard and being listened to.

What a one to one costs, against what a resignation costs

It is worth doing this arithmetic honestly, because “we are too busy” is the reason one to one meetings never start, and it does not survive the comparison.

Twenty minutes a month, per person, across fourteen staff is under five hours of management time a month. Set against that, losing one RVN costs the advertising, the manager’s time through a recruitment round, the induction period before they are productive, and the freelance vet cover or overtime that fills the gap in between. It also costs the rota strain that lands on everyone who stayed, which is the part that quietly produces the next resignation.

You do not need a precise figure to see which side is larger. Our guide to the cost of a bad rota works through the same maths on the scheduling side.

The three ways it goes wrong

• It gets cancelled. Once is understandable, twice tells everybody exactly what it is worth. If you cannot protect the slot, move it rather than dropping it.
• It becomes a status update. If the manager spends the twenty minutes describing what is happening in the practice, it has become a briefing. The ratio should be roughly eighty per cent the other person talking.
• It becomes performance management by stealth. The fastest way to kill a one to one is to use one to deliver a criticism that should have had its own meeting. Do that once and every future answer will be careful.

All three are failures of discipline rather than of the format. If one to one meetings have been tried before at your practice and fizzled out, it will almost certainly have been one of these rather than the idea itself.

The veterinary specifics

Three things come up in practice one to one meetings that would not in an office, and it is worth being ready for them.

• A bad case. Clinical outcomes sit with people for a long time. A one to one is often the first place someone will say that a euthanasia or a complication is still bothering them, and the right response is to take it seriously rather than to reassure it away. Acas has practical guidance on supporting mental health at work if you are not sure what to offer.
• Client behaviour. Reception in particular absorbs a great deal and reports very little. From 30 October 2026 the practice has a duty to take all reasonable steps to prevent harassment of staff by third parties, and a one to one is often where you find out it has been happening.
• The rota. Almost every retention conversation ends up at the rota. If the same names keep appearing in the out of hours count, the fix is structural rather than pastoral.

Where something raised is a formal matter, move it into the formal process rather than handling it in the meeting. Acas guidance on discipline and grievance sets out where that line sits.

Starting them without it feeling ominous

In a practice that has never had one to one meetings, the announcement lands badly if it is not explained. People assume performance management, because that is the only time anyone has ever been asked for a private meeting.

Say three things when you introduce them. Everyone is getting one, not just you. They are not about performance and nothing goes on your file. And if you have nothing to raise, we finish in five minutes and that is a good outcome, not a wasted meeting.

Then hold the first round exactly as promised, including finishing early where there is nothing to say. The format is established by what you do in month one, not by what you announced.

Frequently asked questions about one to one meetings

Who should hold them?

Whoever the person actually reports to day to day, which in a practice is often the head nurse or the practice manager rather than a partner. Split them so nobody holds more than about eight.

Should we keep a record?

Keep actions, not minutes. A short note of what was agreed and by when is useful and reassuring. A transcript of what somebody confided is neither, and it changes what people are willing to say.

What about part-time and bank staff?

They need them more, not less, because they are in the building less and hear less. Hold them at the same frequency even if it means catching someone on their working day rather than yours.

Do one to one meetings replace appraisals?

No. They make appraisals easier and much less dramatic, because nothing in the appraisal is a surprise by then. Keep both, and keep them clearly separate.

What if someone says nothing, every time?

Keep holding them. Some people take four or five before they use the space, and the ones who take longest are frequently the ones with most to say. Consistency is what earns it.

The practice view

Recruitment in this profession is slow, expensive and uncertain, and freelance vet cover in the gap costs more than either. Against that, twenty minutes a month per person is not a soft investment, it is the cheapest retention tool available.

Put the first round in the diary this week. If you want a structure for what to ask and how to record it without turning it into a performance review, our free HR health check covers it, and you keep the written summary either way.