In the demanding world of veterinary practice, keeping your best team members isn’t just a goal—it’s a non-negotiable. As practice managers, you’re facing extraordinary challenges in staff retention and recruitment. The good news? Artificial Intelligence isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a practical tool that you can use to better support and engage your team.

Evaluations and Check-ins with team members are vital to keep employees learning and growing. Managers consistently work to provide clear, actionable, and objective evaluations. AI can help you create more meaningful, consistent evaluations:

• Generate evaluation templates that focus on growth for your team
• Develop objective skill assessment frameworks that reduce or remove unconscious bias
• Suggest specific, actionable professional development recommendations based on an employee’s current skills and career aspiration

Here’s an example of a prompt you can use in AI to generate a performance template.

Remember when building prompts you should pretend AI is a person – like a mentor or a former boss you had that was excellent at giving reviews. Outputs are only as good as the prompts used. Communicate to AI like you would that person and provide sufficient details and feedback to get what you want.

Remember: if you are using free AI tools, do not load in any personal or confidential data.

Prompt: Pretend you are a practice manager at a veterinary clinic who wants to grow their team and provide consistent feedback. Please create a performance evaluation template for a front desk specialist with the following criteria:

• Focus on both technical skills and soft skills
• Include specific competency areas for a front desk specialist (strong communication, friendly appearance and tone, able to ask technical questions, ability to balance multiple tasks at once)
• Provide objective language for rating performance
• Suggest 3-5 personalized professional development recommendations based on the evaluation
• Ensure the tone is constructive and supportive

Recruiting the right team members is an art and a science. How will this person fit with existing team members or what complementary skills this candidate has can be helpful to cohesive team development. AI can be your strategic partner during the interview process:

• Create interview question banks tailored to veterinary clinic roles
• Develop scoring rubrics that help you objectively evaluate candidate responses
• Generate scenario-based questions that reveal a candidate’s problem-solving and emotional intelligence

Prompt: Pretend you are a practice manager at a veterinarian clinic who needs to hire a new person for a front desk role. Generate a comprehensive interview question bank for a veterinary clinic front desk position that:

• Includes behavioral and situational interview questions
• Covers key competencies: customer service, communication, stress management, and technical skills
• Provides a scoring rubric for evaluating candidate responses
• Include questions that reveal the candidate’s passion for veterinary care and ability to work in a high-stress environment
• Suggest follow-up questions to dig deeper into candidate responses

It’s important to have regular and predictable staff meetings and those meetings don’t have to be boring. AI can help you design interactive, meaningful team experiences:

• Generate creative team-building activity ideas
• Develop structured meeting agendas that balance work discussions with team appreciation
• Create prompt lists for open discussions about workplace satisfaction and team goals

Imagine an AI-suggested monthly meeting segment like “Team Wins and Challenges,” where staff can share both professional achievements and areas where they need support.

Prompt: Pretend you are a practice manager at a veterinarian clinic with a staff of X. Design an engaging 60-minute team meeting agenda for a veterinary clinic that:

• Balances professional development with team building
• Includes a segment for recognizing team achievements
• Provides 2-3 interactive activities that boost morale
• Offers discussion prompts about workplace satisfaction and team challenges
• Suggests a fun, team-building exercise that takes no more than 15 minutes
• Ensure the agenda promotes open communication and team unity

Every team member is as unique as your practice is. AI can help you create personalized engagement approaches:

• Analyze anonymous employee feedback to identify ways to improve management and workflow of the clinic
• Suggest tailored recognition strategies based on individual motivations using strategies from the 5 languages of appreciation at work (written by Chapman and White)
• Create customized professional development pathways

For instance, AI might help you recognize that a vet tech who loves learning could be motivated by specialized training opportunities, while another might value flexible scheduling due to family obligations.

Prompt: Create a professional development resource package for veterinary clinic staff that includes:

• 3-5 bite-sized training modules on emerging veterinary techniques that count as CE credit*
• Mental health and stress management guides specific to veterinary professionals
• Self-care strategies for high-stress medical environments
• Suggestions for peer support and team resilience building

*just remember to verify what AI provides as it still comes up with made-up information (called hallucinations).

While AI is a powerful tool, remember that it’s just that—a tool. While it can give you strategies and tactics to help with your culture and management skills, ultimately it’s the humans in the practice that build the culture that will keep and recruit the right staff for your team.

Ready to Transform Your Practice?

AI isn’t about replacing human expertise—it’s about amplifying it. By strategically implementing these AI-powered approaches, you can create a workplace that not only retains top talent but becomes a magnet for the best professionals in veterinary medicine.