What do you really want from your Employees?
If you’ve ever had a problem recruiting workers, keeping them, or getting them to perform satisfactorily, then you’ve probably asked other employers for advice.
If you’re lucky, it’s been a problem solved and case closed situation.
But often, what works for one employer doesn’t work for another − and sometimes it even makes things worse.
“When it comes to labour management, one size does not fit all,” says Connie Kehler, executive director of the Canadian Herb, Spice and Natural Health Products Coalition. “Agriculture covers a lot of types of businesses, and even seemingly identical businesses can have very different individual circumstances.”
So does that mean it’s every employer for him- or herself when it comes to solving labour challenges?
Not at all, says Kehler.
“Our organization really emphasizes the outcome-base model,” she says. “You want to zero in on the result you want to achieve, gather some suggestions, and try them on a test basis to see if you get the outcome you’re looking for.”
Most employers secretly hope everyone they hire will be just like them – and are perpetually disappointed, says Kehler, who once owned and operated a small greenhouse.
“We work like dogs and we hope our employees will, too, even when we can’t afford to pay them very much,” she says. “Is it reasonable to expect they’re going to have the same passion and drive as we do?”
Rather than hope for the moon and be disappointed, it’s better to prioritize what you want from an employee, she says.
In her greenhouse business, quality work was usually the top priority. For example, in transplanting, placing the seedling at the wrong depth or not packing the soil around it properly will send plant mortality rates soaring and cost you big bucks later on. So your fastest worker could well be your worst employee.
So having set quality as a priority outcome, Kehler adjusted her management style accordingly. For example, after telling an employee how to properly do a task, she always asked that person to repeat what she had just said.
“That’s not easy to do because you’re always in a hurry – it seems you never have enough time – and you just want to tell the person, ‘Do it this way,’ and then get on to your next task,” she says. “But I’d force myself to take the time to ask them to regurgitate what I had just told them. They wouldn’t do it word for word, but you could pretty much tell if they got it or not.”
Of course there are other ways to encourage quality work.
Kehler always tried to explain why quality mattered. It’s obvious to just about anyone in agriculture that a slipshod transplanting job will hinder a plant’s growth or even kill it, but the person you hired might never have grown a plant in their lives (even if they said otherwise during their job interview). Other ways to foster quality include bonuses (for example, if plant loss is kept below a certain percentage) or giving workers the occasional chance to interact with customers and see firsthand how fussy they can be.
If productivity is the priority, you may want to consider other methods. For example, to compensate for the long, hard days during seeding and harvest, you might occasionally allow your staff to knock off early (with pay) during slow periods. Perhaps explaining to your staff why you’re asking them to work hard might help. (“To compete with off-shore imports, I’ve invested a lot in modern equipment, but we still need to achieve this production level to keep our doors open.”)
But again, one size does not fit all.
A $20 (or even $200) bonus might mean a lot to some workers, but be considered cheap and insulting by others. The same applies to job titles. One person might be thrilled to be appointed ‘assistant production technician’ while another might laugh and make cynical jokes about being “executive vice president of pig-slop logistics.”
In fact, says Kehler, there are hundreds of great labour management techniques that will be totally useless to you as an employer unless you’ve first determined your desired outcomes.
“I really believe this – you have to define what you’re looking for before you start grabbing training methods and trying to implement them,” she says. “I’ve managed people all my working life. There are things which are very effective in an office environment which I would never dream of trying to use on a farm. And what works fantastically on one farm might flop on another.”
It’s commonsense advice, but here’s the tricky bit – if you really have a priority list, then you also have a much longer one called ‘not important enough to make a fuss about.’
“If you want to keep people, there must be some give-and-take,” says Kehler.
“Decide what’s really important to you as an employer and let that define the job. Then look for methods that will encourage the employee to take ownership of the job duties you really need them to do.”
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