Why You Need To Support Your Farm Staff [Opinion]
January 20, 2021 To be a successful business owner, you need to have a fair amount of confidence. After all, vision and leadership are necessary elements to any business. It’s important, however, to not lose sight of how important employees are to reaching your goals.
The Petrocco family (featured in this month’s cover story) laid out a great formula for building a team that can carry a business: 1) Hire the right people; and 2) Support them through training and rewards.
I’ve spent most of my career talking to business owners. And I can tell you that as simple as the Petrocco formula may seem, it needs a lot of planning to carry off.
Hire the Right People
Hiring the right people sounds easy. But in order to attract the right people, you need a reputation as a company that rewards loyalty.
If your whole strategy of finding great labor is in your salary, then you’re going to be disappointed with the results. While pay is important, it’s only the starting point. If working for you is less satisfying than working for other farms, word will get around in the tight-knit labor community.
You need to have a reputation as an operation that is fair, that supports its crew outside of making payroll. If you lose that reputation, an already tough labor market will be much rougher for you.
Train and Support
Many think that if they hire the right people (i.e., people with the skills to do the job), the need for training is minimal. I’ve visited (and occasionally worked for) companies whose idea of training is a two-hour orientation about company policy.
It’s true that motivated, talented staff will figure things out from their peers if they’re left to train themselves. Unfortunately, not everyone is motivated.
Also, when you leave crews to get on with things on their own, they will do just that. By default, they will determine your company’s policies. That’s because they’ll adopt whatever works for them. You will not be in control.
Petrocco Farms’ policy of having a matter of fact, non-shaming retraining session as soon as a weakness is spotted is one way you can ensure your company culture is exactly what you need it to be. Coupled with recognizing a job well done in front of peers and supervisors, it builds a healthy workplace.
That’s the kind of farm that will have an advantage in recruiting a great crew.
Oh, One More Thing…
Do just a little digging and you’ll find there’s a mountain of free resources for employee training.
Here are a few techniques company owners tell me works for them:
1. Get Feedback from Your Team
Want to avoid being the last to know that employee morale is awful? Find ways to get honest feedback. Some use anonymous surveys, others hire outside consultants to do interviews, and others hold regular focus groups.The only way these techniques work, of course, is if you do something about what you learn.
2. Keep Your Goals High
If you’re measuring your team’s success by a particular benchmark, then your team should know exactly what’s expected of them.
3. Make Resources Easy to Access
As farming gets more technical, it makes work easier overall. But it also forces your team to troubleshoot new types of problems, often when they’re in an isolated area. Make sure you equip them with devices that have step-by-step instructions on how to operate any equipment they’re authorized to work on.
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