Bill Arman, of the Harvest Group, an NALP consultant member, shared these tips in his webinar, Don’t Let Them Quit: How to Keep Your Keeper Employees.
Here are 5 simple ways that landscape and lawn care companies can improve their employee retention. Get these into place and they will help with keeping your keeper team members.
#1. Determine why people are leaving your company and fix it. These are the top reasons people leave:
- Bad Leadership or boss, people escape their boss not the company
- Bad culture
- Under appreciated and over worked
- Un-kept promises
- Lack of clear expectations
- Compensation: Non competitive pay rates and or bonus program
- Lack of feedback
Here are some suggestions to reduce the number of people who leave your company:
- Build leadership skills
- Adjust to better leadership behaviors
- Make it clear what is expected
- Lose the losers and sacred cows quicker
- Do a compensation check, adjust to the market
#2. Create a very effective hiring and on boarding process that brings new people up to speed with safety, productivity, consistent delivery and cultural alignment in a most expedient manner.
Here are some suggestions:
- Build a formal on boarding program
- Have a safe entry portal
- Have all PPEs, tools, uniforms ready
- Review status weekly with assigned coach or “buddy”
#3. Build and shape your culture.
Here are some suggestions:
- Build a vision and mission statement
- Determine the dos and don’ts
- Define the success behaviors
- Have a career ladder that shows future opportunities to aspire towards
- Build and maintain a healthy culture that excites people
- Remember that a great culture inspires people to aspire to higher level and to perspire to get there!
#4. Encourage and engage them.
Here are some ways to do that:
- Draw out a People Map (org chart)
- Rate each employee take good care of the best
- Allow employees to speak their minds freely within the organization
- Provide an environment in which people are comfortable providing feedback
- Have employees offer ideas, and feel free to speak up even on touchy topics
- Build leadership skills ands behaviors
- Have an annual planning session and get their input with surveys
- Engage key people with planning process
- Review plan status at least 4x /year
- Be competitive with pay and bonuses
- Make certain they know what is expected of them
#5. Educate and train your employees.
Here are a few ways to do that:
- Build solid training programs that link to the right results: productivity, safety, quality
- Provide training and education opportunities both internally and externally
- Encourage industry certifications
- Go on “road” trips
NALP members have free access to more than 100 archived webinars and dozens of new live webinars each year.
