5 Key Ways to Improve Your Employee Retention       - The Edge from the National Association of Landscape Professionals

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 5 Key Ways to Improve Your Employee Retention      

Bill Arman, of the Harvest Group, an NALP consultant member, shared these tips in his webinarDon’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

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