Your landscape or lawn care can only be as successful as your training programs. If you want to see improved profit, you first need to ensure your training programs are setting team members up for success.
“With the improper foundation, which is the knowledge of your people at the base level, you actually don’t receive the results you want to see at the top,” says Patrick Murray, managing partner of Local Roots Landscaping, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
One key to enhancing your training programs is to evaluate their effectiveness regularly. Murray says it’s important not to assume that something you created five years ago still suffices.
“We are in such a fast-paced and fast-changing environment with the generations of people that we’re hiring and the attention spans of people we’re hiring,” Murray says. “With the learning tools that exist online in other parts of our lives, we cannot separate our businesses and our training programs apart from how the world is interacting with other things.”
He says companies need to be okay with reinventing the wheel. Utilizing technology and adapting to shorter attention spans can help elevate your training.
“We can’t be stuck in this idea where we can have people watch 30 to 45-minute videos on how to safely run an excavator,” Murray says. “That’s just that’s not our day and age.”
Make It a Priority
One of the major pitfalls of company training programs is it’s hard to keep up with during the busy season.
“That’s why it’s on our weekly meeting status with our managers,” Murray says. “He has to come with reports every week. I require him to give us case studies from the week prior so that accountability is there.”
In these weekly reviews of training, he stresses that it shouldn’t just be a binary question of whether it’s going well or not. Dig into the details of what trends are coming up. Murray says part of making training a priority comes down to delegating the task to the right people who have the incentive and passion for training.
“For us, that is our production and account managers,” Murray says. “The people who are with the field team members. They’re incentivized for our company to do well, their crews to do well.”
He notes that you shouldn’t expect to see an instant payoff with training. It can take years for the improved training program to become part of your company’s DNA.
Keep It Engaging
Training should be empowering for your team members.
“They don’t see that top-down training like we’re training you this because you don’t have the knowledge,” Murray says. “It’s ‘Hey, we’re empowering you to learn this so that you could teach others and be better at your job and be prouder.’”
One way to make your training more engaging is to create a feedback loop. Murray says in the past they would assume if they weren’t hearing anything, then all must be going well. Now, they have boots-on-the-ground management assessing their teams and conducting Google Surveys to compare trends and analyze what action items are needed.
He says they are conducting consistent check-ins to evaluate what’s working and what’s not. Murray encourages other owners to delegate authority to team members so they have the autonomy to make decisions.
“Sometimes I can be hesitant to make a decision fast enough and be like, ‘Oh, we’ll just see if it works,’ when really if I would have listened to my people below me, I would have cut it off a lot sooner,” Murray says.
He says you also have to figure out ways to make your training fun. Murray says one way he hopes to make training more engaging is to have the employees in training create certain videos for their company TikTok account, giving them agency and highlighting their retention of the learned skill.
Gamification is another way you can make training more engaging. If you’re quizzing team members on knowledge-based information, why not turn it into a Jeopardy game? The employee with the highest score could receive a gift card or an extra PTO day.
Utilize Available Resources
If a portion of your workforce is Spanish speaking, make sure you’re giving them all the resources necessary for an even playing field. Murray says having a proficient bilingual employee on hand to help with training can be huge.
He says Greenius has English and Spanish-speaking options they have utilized. NALP also offers some of our most popular landscape certificate courses and certification programs and resources in Spanish.
The Landscape Management Certificate course is a quick and easy way to ensure your team members have mastered the basic landscape management knowledge needed to succeed. Meanwhile, the Landscape Technician Bootcamp includes 44 detailed lesson plans grouped in five categories that is self-paced.
Murray also encourages leveraging your veteran employees’ experience by empowering them to do the teaching and the training.
At the end of the day, he says the keys to enhancing your training are to keep trying new strategies, create a constant feedback loop, make it fun and be consistent.
