Employee Management for Your Landscape Supply Yard Business

Introduction

Having a team of dependable, capable employees is an absolute game changer for a business, especially for a landscape supply yard. As your business and the catalog of products you carry grows, you’ll have no choice but to take on more help; many people wonder what the key is to actually finding reliable employees that you can trust your business with. Recruiting, developing, and maintaining employees is a constant challenge for any business; this page aims to provide a base on information for finding solid employees and maintaining those reliable people over the long haul. For a more in-depth look, attend the free Managing a Landscape Supply Yard course put on by the people at DeFeo Materials who call upon their years of experience managing a staff within a landscape supply yard to help guide you towards success. Here are the core tenets to better employee management.

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Recruitment and Hiring

Getting the right employees in the door is the obvious place to start when building a reliable workforce. This begins with attracting the kind of employees that can fit into the culture you have established and whose goals align with the long-term plans for your supply yard. The first line for many employees potentially interested in your business is the job description.

Job Description

A clear, concise job description lays out the fundamental role and expectations for the employee should they want to join your operation. This includes essential information such as the skills required of the job, flexibility for the many tasks within a landscape supply yard, as well as a general expectation for schedule and payment. The job description ensures whomever walks in for a job has their expectations set; the way it’s crafted can attract or deter certain people. 

Selection Process

With applications on the books, the selection process can begin to further limit your search for the right employees. The initial screening starts with resumes to see if they meet the basic requirements before you start interview rounds to dig into technical proficiencies and cultural fits. Sometimes multiple interviews are needed to determine if someone is truly a match for your culture and operation. From there, reference checks can be a great safeguard for understanding how your employee has done in past employment.

Onboarding Programs

When the match is right, you can begin to onboard an employee into your business culture and atmosphere. Provide orientations to show them the bigger picture such as company values and the day-to-day operations. Pairing a mentor to a new employee is a great way to build a personal relationship with them while providing essential information on culture and operations. Basic training gives fundamental knowledge to new employees who can begin to see how your specific landscape supply yard functions. Seek out opinions from your newest employees to get their take on what onboarding strategies were most effective. 

Training and Development

Once in the door, continuing to develop your employees contributes to your growth and evolution as a business. Well-designed training can drastically raise the competence of your workforce in the face of unique situations while maintaining higher morale and a greater commitment to the company. Your employees, who invest their time in energy in your business, want to see you invest in them as a return. 

Training Needs Analysis

To build an effective training program, you’ll need to understand the needs of your workforce. Skill audits give a picture of where knowledge is lacking in your employees. Future projections create a plan for which skills you need developed to ensure smooth operations as you grow. As always, hear feedback from leaders within your workforce about any areas where the staff is lacking in skills/knowledge.

Industry-Specific Training

Having industry-specific knowledge is key for your employees, especially when they’re engaging with a customer trying to fill a specific need. At the same time, when working with the material, having safety knowledge is essential to worker health and reducing accidents. Then, when engaged directly in the industry, employees can understand trends to shape/mold your business to stay up-to-date and competitive. 

Continuous Learning

External learnings such as online platforms can contribute towards a continuing education of your workforce. Interesting/engaging subjects can keep employees satisfied as they gain new knowledge in the field. Cross-training is a great practice to employ to create a well-rounded workforce, which can be especially important in cases of emergencies where a specialist is out. 

Employee Feedback

Always keep open channels with your employees for regular feedback on training and continuing education. Always be refining these training practices to make them more informative, engaging, and up-to-date with current practices. 

Performance Management

Productivity and efficiency are key to growing/maintaining a successful business. This stems from keeping your employees engaged and pushing themselves toward personal and professional goals.

Setting Expectations

With clear communication around expected roles from certain positions, you can ensure your employees understand what’s expected from them not only on a day-to-day basis but also more long-term expectations/goals. This open communication allows employees and employers to align personal and professional goals to give everyone the most out of the situation.

Performance Reviews

Periodic reviews give employees areas to improve while recognizing the areas where they excel. Having regularly scheduled reviews provides a canvas for feedback in both directions to help maintain aligned goals and missions. Tracking progress on goals during these meetings are a great check-in to see if everyone is progressing properly or if things need to be restructured to accommodate. 

Motivation and Incentives

Having incentives/motivations for employees can go a long way toward boosting productivity and morale. This can include reward systems to appreciate standout performances amongst the staff. Incentives/motivations can also look like a career pathway where there is a clear path for growth/advancement in the company. Also, sometimes breaks from work can create more productive employees upon return; try team-building events and recreational activities to foster a culture while giving their minds a break from work.

Handling Underperformance

Inevitably, there will be times where you notice underperformance amongst the staff. There are a few ways to address this to various degrees of seriousness. First and most lightly, constructive feedback can provide employees with direction on how to improve their performance. Sometimes, training interventions will be necessary to address potential shortcomings in knowledge/experience. Most structured, you can implement a performance improvement plan to give an employee a clear path with goals towards improvement. 

Employee Relations and Retention

Especially once an investment is made into an employee, retaining them and maintaining good relations is extremely important to the long-term success of your business. Maintaining employees will boost efficiency, cut turnover costs, and help in creating a healthy work culture.

Building Team Cohesion

Team building activities and regular communication channels build a greater team cohesion. Give employees a chance to know you and their colleagues on a personal level to boost morale and relations in the workspace. Ensure everyone feels comfortable coming to work every day.

Employee Benefits

Having solid benefits, including payment, paid time off, health insurance, etc. goes a long way towards maintaining employees. Understand that your workforce has a life outside of the business where they have needs and goals they’re striving for. The more your business can fulfill their personal needs, the more likely they are to stay on and engaged with your business. 

Conflict Resolution

Inevitably, conflicts arise within the workforce and between employer and employee. Having a clear, effective path towards resolving disputes is essential for positive work environments. Best practices include mediation settings with a third party, open-door policies where employees can easily air grievances to address them, and training managers/staff within on best practices to handle their own disagreements on the job in a respectful manner. 

Exit Interviews

When an employee decides to leave, for whatever reason, exit interviews are a great way to gain their perspective as they look back on the job. Sometimes, actionable feedback can be installed to help retain other employees, preventing the same mistakes from taking multiple employees. Maintaining healthy relationships with alumni employees is also key for future business relations and potentially re-hiring down the road. 

Leadership and Growth

Effective leadership is key for any successful, growing business. Roles need to be delegated while morale needs to be maintained. This comes from you at the top, but also from managers and team leaders down the structure of your business. 

Leadership Styles

Understand the types of leadership: transformational, transactional, and servant leadership. Understand what your style is and try to find other leaders who excel in other styles to create a well-rounded leadership structure within your business. 

Succession Planning

Inevitably, key employees may have to depart leaving holes in the leadership structure. Having succession plans, preferably already within the business, is critical to the smooth transfer of responsibilities to maintain efficiency and productivity. This starts by identifying future leaders, providing continuous education to your workforce, and planning for scenarios where you’ll be forced to make employee role changes. 

Employee Advancement

Having clear pathways for employee growth/promotions gives a goal to strive for increasing morale and loyalty. Promotion criteria gives direction for employees on which areas they should strive to improve. Giving access to skill development gives employees an easier opportunity to step into these greater roles. Always provide feedback to ensure the employee is doing the right things to maintain the correct path towards their goals. 

Mentoring and Coaching

Pairing new and old employees, or a specialist with someone getting new training, is the superior way to pass knowledge and build relations between employees. Regular check-ins maintain this relationship and keep both parties on the same page. Once goals are reached, success must be celebrated!

Pricing Analysis

Within employee management falls you and your general understanding of the ever-evolving industry. As the world is constantly changing, how will your business adapt?

Trends and Challenges

New trends like some technological advancements can be a way to improve efficiency while potentially saving costs. Staying up to date on new materials could be critical to maintaining your customer base as their desires shift. Within the space of materials, having a diverse selection as well as a diversion supply chain can counteract material shortages or disruptions in the supply. Always be evolving your business as new competition will arise; stay ahead of the competition! 

Industry Growth Factors

Understand the industry around your business. This includes staying up to date with and getting involved with urban development/infrastructure projects. Diversify your materials to appeal to both a retail and commercial audience by tailoring your stock to what customers want for their projects. 

Regulatory Landscape

Staying up-to-date with local, state and national regulations can be critical to saving yourself money and headaches. In particular, environmental regulations, zoning and land use, and safety/health standards are the main regulations you’ll encounter and want to stay on the right side of. 

Future Predictions

All because business is booming right now doesn’t necessarily mean that this will always be the case. Always be planning for the future by integrating the latest techs to keep your business looking and operating fresh. This included potentially using augmented reality features so that customers can see what their project looks like with different materials or updated websites to make online sales smoother and easier. Evolving your sourcing for materials such that you never run short on supplies is key for happy customers down the line. 

Conclusion

Employees are truly the lifeblood of any good business. Hiring, retaining, and boosting your employees to their very best is a multi-faceted project that starts from the top by creating a solid work culture where people enjoy coming to work everyday. Treating your employees both well as a person and well through benefits while continuing to push them towards developing their skills keeps them engaged in the success of your company and productive every day. For a more in-depth look at any of these subjects within employee management, be sure to enroll in DeFeo Materials free online course “Managing a Landscape Supply Yard”.