Becoming a better employer

Becoming a better employer is not about warm fluffy stuff! Sure, you need good communication skills to do it and you need to treat people fairly but the primary aim of good employment practice is to operate a more productive business. If you have good staff working for you, who are engaged in their work and stay for more than 12 months, your business will be more productive. To attract and retain these people you need to be a good employer.

The general principles that you should observe are applicable in all employment situations:

Be respectful of employees

Staff choose to work for you just as much as you choose them to work for you. Respect and trust are the foundations of a working relationship. Offering respect includes actions such as:

• Greeting people in the morning
• Keeping your promises to them
• Asking their opinion and listening to them
• Minimising “out of hours” work recognising they have commitments outside the job
• Thanking them for the day’s work.

Get employees involved

When employees understand the goals of the business and are able to contribute to that goal, they will be more engaged. Their contribution can be at an annual level and with respect to day-to-day decision making. To make sure they are really involved, monitoring progress along the way and celebrating success really helps.

Give people the opportunity to grow

Growing and developing through work is a key requirement in a job for most staff. Understanding what they want out of the job can help you to put a development plan in place with staff that will help you both meet your goals. Working through Career Pathways is a good way for staff to develop their goals and sharing this with you helps alignment. Of course, you can also ask them what they want!

Developing people does not always mean sending them off to a course. There is a lot of on-farm training that can help towards a persons development goals and this usually does not get recognised. When people attend a course, it is important to discuss their learning with them and tie it back into the farming operation, and give them the opportunity to put their learning into practice.

Provide feedback

A lack of feedback comes through strongly from employees as an area where their boss could improve. Particularly look for opportunities to provide positive feedback. This is what engages people and keeps them putting in the extra effort.

It sounds simple, but often it’s easiest to implement these sort of ideas in consultation with others. Some ideas where to get more information and training on employment practice is provided below.

Resources available:

HR Toolkit

The HR Toolkit is a resource that pulls together a lot of the fundamentals of managing people. The HR Toolkit is available free to levy payers and in it you will find sections on:

• Getting people started
• Performance management
• Training and development
• Remuneration and retention strategies
• Leadership
• Communication
• Understanding peoples differences.

• For more information: www.dairynz.co.nz/hrtoolkit

Compliance Toolkit

The Compliance Toolkit helps to take the leg work out of compliance, particularly around people management. It clearly spells out what you need to do to be legal and helps you pull together documents to keep your business ship shape.

• For more information: www.compliancetoolkit.co.nz

Career Pathways

This tool will help your staff member to establish a vision for why they want to be working in the industry and establish training and development needs to achieve the dream. This will help align their goals with yours and can lead to a real win-win.

• For more information: www.dairynz.co.nz/careerpathways

Training available:

The Agriculture ITO offers a Certificate in Rural Staff Management. This is made up of four modules, one of which may suit your needs:

• Employer responsibilities (including legal)
• Managing staff performance
• Recruitment and selection
• Managing high performing teams
  
• For more information: www.agricultureito.ac.nz

Federated Farmers of New Zealand offers seminars focussed on legal responsibilities where experts answer your questions.

• For more information: www.fedfarm.org.nz