The message began like this, “Wait just a minute Tony! Do you expect me to believe that by making people feel important and having a consistent stop time we can REALLY get our landscaping employees to stay longer? I’m not buying into this. Our employees are asking for higher pay and health insurance for crying out loud.”
Here’s what thirty four years of making payroll has taught us…
If you want to attract, hire and keep good people, you need a simple plan.
You need a plan that makes the employee prospect have HOPE about THEIR future…
And especially….hope about the future of opportunity while working at YOUR company.
Allow me to explain.
Step 3 – Create Awareness of Opportunity
I shared in step 1 that people leave you because they don’t feel important. Now I’m about to share the very best way YOU can help people FEEL important.
You must become their teacher!
The very best employee retention system means that YOU are going to develop a plan to bring on people with the lowest level of physical and mental capacity necessary to perform a job within acceptable levels of quality. The lower the initial skills required upon hiring, the less you can pay this person at the start. Low pay rates help you keep your business costs down.
Why do most fast-food restaurants hire young, no-experience, first job ever employees? Because they can hire them to work for low wages AND they know they have a SYSTEM to train them quickly. You need a similar training system in your company.
Now, before you get your feathers ruffled and say – landscaping ain’t the same as fast food work – I already know that. But hear me out.
The average length of tenure for USA employees is 4.2 years, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average tenure for workers in the age range 25 to 34 was just 2.8 years. Use these benchmarks and go look in your employee records. How does your employee roster compare?
When you make a commitment to teach, train and HELP people understand how to MOVE UP in your company, you’ve discovered the single most powerful retention tool ever created.
Engaged minds don’t feel the need to look elsewhere for a new job. If an employee feels like they have the chance to grow, they will stay with you longer than you might expect. If you are teaching, training and coaching on a regular basis, your company will help people feel important!
I’d like you to think of this as teaching a person how to walk up a set of stairs. One step at a time, you move up, up, up. The person willing to take a series of upward steps is rewarded with higher pay and greater personal satisfaction from their job.
If your company has survived beyond 5 or 10 years, I’m almost willing to bet you’ve had a person or two who learned a lot while working there. The more they learned, the more valuable they became for your company. And the longer they stayed, they saw their pay increase as a result of their experience.
Now go back to the median length of employment for 24-35 year-olds in the USA. It’s just 2.8 years.
Build a training program that teaches an entry level employee how they can increase their pay 50% to 100% in 2.8 years and I’ll bet your retention goes up, up, up.
Think about your first 2.8 years working in this business. Did you find a level of excitement and positive energy learning NEW things? I’ll bet you said YES.
The more you train, the longer people stay. Period.
If your company is lacking a well-defined training program, then you’re a candidate for the 13-Module Build Your Team Training Program. Learn more here.
Let us know what you think about retaining lawn and landscape employees.
Tony Bass, founder
866-923-0027
PS – This is part 3 of a 4-part plan to improve retention of lawn and landscape employees.
You can find part 1 in this series right here.
You can find part 2 in this series right here.
When you are ready…
There are three quick ways we can help you enhance your systems for finding, recruiting, hiring and retaining super star employees.
- Purchase a copy of our little-known book titled 50 Ways to Find, Recruit, Hire and Retain Super Star Employees. The print book comes with an audio (4) CD set read by the author. Yes, there really are 50 unique ways to enhance your employee systems and we share the details, the scripts, the job offers and little-known government programs to help you get big-time tax credits for hiring certain workers. Click here to purchase.
- Get immediate digital access to The Automatic Hiring Machine training program. You can learn the 11-steps to build a recruiting system that automatically sorts, sifts and selects the very best employee prospects from the lazy and unreliable duds. Click here to order online and get started this weekend.
- You can hire us to help you build your very own Automatic Hiring Machine. If you are super-busy and want to move forward quickly, we can help. Please understand that we reserve the right to limit our services via our non-competitive exclusion zone in some markets. Order the Automatic Hiring Machine implementation service by clicking here.
