Mike Rorie at GROW! 2013

4 High Impact Ways to Become a Better Employer in the Landscape Industry

Owning a business and employing people can be very rewarding but also very stressful. It’s something I talk about often at trade shows and industry conferences, and a topic I wrote about in one of my recent Snow Business columns. In fact, I’ll be covering this topic next week at the SIMA Symposium in my Thursday morning session (hope to see you there).

As a business owner, you have a responsibility to your team to provide a safe, inviting and productive workplace. You also need to make sure the business is profitable and everything is getting taken care of as it should. It’s a lot to take on, and all too often (especially in the green and white industries) we as owners try to do too much of it on our own, something that can threaten your ability to grow the company.

So in order to set yourself up for success and growth, you have to focus on developing your people rather than getting tasks done. Build your A-Team. It’s your greatest opportunity for success. When you have your team in place, you will be able to take your company places you never could alone.

4 High Impact Ways to Become a Better Employer

There are many components to being a great employer, but these four tips are easy to implement, pretty fundamental and they will take your team and your company far:

  1. Create and share a compelling vision- What do you want for your company and your employees? They need to know and they’ll help you get there if they know.
  2. Give your employees great systems- Systems increase productivity and reduce turnover.
  3. Work hard to retain the proper talent-  When your staff members become the gatekeepers, good things happen.
  4. Recognize, reward and replace talent- Pay attention to who is exceeding expectations, who is improving the fastest, who is taking on more responsibility etc. Recognize these people and reward them for it.

At the end of the day, it’s easy to get distracted and caught up in what needs to get done. It’s hard to focus on developing our team members.  If you can put these four things in place, it won’t feel so hard. Your employee retention rate will go up, your people will be happier, and they will contribute much more than their job description asks of them.

I’ll elaborate on these four points and more at the SIMA symposium in Minneapolis, MN on Thursday, June 20 from 9:45 to 11:15. If you can’t make it to my session, stop by an see us at booth 821 and we can chat one-on-one about the topic.

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