Staff, The Core of Our Business

Ergh, the mention of the word staff amongst the farming community (and probably many employers for that matter) is enough to give you a cold sweat, “I can never find staff” “They are all useless” “Nobody wants to work anymore” ring any bells? Heard it all before? Well I am here to tell you that it’s never going to be perfect but it can work well.

What if I told you that the likelihood is, they aren’t the problem you are? Don’t switch off here. Hear me out.

What if I told you, you’ve been looking for the wrong people, in the wrong places or you have been accepting something less than mediocre out of desperation? But what got you to the point of desperation?

We are so fortunate to have a good, committed team of staff and by team, I include myself and Ed in this bracket. I may not be as visible as he or the rest of the team are but we are a team. My role is doing this (yeah, blogging isn’t exactly a job but its part of the bigger picture), raising children takes a huge chunk of my time too but also doing the bookkeeping, researching products, organising and attending training, helping with the other office bits like farm assurance, milk buyer paperwork, passports, you name it. If it requires a computer or a pen and paper, you’ll generally find me there.

Recently as part of our continued training and development, our milk buyer included that we should attend ‘Management Training’ I had already attended a brilliant workshop organised by Women in Dairy, hosted by Grosvenor Farms and facilitated by Paul Harris of Real Success. My background is actually civil service, the job centre to be more precise and whilst I am thankful for the outlook and experiences this role gave me, quite frankly it was awful. At the time, I never anticipated that I would marry a dairy farmer and play an active role in a business that I knew nothing about but that’s the point. Nobody goes into or falls into farming because they are top notch business managers or because they have a desire to manage or be part of a team of staff. They go into farming because they are good at managing animals or crops. Farming has become something much bigger than milking a few cows and popping to market once a week. There are so many other hats that one must now wear and to expect everyone to be good at everything is quite frankly unrealistic. So here is where I organised for Ed and some other farmers to attend training with Paul Harris, of course Covid played its part in our organisation which meant that ordinarily classroom/face to face training had to become a Zoom call but actually, this worked out for the better and meant that attendees only had to give up time for the actual training and not travel time but also that people from the outer most of Scotland and the southern most of England could all be in the same room so to speak which quite frankly was a breath of fresh air in a time when all shows and social events had been cancelled. But what did we take from the training?

• Hire attitude, you can teach skill later

• How to identify and handle different personalities amongst team dynamics

• How to effectively advertise to attract the right candidates

• How to make staff feel valued

There was so much more that we took from this training but most of all that usually if a team member isn’t aligned to the team, usually its down to how you as a manager have or are handling them – this could be from the beginning such as not hiring the right person or it could be at another stage where they have either not felt valued or simply how they have been spoken to. So just as a little food for thought, next time you are bashing your head against a brick wall and thinking ‘they have got to go’ ponder where in the system things may have broken down and how it may have been handled differently. As a manager it is your job to adapt to them, not the other way round but none of us will ever be perfect!

If you’d like to know more about this training or anything related to people management on your farm, I recommend you contact Paul Harris at Real Success Ltd. You can find contact details and more information here: www.real-success.co.uk