In Minor's League: March 2000

QUESTION:We are looking at ways of making our employees more efficient. Can you provide some insight on this subject?

ANSWER: First, let me congratulate you for focusing on the most important aspect in expense control of a landscape management or landscape construction operation. While employees are our biggest assets, personnel costs are the most significant expense items on our financial statements. Ensuring that your people are more efficient than your competitors’ employees means the difference between acceptable and less-than-acceptable profitability – even more importantly – in the pricing structure of your services.

With that in mind, here are some simple concepts that are critical to getting the most out of your employees. These concepts, quite frankly, are not rocket science, but you would be amazed how many landscape companies do not adhere to these philosophies.

1. Establish goals for all your employees. At the very least, the goal for your key field people should be meeting their budgeted hours. This information should be communicated every day before any service crew of any type leaves your facility. Staff members need to understand your expectations if you want them to meet those expectations. This is why establishing goals is the critical first step.

2. Monitor those goals. Each day when the crews come back in, you or your managers must determine how they performed in comparison with the established goals. This monitoring process needs to be done as soon as the crew comes in or the next morning, at the very latest, to reinforce the importance of these achievements.

3. Give feedback on the goals. Without feedback, establishing or monitoring goals is immaterial. You can give feedback in a number of ways. The most obvious way is communicating your feelings about the employee’s performance. Simply said, praise or reprimand based on the performance.

Obviously, when I talk about reprimanding, don't take that too literally. Feedback can be either positive or negative. How you give that feedback is important. Praise should be done both privately and publicly. Criticism should never be given in a public environment.

Another way to give feedback is by charting your crews’ progress daily using scoreboards in your warehouse with everyone’s name listed on the board alongside their budgeted hours. Each day, post their actual hours. The benefits of this approach will be realized in a number of areas, the most important being the power of peer pressure.

Seeing this evolve over time in my years in business, I was amazed at the peer pressure that emerged as crew members compared performances. This type of pressure is not necessarily bad if you and your managers focus on the right areas. For example, by increasing efficiency, you can charge your customers less and conceivably pay your employees more. The feedback aspect of these strategies cannot be overstated.

4. Establish rewards for achieving goals. There are very few individuals who will work extremely hard simply because goals are put in front of them. But there are many people who will work very hard if there is a reward for achieving their goals.

For field people, the reward must be immediate. By immediate, I mean no later than one month after achieving the goals. Monitoring and feedback must be ongoing. The payout for goal achievement must be made as soon as possible. With mid-level and senior managers, you can establish a similar reward system used with less regularity, perhaps annually, based on a profit-sharing plan or the like.

Trying to increase your efficiency is certainly an admirable goal. Efficiency must be examined every year, if not every month. Painting a picture of the expectations you have for your employees is imperative — but that is not enough. Monitoring the goals, giving feedback on the goals and rewarding for goal achievement will ultimately lead to increased efficiencies.