Opinion: Regular staff development matters in farming
© Elen31/Adobe Stock In winter, our local training group goes into overdrive. Lynne Wilson, the indefatigable organiser of Holbeach Marsh Training Group, is at her busiest when the farming calendar is quiet.
No one on our farm gets to escape her crusade for personal development, but each year the individual subjects that each of us covers get more specialised and esoteric.
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The days when everyone on the farm could do everyone else’s job if required are now long gone. We are each focused on very different aspects of the business.
This week, Sam is tuned into Association of Labour Producers webinars, to learn about new employment legislation, and James and Chris are mastering the telematics on the new John Deeres which have just arrived.
Mick, who runs our workshop, has just become a qualified PAT tester. I don’t even know what that means. I thought Pat Tester was a character in Eastenders with big earrings.
The one area where we all come together is health and safety and first aid training.
I made a threat that “if no one volunteers, everyone has to do it”, but my bluff was well and truly called and so now we are having to hire in extra training dummies and rent the village hall to accommodate everyone.
As our team continues to grow, it pushes my abilities as a manager. The job we do – growing luxury goods, on a budget, in the countryside – has many competing objectives.
We could grow cheap flowers, if environmental impact wasn’t a consideration. We could do wonders for biodiversity if we weren’t constrained by such tight margins.
We could offer better working patterns for the team if retailers would fit their ordering systems around us, instead of us around them. We could offer fantastic customer service if there were fewer employment regulations.
The reality is that we have to navigate each of these challenges and find solutions by orchestrating a team of people with special skills and individual passions to deliver a common goal.
With this is mind, a couple of weeks ago, it was my turn to go back to an over-heated classroom and eat a beige buffet. I was booked into a course titled “Making Appraisals Work”.
In the corporate world, the concept of staff appraisals isn’t regarded as particularly radical, but in the farming world, it is greeted with much more scepticism.
The course really clarified in my mind how important it is to have regular conversations within a team and that there should be a dialogue where both parties do their fair share of speaking and listening.
I am also well aware how much more difficult it is to do this in agriculture, where many of us work in a small team, or with family members, or are required to manage people who are older and more experienced.
Most farmers don’t like talking about how they feel, they don’t like making plans or setting expectations. They just like working hard and doing that which is already proven.
The new year is a great time to set your objectives for the year ahead, to question your strengths and weaknesses, and to talk about how you are going to turn yours plans into action, and your actions into results.