Recruiting & Retention: A Guide For Tree, Lawn & Landscape Companies
Recruiting new employees and retaining great employees is something every business is concerned with right now. This is no different for the Green Industry. Lawn Care, Landscape, and Tree Care companies are all trying to solve this issue so they can serve their customers with excellence.
In this post, we’ll dive into six key areas that Landscape, Lawn Care, and Tree Care companies must address to recruit and retain top talent.
Career Advancement – Show Them The Way
The Green Industry is one of the career paths left where someone can put their head down, work hard, and get ahead. There is little room for politics and lots of opportunities to prove yourself.
Being deliberate with creating a path to advancement will pay huge dividends for your recruiting and retention efforts. In this post, we show you why this is so important for your business, and practical steps you can take to document this path. This is the first installment of our six-part series on recruiting and retaining your top talent in the Green Industry. Read the full blog here.
Build Excitement – Give Them Purpose
Monique Allen, the owner of The Garden Continuum, said on our podcast “We have to restore the honorable-ness of this profession.” We couldn’t agree more.
Giving people a sense of purpose, infusing excitement about healthy practices, energizing your workforce about the difference they’re making in the natural world around them – these things will help you retain great employees. We also take a look at the type of people you should target with your recruiting efforts, and how to incorporate storytelling for more effective recruiting.
You can take a deeper dive with our second installment “Give Them Purpose” by clicking here to read the post.
Cultivate Your Company – A Healthy Culture
When we dig holes in the ground and add a plant, we expect it to grow. We’ve all seen plants that thrive because they’re well-tended and plants that struggle due to neglect. And, if you’ve been around the industry long enough, it’s not hard to spot the difference.
It’s the same with your company’s culture. People will stay for a long time, develop professionally, and thrive when you have a great culture. If you’re battling a constant churn and high turnover, it may be time to take an honest look at the type of working environment you’ve created (or allowed through benign neglect).
Our third post explores what a healthy culture that attracts new employees and keeps great ones should look like. You can read part three of our recruiting and retaining series by clicking here to see “A Healthy Culture.”
Work/Life Balance – Employees Have Lives
One expression you hear frequently in the Green Industry is “You’ve gotta make hay.” The implication behind that statement is that you have to work crazy hard during Spring, Summer, and Fall in order to make sure you’re profitable as a Green company.
While hard work is certainly part of the equation, savvy Lawn Care, Landscape, and Tree Care companies know that their employees have other things going on in their lives. They’re parents, siblings, volunteers, coaches, and actors. They have a life outside of work that’s as important (or more important to them) as the work they do for you.
Part four of our series on how to recruit and retain examines the research behind giving employees a good work/life balance, and how it can impact your staffing. You can read that full post here.
Equip Them Properly – A Plan For Onboarding
Here’s a startling statistic: companies with a great onboarding experience improve retention by 82%.
If you want to spend less time and money working on recruiting, you should seriously consider the way you’re onboarding new hires. From paperwork, training, and internal mentoring, you should take a look at the whole process before your next hiring investment.
In the fifth part of our employee recruiting and retention series, we examine some of the key elements you should consider when onboarding new employees. If you click here, you can read the post.
Help Them Live – Pay & Benefits
There have generally been two trains of thought when it comes to wages and benefits for Tree Care, Lawn Care, and Landscape companies.
One school of thought says “You’ve got to pay people a ton of money to do this job.” The other says “Pay people as little as possible so that profits stay high.” Both approaches are flawed.
In this final post in our series on recruiting and retaining Green Industry employees, we’ll take a look at The Living Wage (that’s in caps because it’s an actual thing) as well as other benefits you should consider offering. You can read the full post by clicking here.
Download the Guide
To help you keep things on track for your Landscape, Tree Care, or Lawn Care business, we’ve created this FREE guide. It’s a downloadable PDF that condenses these posts and captures the high-level insights. It’s our hope that you grow your business in a healthy and productive way by having this resource available.