Where does training sit on your priority list in the company? Where should it sit? These questions don’t have easy answers. The next question would be are you a growing company and how seasoned are your current employees? These answers help move training on the list. While training is always important growth will make it a very important part of the company.
Training is important for any employee, new and old. Making sure that there is a program in place is essential for a company’s success. Under-trained employees may lead to accidents, poor efficiency numbers, and poor team/employee morale. Any of these can impact the company negatively. This impact could be bad but when you factor in the growth of the company it can become disastrous.
Fast growth can exacerbate any problem that your company has. Fast growth means hiring employees at a fast pace and having new employees on most if not all of your crews. This can cause efficiency issues that must be planned for.
Typically, Commercial Landscape Management, like most companies, like to hire from within to fill positions as we grow. This is usually a great thing for aspiring crew members as well as it gives you an employee that knows you and your company routine. This knowledge is invaluable. If your training program is not good enough then you will lack the qualified individuals needed to promote during periods of growth. Fast growth is even harder to manage. Even if you are training very well then, the employee may still not be trained enough to move into new positions. This is the hard part of growth. It leaves management with few choices.
Promote a very green person into a new role and take your chances? This can lead to quality and employee issues from inexperienced employees. The only other option is to hire an individual from outside the company. In this market, that is a difficult task.
Finding a good employee to fill that spot is hard. Typically, getting that employee is going to cost more in payroll than hiring a person from within because you are going to hire a more experienced person who is going to ask for more money.
What if the other employees find out that the new hire is making more money than them? Will the new hire fit in the culture and work with the crew dynamics? This is a risk we take when hiring any person.
Growth is a science, a guess, and an art.
There is no good formula or chart that helps during this process. We can do the math and know what hard assets are needed for each revenue dollar. That used to be the easy part. Have you tried to buy a truck lately? Management can prepare and plan for growth. Timing is always going to be the question that needs answering.
Management must always have a training plan in place. It benefits everyone. Just remember that training never ends and that sometimes the labor pool requires more training than we are used to giving. In this day in age employees need more training than we are used to. This means management must plan more time for development and training staff to be with the crews.
Commercial Landscape Management have found it necessary to have a full-time trainer and culture ambassador on our staff. While it does add overhead to the company it is a vital part of our plans and success. As a growing company, Commercial Landscape Management will always going to need employees. This is going to be the biggest limiting factor in our growth.
Making sure that the crews can run daily with able individuals will allow us to succeed. The trainer is also a very big part of safety. Training to operate safely will help reduce insurance costs and keep the crews safe. Failure to do this will have increasingly negative impacts on the company’s bottom line as they grow.
Every company must take training and safety as one of the most important tasks that a company has. Fulfilling this task will allow for crews to perform efficiently which will positively impact your company culture and bottom line. It is a team effort to train and make a company a success.