Friday, March 29, 2024

A new measure for success

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For Canterbury dairy farmer and DairyNZ developer Dana Carver, it’s better to train someone and lose them than not train them and keep them.
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Carver, part of the People team at DairyNZ, focuses mostly on wellness projects within the organisation, but has observed the benefits of training and development onfarm first-hand.

“There’s two main reasons for training. One, you’re going to get better efficiency onfarm,” Carver said. 

“Training is one of those things where you can get efficiency within a couple of months. With reviews and recruitment and things like that, it can sometimes take a year or two to see the benefits, but with training it’s often within a couple of months.

“And two, for the industry. We can’t all be thinking is this going to suit our farm – we’ve got to be thinking that we do not have the capability that we need at the moment so we’ve got to be part of building that up.”

Carver reckons an employer should not be afraid to invest in training simply because they fear increased staff turnover as their people progress. She said it took about 18 months to build a reputation in the industry as a supportive and progressive employer, as somebody who teaches the next generation – a reputation beneficial to attracting good new recruits.

“So even if every couple of years you are turning them over, you’ve got good new people coming in. I think that we’re kidding ourselves if we think we’re going to get people and keep them for five or six years.

“In my opinion we can’t be measuring our success on turnover, we have to measure our success on how quickly we can get somebody good back in.”

For Carver, onfarm training needs to be at the core of any development plan, accounting for about 80% of the learning load.

“I think off-farm training is a cop-out if that is all you’re doing. We have to have it there, and it’s great, but in farming it’s all about the practical. 

“Maybe in other industries that’s not true. But if somebody’s coming to me to work, I want to see the practical experience. I am glad to see that they have the discipline to go through the course – and the knowledge – but I want to see the practical application.”

Off-farm training was still important, but the learning done in the classroom needed to be integrated and reinforced onfarm.

“To me, off-farm is bonus, but onfarm is a necessity.”

One strategy Carver has employed in the farming business she is part of is to let the person doing the off-farm study drive an area of responsibility onfarm.

“Sit them down and say what have you learned and have you learned anything that you would like to try and implement here?”

“We had one of our herd managers doing a course and he was learning all about calf rearing and he came back and said more navel infections actually come from a dirty calf trailer that they do from the actual navel not being iodised. We knew that was one of the issues, but we thought here’s some passion – so he created a system where we always left the trailer in the sun and then on Sunday it got a much bigger clean than we used to. He took ownership.”

Carver said there wasn’t a need to focus overly on systems – integrating off-farm learning could be as simple as asking that person what they had learned and if they had any ideas for improving practice onfarm.

“To me, development is knowing who they are and what they want, helping them grow as a person into the industry.”

Tying in with the dairy industry wellness project Carver is involved with at DairyNZ, farmer workload rates as one of the top stressors facing dairy farmers – just the sheer amount of work there was to do.

“And what do we think is driving this? They thought the biggest issue with workload was really just the lack of investment into people, and time management. Because once we can manage time better and we can actually delegate – that’s really the only answer to the workload problem.”

  • Write a training plan for each employee detailing what training they need or want, and why, in conjunction with the employee; decide if onfarm or off-farm training will be most effective.
  • Discuss existing skill set with employee and agree on any gaps between where they are at and where they need to be; find out in what areas the employee is interested in learning more.
  • Schedule regular and structured onfarm training into the roster and provide encouragement and support for completion; let employees practice new skills onfarm, post-training to cement the learning.
  • Mentoring is effective when people have just taken on a new and challenging role or are looking for such an opportunity. The desire for new skills and learning at these times is heightened so people have a greater focus.
  • Delegation gives people an opportunity to grow and learn new skills. It can be a win:win situation – the manager frees up some time and the employee gets to develop.

 

• Check out the people section of www.dairynz.co.nz for resources and templates to help structure a training and development plan.

 

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