Thursday, March 28, 2024

Share the vision

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A DairyNZ survey has shown farmers rate the importance of their staff to the success of their business a nine out of 10.
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But almost half say they only ‘tolerated’ managing staff and 10% said they actively disliked managing staff.

Ronnie Briggs, of the DairyNZ people team, said many farmers also said they found it difficult to recruit staff and keep them.

“We can’t do a lot about the early mornings and the isolated locations but there is a lot we can do.

“We have to value our staff and their contribution to our dairying business. Surveys show that 29% of dairy employees have no job description, 32% of farms don’t run regular team meetings, only 23% conduct staff reviews and 42% do not have a working health and safety plan.”

She said farm staff should be viewed as a team which had a shared vision, values, knew each other well and used each other’s different abilities. Developing good teams started at recruitment and job ads should be written carefully to attract the right applicants.

“You can write an ad to make sure the people you don’t want won’t apply by putting in things like random drug testing is done on farm,” she said.

“But also you need to put in what is expected. Some ads for dairy farming assistants don’t even say if the employee will be milking the cows.”

Maintaining good teams meant regular team meetings where everyone had the chance to speak, as well as seasonal planning, creating good rituals and habits, celebrating success and having fun together off farm. Training was important to grow teams and should never be considered as an “add-on” or a “nice-to-do”.

“Training is an essential part of the process if you want to get the best from your team and therefore from your farm.”

Answering the “w” questions was a good way to approach it: why do we do what we do, what is the benefit, how exactly do we do it and what happens if we don’t do it.

DairyNZ has information packages on recruitment including job descriptions, skill checklists, how to run team meetings and carry out performance reviews. Visit www.dairynz.co.nz for further information.

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