Michael Skudder, rural bank manager with ASB Bank and recent participant in the Kellogg rural leadership course, has written a report on employment trends since 2000 and how changes in the dairy industry have impacted employment.
He originally planned to look at factors in staff retention, but discussions with clients led the focus to evolve into employment trends.
“To start off with, staff retention was a consistent issue, then we got a drop in payout which saw farmers shift their thinking about retention to what can we do to have less staff. So I wanted to understand the cycles that are at play and how that affects employment, so it really turned into more of a literature review.”
Although his home base of Northland was chosen as a case study, he says his findings probably apply to the rest of New Zealand.
Skudder reviewed historic research conducted to identify themes behind the work and establish his own hypothesis. The common threads were collated into a survey with questions from both an employer and an employee perspective.
“If someone had the time and resources to do further work and have a singular focus, rather than the helicopter view I took, it could be worthwhile.”
Skudder’s survey was broken into sections of health and safety, farmer employment support, dairy payout influences, changing farm ownership structures and migrant workers. In the health and safety section, all participants recognised it as an area of concern but few felt prepared to do anything about it.
“It was a small sample, but I found the younger owners-managers-employers were more accepting of that change than the others. Again, it’s a bit of a generation gap. The younger guys are more used to the fact you can’t ask someone to do something if it’s unsafe.”
Help with employing staff also rated poorly in the survey, with most farmers feeling they didn’t get enough support or guidance through the recruitment process from the likes of DairyNZ and Federated Farmers.
Although there’s a raft of information from DairyNZ, there’s still scope to do more in the employment area to help farmers, Skudder says.
“Generally discussion groups tend to be a bit ‘old hat’. Sometimes it’s just a matter of letting people know what other information is out there and where to get it. They do things like the Tight Tactics days really well and it makes it real for farmers, so something along those lines perhaps.”
The dairy payout is influential in employment decisions, he found, saying during low payout years, labour was one of the first considerations to cut costs although it wasn’t sustainable for a prolonged period.
Skudder broke the last 15 years down into three time periods to show the national and Northland trends against payouts.
Period one: 2000-2002 – Under an improving payout scenario, the total people employed in the dairy industry in Northland lifted by 309 (4245 nationally)
Period two: 2002-2007 – Under a lower but stable payout, total people employed in the dairy industry in Northland fell 765 (5313 nationally)
Period three: 2007-2013 – Generally lifting and stable payout, total people employed in the dairy industry in Northland fell 102 (Lifted 3753 nationally).
“Northland was notably different in period three, likely due to Northland having minimal true dairy conversions coming on-stream with increased staffing demand.”
Skudder concluded while he had little to no concern the payout would recover and improve, when it did, farmers should consider investment in people and improved working conditions.
“Debt reduction and stabilising balance sheets, rather than seeking capital gain by further growth via amalgamation, could be considered to ensure they are in a better position to provide themselves and their employees a more stable employment environment.”
Keeping fresh
Skudder has been based in Northland with ASB for the last 15 years and says the Kellogg rural leadership course was an opportunity to challenge himself.
“You don’t want to turn stale, you need to keep things fresh and expose yourself to new ideas and networks – it’s sort of like pushing the reset button.”
He says the programme gave him the ability to get in contact with different leaders and leadership styles, which concreted his own values and the style he wants to adopt in the future, as well as reinvigorating him in his day job.
