Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Dairy bosses are best employers

Avatar photo
In the first-ever Primary Industries Good Employer Awards dairy farmers Ben and Nicky Allomes won the top accolade, the Minister of Agriculture’s Award for Best Primary Sector Employers.
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Woodville dairy farmers Ben and Nicky Allomes have been named the Best Primary Sector Employers. 

The couple, who own Hopelands Dairies, also won the Innovative Employment Practices award.

“They have creatively solved the age-old problem of work-life balance by investing in a rostering system that allows their workers ownership of when they work and what they do on the ground,” Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor said.

“They have also shared this knowledge with their community.”

The primary industries employ about 350,000 people – one in seven working New Zealanders and as many as one in three in some regions, O’Connor said.

“Attracting and keeping this hard-working talent is a significant challenge and we recognise those exceptional employers who are committing to good employment practices such as training, paying and treating staff well.”

The Allomes take an unconventional but effective approach to being employers and it works, Ben Allomes said.

“We have the philosophy that our team are our customers and that our whole staffing structure is customer-led. 

“So the team takes the lead on how they want to be rostered and organised.

“I know how many hours I need worked on the farm and then it’s up to the team to work out who does what hours, when and how many different people we need to make that work.”

The couple had long ruminated on finding a way to make their dairy farming system and equity partnership business fit around the people available and willing to work in it – rather than taking an inflexible system and trying to find the right people to fit it.

So the Allomes stripped out the standard hierarchical method and moved to a system based on the motivations and interests of all the team.

“You have to understand your people – what are their motivations?” Allomes said. 

“Some people want to do just the one job and be an expert at it and we get really good value and efficiency from them – they love being the expert in their area and they are the one who knows how to run that system.

“Some others like to keep learning and expanding their skill set and that is the job of management, to identify that motivation and help them become more competent and skilled one skill-set at a time.”

Other people want to work 45-50 hours a week out of choice while others who cannot or do not want to work longer hours are quite happy to fill in the gaps.

New Zealand has fairly low unemployment but notably high underemployment, he said.

“Many people in our community, for whatever reasons, can’t work full-time but want more part-time opportunities. 

“On farms we have an amazing opportunity to package our jobs up in much smaller bites that can make jobs more available.”

Employers today must pay some heed to the needs and aspirations of young people, he said.

“They want to feel part of a business and have some responsibility.

“It may be as simple as being in charge of the water system or power or mating – something narrow but also with important implications for the farm. 

“This means that from day one even the most junior person is a boss and they like it and so do all the staff.

“Standardise the role, not the person. 

“The jobs we want to get done don’t really change but the person changes so we need levels of responsibility of being able to fulfill the roles.”

Allomes prefers that approach over the old system of employing new farm assistants and throwing a whole lot of jobs at them, which they could perform to a low level of competence, and risking overwhelming them.

“This way you take someone on to do one job and they are trained and competent then you introduce another job. They grow in confidence and want to do more. Instead of their skills lifting horizontally across the job they really master one thing before moving on broadening their experience in other areas.

“And, as farm owners it offers us flexibility over how we run our own operations and the ability to offer work of all types to the local community.”

Recent statistics show about 36,000 people working on NZ dairy farms. About half are employees, 45% are business owners including farm owners, sharemilkers and contract milkers and the others are unpaid family members.

Allomes said employers across the primary sector should take active interest in their staff and know what appeals to them and motivates them.

“We shouldn’t treat others how we expect to be treated. Instead, we should treat others how they expect to be treated.”

The awards are run by Agmardt and the Primary Industries Ministry.

Total
0
Shares
People are also reading