Top leadership tips to help dairy workforce thrive
© Adobe Stock How is profitability increased by focusing on employee wellbeing and a positive work environment?
Dr Ellen Joan Ford, a leadership expert from New Zealand, says that a leader’s job is to create an environment where people can thrive, and direct that thriving energy at whatever it is that needs to be done.
See also: What makes a good employer on a dairy farm?
“When people have better [workplace] experiences, they do better work and they make organisations more money,” she says.
Ellen places a lot of emphasis on the importance of caring for staff and understanding what matters to them outside work, as a means of improving staff retention and productivity.
“The more you care about people, the more you get out of them,” she maintains.
She says there is no step-by-step recipe to creating a thriving workplace; instead, baby steps to improve the workplace culture can be effective.
Ellen advises the following:
Focus on outputs, not hours
This means having a flexible approach to working hours or working patterns, to allow staff to do what they want/need to do outside work too.
For many, this means working around parenting and caring responsibilities, but it can also apply to sports or hobbies.
It could involve shorter shifts, to fit within a school day, or even tweaking milking schedules.
“Make it easy and you’ll get so much out of them,” she says.
Ellen describes one dairy farm that changed its milking times to fit around the school bus pick-up and drop-off times, so people could be with their children before and after school or share responsibility for picking up each other’s kids from the bus stop.
© Dr Ellen Joan Ford
“Their production of milk went down by a small percentage, but they said revenue overall and profit went up far more, because they actually retained their staff,” she says.
“They actually think they can get the milk production back to where it was anyway.”
Get the team together
A good place to start is getting team feedback on what could be done better, gaining insights on commitments outside of work, and looking at those alongside the list of things that need doing.
It does not have to be all down to the leader to juggle the schedule – getting staff involved in rotas means they can work as a team to cover each other’s shifts, building camaraderie among employees.
Give proper recognition
Instead of tokenistic mission statements, Ellen advises recognising what individuals have done to help achieve the farm’s success or goals.
Targets should be checked to ensure they make sense to the people on the ground.
And care should be taken when giving feedback: it needs to be “real” to people so that they can see the impact of their contribution, she says.
Care for people – and hold them to account
“Being kind and caring about your people does not mean you let them get away with anything and everything,” Ellen explains.
“I can be nice as pie and still hold someone to account.”
Staff need to be accountable, but when there is an issue, first explore with them if there was a misunderstanding or a training shortfall, or if it does boil down to negligence or poor performance.
Dr Ellen Joan Ford’s leadership model
People need three things at work, says Ellen. They are:
- A sense of belonging This is different to fitting in – it requires people to show up and adjust themselves to fit in, which is not relaxing. Belonging requires acceptance and allows people to do their best work.
- A sense of autonomy This means not micromanaging, and instead providing some flexibility on when, where and how jobs get done. Some farming tasks are not flexible on location or timing, but there is scope to work out what other tasks could present an opportunity for autonomy.
- A sense of purpose People want to know that what they do matters. This means they need to know the “why” behind the task they are being asked to complete.
Dr Ellen Joan Ford was a guest on a recent AHDB Talking Leaders podcast