ME & MY MENTOR
Engagement and retention
What is your company’s job value proposition? by Renee Wright, SHRM-CP, Bloom’n Gardens Landscape Q. What has the landscape industry realized over the years about employee engagement and retention that can help us today? A. The answer is not wages, a signing bonus, or company vehicles. What is needed to attract, engage and retain employees is a purpose and mission for a company that is supported by values that the employee can truly get behind personally - otherwise you’re just offering employment. These days, if you talk to anyone in the service industry they will say there is an labor shortage. This has seemed to be the case ever since the bounce-back of the economy after the 2008 housing crash, and recently made worse by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The employee shortage has to do with low unemployment rates, rising wages and, honestly, just a much smaller pool of qualified candidates coming through the door. That makes it a very large challenge for companies. If it wasn’t already hard to find a single candidate, finding a qualified and experienced candidate is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Since unemployment is so low and there are so many open positions for the small pool of candidates, we have to look at our companies and evaluate how well we engage and retain our current workforce. It’s not the early 2000s where we have a line out the door of potential new workers.
Job value proposition
When talking about hiring, employee engagement, and retention, we must look at our job value proposition. Employees are assets, not just workers. Every position on a payroll creates value for the business. Does the person who holds that position optimize that value? When creating our job value proposition, it must connect to something in the company, and that’s not money. To engage, retain and get the value out of an employee we must connect them to more than just wages; we must have a purpose and mission they can personally get behind. As we transition into a new generation of workers we must look at other industries and adapt the tactics as they did five-to-ten years ago to engage and retain our workforce. Money is not the primary motivating factor anymore. Below are four categories you can look at to address employee engagement and retention.
Renee Wright, SHRM-CP Like many secondand third- generation industry members, Renee Wright seems to have been destined to find her way back to the family business. Renee serves as the Human Resources and Safety Manager at Bloom’n Gardens Landscape LLC. Her route to the business included obtaining a degree in horticulture and business from Mississippi State University in 2011. During her time at MSU, Renee’s
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floral design team took home overall baccalaureate school awards from American Institute of Floral Design National Competition. Renee is also a member of the Young Professional Council (YPC) American Floral Endowment program that gives networking opportunities to young industry members and students. Since graduation, Renee has been learning the landscape trade and pursing continued education in Human Resources, by earning her Society of Human Resources Certified Professional Certification. Renee has a real passion for the labor industry and desire to make the landscape industry a viable career option for upcoming generations.
