Reliable labour has always been an issue for horticulture companies. Today, COVID and changes in government policy have created almost unprecedented constraints on the quantity and quality of labour — and those constraints are not going to ease any time soon.

To attract, keep and get the best from good people, companies have to improve the quality of their operational managers.

Download our guide NZ Horticulture: Addressing critical labour challenges to transform the way you think about Horticulture management training.

Labour Challenges Being Faced in Horticulture

That’s the general context within which horticulture is operating, while also trying to keep up with the 64% growth the industry has enjoyed over the last 10 years. And horticulture has its own specific labour challenges to deal with on top of that:

• Government policy and the pandemic is severely restricting the flow of RSE labour, backpackers, international students, and limiting migrants in the short and longer term.

• Migrant labour is more upwardly mobile. Our recent Voice of the Operations Leader survey. revealed that a large number of employers were seeing their migrant workers able to get jobs they were qualified for rather than having to take what’s on offer — think the qualified engineer who was driving an Uber now (finally!) getting a job at an engineering company. It’s right and good that this is happening, but it’s another fissure in the supply of good-quality labour.

• Employees are less willing to put up with the demands of a high-pressure packing/harvest season if they are not being treated well — i.e., with respect and empathy. There are easier ways to make a living.

Read more on how these challenges affect seasonal leadership training here.

Invest in Leadership Training

This highlights a key issue for horticulture and other seasonal businesses. Horticulture companies invest millions in technology to improve productivity and work around their labour challenges but have invested more in technical skills than in management development – and for good reason. Upskilling new supervisors who manage the majority of seasonal labour is always a challenge because there is often limited time between their appointment and the start of the busy season. As a result, training tends to focus on downloading the technical and functional skills they need to do their job, not the soft skills of management.

Our research suggests that this is starting to bite. Last season many companies struggled to reach establishment levels, even allowing for the COVID constraints. We saw higher than usual absenteeism and lower return rates affecting production and ultimately profitability. Exit interviews revealed that the key reason for early exits and absenteeism was the employees’ perceptions of their treatment by their managers.

This is not surprising. The leading cause of dissatisfaction for employees in every industry and in every organisation is the quality of their manager. This may be even more pronounced in horticulture: the pressures and stresses of the packing/harvest season coupled with a lack of ongoing training means horticulture managers often don’t have all the tools they need for a difficult job.

Some companies have invested in training their managers, and they’ve run into the other part of the problem: traditional training solutions don’t work well in most industries, but they are even less effective in seasonal industries where access to casual and transient labour is restricted. The horticulture industry needs a new approach.

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NZ Horticulture: Addressing critical labour challenges

Download our guide to transform the way you think about Horticulture management training.