One WAFLA H-2A conference panel left me with more questions than answers: "Fostering a positive workplace culture". We all want to work in a good environment, and as managers we want our employees to be engaged. In agriculture, with our seasonal workforce, employees may only work for you for a few months. Does it really make sense to invest money and time in employee engagement for those workers? Their disengagement can still cause problems for you. So we probably want to put some resources into it.
The panel of growers offered several ideas for engaging farmworkers:
- Offer learning/upskill opportunities (love this!!)
- Pay bonuses (who doesn't like more money!)
- Take your kid to work day
- Employee parties/bbq
- Expose H-2A employees to non-mexican cultural events
- Have leadership check in with employees one-on-one
- Allow third party charitable services to visit H-2A housing sites
- Buying all employees company swag (t-shirts and trucker hats)
These are all great ideas, but they made me wonder about the next steps: how much each idea cost, and how impactful was each idea? I think a good first step is defining the goal we're trying to achieve -- what's the outcome we can measure? We did a survey, and 94% of employees that use Harvust are happy with their relationship to their employer. This seems like a fair question to ask, but more importantly, it is a measurable outcome. Now we can test before and after for any employee engagement initiative (like the ones above).
While it's almost impossible to tie initiatives like this to unionization risk, good employee attrition rate, sinking productivity, etc. Some metrics are better than none, because without that any investment by leadership is going to be hard to get, and for those who are investing, it leaves the question: "is this worth it?".
As an example, I ran the numbers and getting a custom t-shirt and trucker hat would cost about $24 per employee -- that's six months of Harvust's labor compliance software! Which includes our automated employee engagement messaging. We did a survey of the thousands of workers on Harvust and they appreciated most when their employer recognized their birthdays, and Mexican holidays. So we added one-click-to-subscribe messaging automations that write personalized holiday and birthday well wishes to your employees. The best part is that it takes none of your time.
From what I can tell, the best employee engagement strategies are the ones that can be measured, and have the largest impact to time ratio.
Every dollar and hour of your time counts, and when you're investing in "fuzzy" things like workplace culture its even more important to have a clear idea of what your goals are and how you define ROI. Are trucker hats really the best ROI?
