Keep count of five to seven numbers about your crew, such as how many people quit this year, how many workdays were lost to absence and how many people were trained for their job. Write them on one sheet of paper, one line per number. Beside each one, write the farm record it comes from, such as the time sheet or the payroll, how often you will look at it and who writes it down. With that sheet, you can count how often a problem comes back over the year, such as milkers quitting or people missing work on Mondays. Then you can fix the pattern instead of blaming whoever was there the last time.
Without the sheet, everything you know about your crew is in your head. Nobody has counted how many people quit, how many days were missed or who was ever trained. So when the third milker in a year quits, it still feels like three separate stories. You end up deciding, in the heat of that third story, whether to move someone to another job or let them go.
Managing your crew by gut feel does not make you unfair. But with nothing written down to point to, the blame tends to fall on whoever happens to be involved. You do not need a computer program full of charts. You need one sheet, a handful of numbers and, beside each, the record it comes from and who writes it down.
Why does managing your crew by gut feel make every problem personal?
Because when nothing has been counted, the only thing left to point at is a person. If nobody counted how often something happened, you cannot show that it keeps happening, not even to yourself. Filling in the sheet also teaches you something on its own: each line you cannot fill in is something nobody on the farm has ever counted.
Which five to seven numbers should you pick, and why so few?
Stop at seven, because someone has to look up and write down every number on the sheet, and a number that takes too much work to fill in ends up as a blank line. You can start with three and add the rest later: how many people quit in the past year, how many workdays were lost to absence, and how many people were trained for their job.
Turnover, the share of your crew that quit during the year, deserves its own line on almost any farm. Cornell Cooperative Extension, the farm advisory service of Cornell University, reports that on large dairy farms annual employee turnover rates range from 20 to 80 percent. With a range that wide, the only way to know where your farm stands is to count your own.
For each number you pick, ask what you would change on the farm if it got worse. Take turnover. In a study of current and prospective workers in the Australian banana industry, published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE, Roy and colleagues found that career progression reduces turnover intentions. In plain words, workers who see a way to move up are less likely to plan on leaving. The study was about work in Australian banana growing, not about your crew. Still, if your turnover climbs, one question worth asking is whether your people see any way to move up, say from general hand to tractor driver or foreman.
Which record does each number come from, and who writes it down?
Each number should come from a record the farm already keeps: the time sheet, the payroll, the sign-in sheet from a training day, the notebook where the foreman writes down who was absent. A number you cannot trace back to a record is still a guess, only written as a figure. If a number has no record yet, you either start a simple one, such as a line in the foreman’s notebook, or you drop the number.
A simple way to show who wrote each figure comes from food safety records on fruit and vegetable farms in the United States. The University of Maryland Extension, the farm advisory service of the University of Maryland, publishes record templates for these farms. Each template has a place for the employee to sign or initial, and at the bottom, a place for the supervisor’s signature at time of review. Anyone who opens the record later knows who filled it in and who checked it.
You do not need to grow vegetables to borrow that idea. On your sheet, beside each crew number, write the record it comes from, how often you will look at it and who writes it down. Leave room for the date and the initials of whoever filled it in. If any of those is left blank, you are back to guessing.
When do you read a crew number the wrong way?
You read a crew number the wrong way when you take it as a verdict on one worker instead of a count for the whole crew. The records behind the numbers carry names, because the foreman has to know who was absent. On the sheet you write only totals for the whole crew, such as days lost to absence or people trained in milking, never a figure for one worker. Do not use the sheet to rank your workers from best to worst.
The costliest way to get a number wrong is to pay a bonus on it. Tie money to a number and people find the easiest way to push it up, even if the work gets worse: pay by the box and you can get more boxes and more bruised fruit. Before you pay a bonus on any number, write down what it does not count, such as fruit quality in a bonus paid by the box. How to test a bonus on paper for the easy ways around it has its own article.
Two more mistakes come up often. The first has to do with crew size: on a three-person crew, one person quitting is a turnover of one third. On a small crew, look at whether a number goes up or down over several years, not at a single year’s figure. The second is reading a number with nothing to compare it to.
Penn State Extension, the farm advisory service of Penn State University, tells dairy farmers they can find where to improve by comparing performance metrics against industry benchmarks, meaning the figures of similar farms. You can compare your crew numbers the same way, and the cheapest figure to compare against is your own from last year.
What do you do when you see a pattern in the numbers?
Start with what you control on the farm, before you look at the person who happened to be there when the pattern showed up. If turnover climbs, look at how people are trained and scheduled, and at how you recognize good work without playing favorites, a rule you can write down and hand out in advance. Those are things you can change. If you decide to pay people for staying, say a bonus for a full year, put the terms in writing and hand them to the crew before the year starts. What goes into those terms is in the article on bonus terms written first.
When absence piles up on the same weekday, say Mondays, look at the schedule before you treat it as a discipline problem. After you change the schedule, count the Monday absences again the next time you look at that number. A number you look at once is a snapshot. Only by looking at it every month or every year can you tell whether the change worked, and that is why you write beside each number how often you will look at it.
One of your five to seven numbers can come from a short anonymous survey of what your crew thinks, which has its own article. Count, for example, how many people raise the same complaint, instead of guessing from whoever complains loudest.
If you have a written description of each job, check your numbers against it. Say the milker’s description includes training new hands in the parlor, and your count of people trained in milking this year is zero: that is the first place to look. If you have no written descriptions yet, start with what each job on the farm is responsible for, the article on writing down the tasks and main result of each job. What turnover costs you and how to read a pattern of missed days are left out here; you will find both among the articles on managing people.
Where to start
One sheet of paper, an hour, and no software.
If you measure nothing about your crew, you can mean to be fair and still end up blaming people. With no number on paper, each problem that comes back looks like a new complaint about a new person. The sheet costs you an hour. With it, you can see whether the problem sits in the job, the schedule or the training, which are things you can change.
You already do this with your fields and your cash: you check each new figure against the last one and act on the difference. With the sheet you can do the same for your crew, as one more part of managing the whole farm.