Many horticultural businesses could be doing more to increase labour productivity by improving their management practices, AHDB has urged.
Access to sufficient and affordable manual labour is already a major concern for producers, and pressure is mounting on them to boost labour productivity – particularly if it becomes necessary increase wages to attract overseas workers after Brexit.
While automation and robotics may offer hope to offset rising labour costs in the long-term future, AHDB said it was trying to encourage companies to adopt ‘Lean’ principles and maximise labour efficiencies to help in the short term.
As part of its SmartHort campaign, AHDB recently hired management consultancy Management Performance Ltd (MPL) to visit six horticultural businesses, assess their use of labour and review their performance management.
While the businesses were diverse in their size and crop sector, SmartHort’s knowledge exchange manager Gracie Emeny concluded that there are areas of development that likely apply to many horticultural businesses.
As such, the AHDB division is building resources to help businesses improve in three main fields: management training for supervisors, standardising operations procedures and creating performance management systems.
“In order to enable front-line managers to get the best performance from workers, they need to be provided with the skills required to manage people effectively and challenge poor performance,” said Emeny.
Commenting on the need to standardise operations procedures, she added that discrepancies were identified between the performance ratings of the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ workers at various farms.
“The approaches to carrying out tasks adopted by the ‘best’ workers, for example how they were picking crops, weren’t standardised in best practice guidelines and were just accepted as a difference due to individual capability,” she reported.
“Few businesses were target-setting and reporting on performance regularly, nor were they establishing systems to address why targets were not being met. Getting to know your business is crucial for improving efficiencies.”
MPL operations director Stan Willey added: “At the start of the process all the businesses visited believed that they were unique in terms of labour issues and therefore could not be likened to other growers.
“The reality is that they are all volume-driven, labour-intensive operations and the management skills of the front-line manager in these types of businesses are paramount to success.”
