Benchmark Your Human Resource Management

Dairy producers use benchmarks to measure their business performance in many different ways. Usually they compare financial or production benchmarks against their own farm’s performance. This technique can also be useful for comparing your human resource management practices to those that other operations are using successfully. The following table highlights several human resource management practices that nearly every dairy business should use. Compare your operation to the benchmarks. Are all of these practices being used to help every employee to succeed?

Human Resource Management Benchmarks

Practice and associated Benchmark

Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
SOPs help to clarify work procedures and ensure that everyone is performing consistently. Critical SOPs include milking, feeding, and reproduction.

Performance goals
Goals give people something to aim for and can be powerful motivators. Everyone should know the goals and how their work leads to achieving it. Your business should at least have goals for milk quality and production, reproduction, animal health/disease prevention.

Performance feedback
People need to know how they are doing, whether it’s good new or bad, otherwise they can never improve. Employees should receive formal performance reviews at least two times per year and informal feedback from their supervisor at least weekly.

Job descriptions
It’s nearly impossible to select the right person for a job when it’s not clear what the expectations are. Job descriptions should be accurate and should cover all key positions on the dairy, including management positions.

Staff meetings
Communications are critical to keeping every business working smoothly. You should have staff meetings at least once a month. Some operations find that key mangers need to meet weekly. Meetings should have a clear agenda and should end with assigned responsibility.

Training
Training is used to equip people with the knowledge and skills they need for the job today, and to prepare them for future roles. At minimum, a logical system should exist to provide on-the job training for routine production tasks.

Richard Stup, Penn State Dairy Alliance