Finding and Keeping Great Workers for Dairy Processors

- Okay, I have noon on my clock, so we will get started.

I am excited today to welcome Dr. Lisa Holden as our speaker in our Value-Added Dairy series.

If you attended the PA Association for Food Protection Conference in the spring, you may have heard Dr. Holden's presentation and that was part of why we asked her to be a guest today and to share the information that she shared at that conference.

I have a few introductory slides that we'll go through quickly and then I'll turn the program over.

This presentation is being recorded and it will be shared online with those of you that registered, as well as available to others for viewing in the future time.

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As I mentioned, the webinar's recorded.

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So if you would please just take a few minutes and give us some feedback on the webinar.

I'd like to recognize the rest of the the Value-Added working group.

My name is Ginger Fenton.

I work with milk quality to the point where it hits the bulk tank.

Dr. Kerry Kaylegian's also joining us, and she goes from the bulk tank through finished product.

And then Sarah Cornelisse is our third team member.

She works with marketing and business development for our Value-Added team.

The website where you can find our materials is listed at the bottom of this screen.

And we also have a Facebook page where we try and promote our upcoming workshops and highlight some materials and make pertinent announcements, which is my last slide.

I would just like to invite you all to a webinar.

Our next one in our series will be in December, so we're skipping a month.

Dr. Kevin Harvatine's going to talk about fat supplements and the effects of dietary fat on melting properties of milk fat.

We don't have all the details up and the registration site is not up yet, but please watch our social media and watch our webpage and your email for those announcements.

And with that, I'm going to stop sharing and I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Holden.

And thank you for being here today.

There you go, looks good.

- All right.

- All right, well thank you Ginger for that introduction and we're gonna go ahead and get started.

I know that some of you may have been at that presentation that I did in May, and some of you may not have been.

So what I did is I kind of mixed and matched a little bit.

So, we're gonna go back and review a bit from, oops, there we go.

We're gonna go back and review a bit from that presentation, but also talk about a little bit more on retention.

'Cause I know that is a big question for folks these days, is not just where do I find workers, but when I do get some good workers, what are some strategies for keeping those folks in place?

So, I have five different things that I will touch on today in our webinar.

First, I wanna go back and kind of set the stage and talk a little bit about what's happening with labor.

Then I wanna share some data and talk specifically about agriculture.

I'm also gonna talk a bit about our apprenticeship program and looking at maybe some different ways to train people to fit into some of the jobs that we have available.

And then third, we'll talk a little bit about solutions and thoughts.

We'll talk about training and technology.

And again, if you have some, I know this is a webinar and oftentimes when we do this in a classroom, we can get a little more interaction, but please do feel free to put some questions in the the Q and A or raise your hand and we can get you recognized so that you can ask a question that way as well.

And then last, I wanna finish up with talking about retention.

How do we keep good workers?

So it's not just about finding those workers, but keeping good workers.

And then I'll save a little bit of time for some questions and discussion at the end.

All right, so with that, let me hit my correct buttons here.

So we're gonna start off talking about setting the stage.

What's happening with labor?

And this is probably not new to any of you that are trying to hire folks right now.

We have some open positions in Extension on our Dairy Extension team right now.

And everyone that I talk to in the industry, whether it's dairy farmers or allied industries, oftentimes you know that people are hiring.

If you go around your community, you'll see signs up.

We are hiring.

That's the the timeframe that we are in.

Lots and lots of help wanted signs, lots and lots of we are hiring signs.

So if you think about what has happened post-COVID, so we are three years plus from the beginning of the pandemic.

But if you think about what happened to businesses and jobs and kind of the world in general with our pandemic, we oftentimes saw, and I'm gonna ask you if you can use your chat function or raise hand function.

How many of you know somebody that changed jobs, either during the pandemic or right after the pandemic?

If you can just kind of weigh in there.

I think most of you probably know at least one person and some of you may know more, that took the opportunity to maybe reshuffle a little bit a bit.

And so we're seeing that post-COVID, that people have moved around.

The workers that we have had in the past may not be the same.

The pools that we're drawing from may not be the same.

The other thing that's happened, we saw unemployment rates go up during the pandemic.

And you'll see, I have a little slide to share with you for that, but really we're faced with fairly low overall unemployment rates, which means that there's not that pool out there of folks that might be looking for employment.

Low job desirability.

And I've got a question mark there.

Depending on the jobs that you're hiring for, sometimes we're hiring for, you know, entry level jobs.

Sometimes those jobs can be fairly repetitive.

And again, looking at workforce coming in, what do they want to do?

What are they willing to do?

What are they able to do?

Higher wages locally, we have sheets in our community, I'm sure many of you do as well.

You have other convenient stores or retail businesses that may be hiring at a higher wage rate than what they had done even five years ago, even three years ago, you know, pre-pandemic kind of thing.

So when you're in that local community and you're drawing from that local labor pool, those higher wages locally can pull people away and pull people out of your pool.

And then the last one I have on there is agricultural image.

And I'm gonna talk about this, have had more experience with this on the production side of agriculture, rather than the manufacturer side.

But it's still something that we struggle with a bit in agriculture.

We do have sometimes a poor image with folks as far as careers and jobs.

So if we look at, this is data from this spring looking at US Chamber of Commerce analysis for labor shortage.

And of course these industries are big, broad industries, but if you look at leisure and hospitality on the bottom here, you can see that they are not quite or only about 40% full.

There's an awful lot of gaps in that labor force.

If you look at wholesale and retail trade, they've started to fill back up there.

Durable goods, manufacturing sectors, still not at where they need to be.

Bottom line is, you know, the yellow are the jobs that are filled.

The blue are the jobs that aren't quite filled yet.

And so we are faced with, not just in our industries, but across industries, a labor shortage.

These signs become familiar signs, right?

We talked about those higher wages in your community.

Warehouse associate looking at 18 to $20 an hour right now hiring.

That's a fairly entry level position.

Dock worker, forklift driver, little bit of specialty skill here, 20 to $27 an hour.

Okay?

Again, you know, looking at people moving through the workforce, they're looking at those wages.

We talked about that hospitality and service industry.

Here's a picture of a sign.

We are closed, no staff, thank you.

And again, I put one of my calf pictures in here as well.

We're seeing this all the way from the farm side of things through production and through that, you know, restaurant hospitality industry as well.

Everyone is dealing with labor shortage.

This graph looks at Pennsylvania unemployment rates.

And so I pulled out the unemployment rate, and you can see the Y-axis here, zero all the way up to more than 15%.

And it starts at January of 20 or 2003 and goes on up to just a few years ago.

You can see this big spike that we have here in the pandemic time, where we saw dramatic unemployment due to all of the businesses that closed or changed or shifted around.

When we look at last year, last September, we were sitting at about 4.3% unemployment rate.

So still a little bit high.

Next slide I'm gonna show you looks at more recent years.

And so you can see kind of where we've come from and where we've gone.

The interesting thing about this table too, I'm showing you unemployment.

So this is the rate of unemployment based on weekly claims.

This is just Pennsylvania data.

But if you go in, I've put the URL for source.

If you go in and look at that website, we can see that before the pandemic we were right about 2%.

And so far this year we're right about one and a half percent or 2%.

And you can see those dramatic spikes in between, again, depending on the week and the month, those are gonna change.

But you can see what happened during the pandemic and post-pandemic.

But if you go in and look at the raw data on this, the number of people that are employed has actually dropped down in this timeframe as well.

We have in 2023, we are getting to about where we were with total people employed pre-pandemic.

So it's not just about the unemployment rate or this is the rate of people that are employed that are filing claims.

They've been unemployed for some reason.

The numbers that we see here have dropped when you go in and look at that data.

And so we just don't have as many people in the workforce as traditional workers.

They may be doing other things in the workforce, but as traditional workers.

We're starting to see those numbers return to normal but we still don't have that same level.

Okay, so hopefully that kind of sets the stage.

And I'm guessing I probably didn't tell you anything you didn't know, maybe some different numbers to share with you.

But now I wanna talk a little bit about agriculture and where agriculture fits in all of this picture.

So, this is a study that some colleagues of mine did a couple years ago, where they surveyed high school ag teachers and they were asking for their perceptions with regard to jobs, with regard to training, with regard to what was next for some of their students.

So again, these are high school ag teachers.

So they have ag students or ag interest students in their classroom.

Less than 25%, less than a quarter of the ag teachers that were surveyed believed that their students were considering careers in agriculture.

So, if we're not getting a pipeline of students that are coming through traditional ag lines, where are those students gonna come from?

75% of them believe that income was the biggest impact for this decision to choose another career.

And I think this one is a little bit of a myth.

If you look at some of our ag jobs and some of our ag careers, maybe not on the entry level for some of them, but when you start looking at career paths, there's some pretty good career paths out there in agriculture.

However, at least with this survey, folks aren't finding, or their perception is that income is holding them back.

We also, they also asked about apprenticeships.

So if students were not gonna go directly into the workforce, if they were not gonna go to a two year school, four year school, would they consider something different?

Would they consider an apprenticeship?

And I wanna talk a little bit about that.

81% believe that yes, they would do that.

This is another survey from the Department of Ag and the Department of Labor and Industry done a couple years ago looking at training.

What is needed for our workforce, what types of trainings?

And you see webinars and meetings here, right?

Over 40%, this purple bar.

Training manuals, the pink bar, workshops, the orange bar, four year degrees, only about 25% said we need four year degrees.

However, this big blue bar in the middle was apprenticeships.

And this is something that we are seeing more and more interest in.

Almost 92% of the respondents in this survey said, we need training for our workers.

75% felt that apprenticeships might be a good way or the best way to satisfy some of those training needs.

So let me talk about that a little bit for agriculture.

So what is an apprenticeship?

If you're familiar with many of our construction trades, they have this, you know, earn while you learn apprenticeship concept where you bring somebody in at an entry level and then they move to a progression with both on the job training and training outside of the job until they get to that journey worker, or higher level position.

So it's paid on the job training.

And this comes from the Department of Labor and Industry.

There are a number of requirements for apprenticeships in order to be a registered and recognized apprenticeship.

So paid on the job training within at least 2000 hours of on-the-job training.

There's a related technical training component, again, with a minimum of 144 hours.

And there is a wage progression from where they're starting until they get to that competent journey worker.

There's also a national credential that's issued by the US Department of Labor and Industry for folks that have a registered apprenticeship.

So, why are we talking about apprenticeships?

Well, because when we look at workforce, when we look at all the opportunities that folks have to go to different industries, and when we look at need for training, we're looking at what are the pieces and parts that we need to put together to maybe fit, make a better fit so that we can broaden that workforce or attract more folks into some of our agricultural jobs.

If people are searching careers, you can go online to something called O-Net that looks at what are the different occupations, what are the different careers?

And this is a national repository.

So we went in, we do have an apprenticeship at Penn State.

It's an animal science apprenticeship that crosses dairy, poultry, and swine.

And as part of this, we've gone into some of these systems and looked at what are the trends, what are the wages?

Where are we falling at compared to what some of those trends are, either in Pennsylvania or nationally?

So one of the things we did is we looked at farm worker trends.

And if you look at farm worker trends, and this is across, this is a very broad category, so it's across a lot of different areas of farms and farm workers.

Projected growth from 2018 to 2028 is slightly negative.

So there's gonna be a slight decline in both the Pennsylvania numbers and the United States numbers.

But if you go in and look a little more specifically at this, and you go in and look at, and I pulled out one that's on the animal side.

So the animal caretakers, you think about all of the things that we need for production ag.

And then food science technicians, all of the things that we need for the manufacturing process.

So, some of the job titles here would be food science technician, laboratory assistant quality assurance analyst, quality control technician.

Both of those have these nice little sunshines and say this is a brighter outlook and these were updated this year.

So here's two careers if someone is looking at this, that do have a good outlook, good job opportunities in these areas.

Going back to our general farm and ranch animal worker wages, again, thinking about the competition within your community, what are people paying for entry-level workers?

The top orange bar looks at Pennsylvania, the bottom looks at the United States in blue, and we see that median wage is about $15, but a pretty broad, a pretty broad range in both.

Pennsylvania has a little more of a broad range in that farm and animal worker category.

If we look at a little more specialized.

So looking at something like agricultural equipment operators, we see, again, we're gonna see Pennsylvania on top in the orange, the US on the bottom in blue.

And you see that for this category, Pennsylvania, the median is about $21 an hour as opposed to what that is for the US, which would be just under $18 an hour.

Again, reflective of the difficulty in finding some of these workers.

I put up that earlier wage rate with, you know, forklift operators, just basic equipment operators, you know, operating a forklift in the warehouse, operating a skid steer on the dairy.

Those types of things that were hiring, you know, equipment operators for very broad base in wages and we've seen increases in those areas as well.

And again, I put the sources in there.

So if you're interested, you can go back and look at that.

So that's where we are in agriculture.

So if we look at, and I'm not trying to paint a dismal picture 'cause I wanna kind of turn around a little bit and talk about in a positive sense, what can we do?

We know that labor is very tight.

We know that sometimes agriculture has a bit more difficulty being competitive in garnering those really good employees.

So, what are some solutions for us?

What thoughts do we have?

How important is training?

And then I wanna spend the rest of the time talking about retention and keeping people and what is it that people want and why do people stay?

Because this is the question I get all the time.

Why do people leave?

Why do people stay?

It depends on the person, right?

And it depends on the job.

But there are some trends that we can look at.

All right, I wanna take a pause here and make sure that you don't have any questions thus far because I've put a lot of different numbers and things out there and I wanna make sure that we're all okay.

So I will be quiet for a sec and watch and it doesn't look like we have any questions.

So I'm gonna move on to the second half.

And again, I did save some time at the end for questions and discussion.

All right, so let's go ahead and move to solutions and thoughts.

So, one of the resources that we have is Pennsylvania CareerLink.

We also have workforce investment boards locally, we have many different groups that meet.

My husband belongs to a business organization that meets once a week.

And you know, one of the things they talk on and talk about and compare notes on is, you know, who's looking for employees.

Sometimes it's temporary, sometimes it's more permanent.

It's that networking and exchange.

So there's a lot of, whether you're looking for just temporary workers or whether you're looking at permanent workers to fill some of the jobs that you have, do think about reaching out locally.

Think about resources like CareerLink, like our workforce investment boards, that you may not have reached out to before but have some really good resources and can have some people.

Think about those traditional pipelines of folks that we have maybe coming through agriculture, coming into our ag or allied ag industry jobs.

We're seeing a shrinking pool there.

And so, in order for us to reach out and get the workers that we need, sometimes we have to go beyond our traditional recruiting tools.

And so CareerLink is one of those, if you haven't talked with, looked at or familiar with, can be a good one.

I just came back from our regional Dairy Challenge event last week and that was one of the things as we got together as coaches that we talked about.

We don't see as many traditional ag students that are coming into four year programs, that are coming into other training programs.

And that's not just in the northeast, but across the country.

So we're seeing fewer trained people come through and we're looking even on an education side of how can we recruit some of those non-traditional students outside of agriculture that may have absolutely no agriculture background, or no understanding of training and jobs and careers.

So, it presents some educational challenges certainly, but it also presents some great opportunities to attract people to our industries.

Finding good employees.

This is an ad that I pulled that says, you know, that, hey, early bird apply, for those morning shifts.

Where are you looking for people from?

Again, our traditional avenues are not nearly as full if you look at it that way, as what they've been in the past.

We saw those low unemployment rate numbers, there's not as many people out there looking for jobs.

So, you really need to capture that attention of the people that are looking for jobs.

And you need to maybe think beyond what you have.

So what about school age workers?

You know, what about those part-time job kind of folks?

What about retired workers?

We have many people that have taken advantage of retirement over the past few years and some of them may be looking to get back into the workforce in a part-time position, or in a, you know, a very flexible type position.

Where are you gonna find them and what do they want?

And many times that flexibility, we'll come back and talk about that again, that idea that I don't wanna work seven days a week or five days a week or even, you know, three days a week.

Maybe I just wanna work Tuesdays and Thursdays because that's when I have time.

Does it create issues for scheduling and HR managers?

Absolutely.

But do we have folks out there that might be able to fill a couple shifts a week as opposed to, you know, the whole thing that we're lo- the whole job that we're looking for?

Probably, they're probably out there.

The other thing to think about is, and you've kind of go, gotta go from the outside and look back in, you know, we talked about all of the competitive wages and what's happening in your community and looking at all those hiring signs.

Why would somebody want to work for you?

What is it about your business that's unique?

What is it about that work environment that is gonna attract people to you?

Why do you work there and why would somebody else wanna work there?

So thinking about that, being able to articulate and share that goes a long way in finding and attracting some of these workers.

Do you ask good employees who work elsewhere, why they like working there?

I had a, again, we were at this Dairy Challenge event and our bus driver of all things for the one bus on the farm just absolutely was the happiest person.

We had a mishap, we went the wrong way.

We had to turn around, she had to go through narrow streets and she was fine with it and she was okay with it.

And I asked her when, you know, after we got to the correct destination and got all everyone unloaded, you know, you really seem to love your job.

And she said, I do.

She said, I like it because it's interesting and I get to see different people all the time.

You know, they, it was a tour bus company and so, she always got to meet new people and always got to see new things.

And she said, I don't like, it was kind of interesting.

She said, I don't like to travel myself.

She said, but I like to hear about other people's experiences and where they're coming from and what they wanna do.

And so, when you think about, you know, where's your next good employee coming from?

Here's a person that, you know, handled some adversity very well and had a, just an absolutely super positive attitude.

And so, putting someone like that into a job where she's gonna be isolated and away from folks, is probably not gonna work for her.

But what she was doing in her current job, she just loved because of the interaction with all the different people.

So again, thinking about where are we finding those folks.

Sometimes you have to ask some of those crazy questions.

Okay, I pulled this out of a Dairy Herd magazine or Dairy Herd Management from this spring.

And it was an article that talked about what the dairy industry can learn from the healthcare industry.

And I just pulled a few little quotes out of here.

And what the gist of the article was, is that we've seen so much technology in the healthcare industry that there was thought that we were gonna replace the need for our healthcare workers, right?

There was this concern about we have all this technology, we're investing in all this technology and you know, we're no longer gonna need some of these careers.

Well, what we found is that human labor was not being replaced, but that the jobs had shifted because of the use of technology.

And there's a reference to a survey in here that looked at dairies and dairy farms and the fact that 50% of the large farms that they surveyed and nearly a quarter of the small farms either are using some precision ag technology or planning to use some precision ag technology.

And again, when you think about comparing agriculture to healthcare, you think about healthcare as being, you know, cutting edge, great technology, think about all the technologies, think about the robotic technologies we have, both at the farm and in the manufacturing side.

Think about, you know, the level of technology that we have, whether it's, you know, frontline jobs working with that technology, or the repairing of that technology, agriculture has become very, very sophisticated.

So it was very interesting to see agriculture being compared to healthcare in terms of technology, use of technology and advances.

So, can automation help us to maybe reduce some of those low skill jobs and replace them with higher skill, higher demand jobs, particularly at the farm level, but throughout our agricultural supply chains?

Kind of a good question to think about and look at.

And how are we marketing that, again, that image of agriculture?

When you think about all of the technology that we're using from farm level through manufacturing, I'm not sure that there's an awareness in our next generation coming into the workforce of just how tech savvy we've become.

Okay, so we talked a little bit about solutions and thoughts.

We talked a little bit about training and technology.

I wanna spend the next 10 minutes or so focusing on retention.

How do we keep those good workers?

What is some of our basic HR principles that we can utilize to help us keep the folks that we have in place?

Alright, so there's a tremendous cost of turnover and I pulled this out of some dairy numbers.

If we look at in your particular industry, your particular segment of the business, may be a little bit different.

But if we look at labor compared to income, about 15% of that is gonna be labor.

If we look at the increases that we've seen in the last few years, those numbers have probably gone up a little bit.

So this example may be a little bit conservative.

So, I wanna look at the cost of turnover.

What does it cost us when we lose that employee?

So just a basic business example, if we've got a business that has a million dollars in gross revenue, so fairly small business, they might have 150, $200,000 in labor costs, right?

So what happens when those workers leave?

Well, we have that cost and we can add up these dollars in terms of real dollars.

We have the cost of refinding someone, so the hiring costs, whatever hiring costs we have associated with that.

We have the retraining costs, so we have costs associated with that.

Plus we have the cost of filling that position while we are waiting to get that person in place.

So, the other things that happen in addition to those real dollar costs are things like information.

We lose that vital information that that person had.

And if it's an entry-level worker, that's one thing.

If it's a manager, that's another thing altogether, right?

Because that knowledge may be walking out the door.

So that cost for rehiring, those, you know, may be paid services or ads depending on how we're doing that, retraining, plus the information, turnover can be a huge, huge cost to the business.

So what makes people wanna stay?

Well, what makes a desirable employer?

And think about your own situation.

Why do you like your job?

What kinds of things do you like about where you work and what kinds of things do you wish might be different?

Positive culture for existing employees.

What do the workers say?

You know, are we grumbling in the employee break room?

And a little bit of grumbling is normal anywhere, but are they truly unhappy, or do you have a positive culture?

If you have a positive culture, they're going to help you find those employees.

They're gonna refer people, oh, I work at X, Y, Z.

What's the first question people ask?

Is that a good place to work, right?

Why or why not?

So if your current employees are positive about work environment and what they're doing, they're gonna help you to attract.

Conversely, if they're not, if somebody goes out and says, I work at X, Y, Z, and the next question is, how do you like working there?

And they say, I hate it.

I have a terrible boss, my hours are bad.

You know, I've been doing this job for a year now and I can't wait to find something better.

Those kinds of comments are gonna drive people away.

So what are your workers saying?

That's really, really important.

Other things, bonuses or competitive wages.

Again, I'm always a little bit cautious with money because money is, tends to be a short-term motivator.

It doesn't keep people in the long run.

Do you have to be competitive?

Absolutely.

And I am a big fan of bonuses as opposed to incentives.

Some people utilize incentives, if you hit this target, you get this.

I'm a bigger fan of bonuses, you know, hey, and I'll use dairy examples here.

The middle of winter when it's cold and sloppy and it snows and we have extra time plowing snow and extra time cleaning cows and extra time doing this, and you bring in a hot meal or you give some gift cards out or you do something to let folks know that they are, you appreciate what they're doing, that's a bonus.

That says a lot more to me than, hey, you hit your target for this week so you're gonna get that little bit extra in your paycheck.

People come to expect that little bit extra.

With the bonuses, the appreciation, the gratitude, along with whatever monetary or in kind kind of thing you're giving means a lot.

Flexible schedules.

I shared that, you know, looking at retirees, looking at school age, looking at maybe I can't fill all my shifts, but I can fill my shifts on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

We are reluctant to be more flexible, but given the workforce shortages that we have and given the difficulty we have filling jobs, we're gonna have to learn to be more flexible.

Is it gonna be more work on the paperwork, hiring, you know, HR kinds of things?

Yeah, probably.

But giving people flexibility may make them stay with you as opposed to jumping somewhere else.

And then last and certainly not least is, do employees feel valued?

Do you, you know, a simple thank you, making sure people know they're appreciated.

I did a manager's workshop one time and I handed out thank you cards and said, you know, find, go back to work next week and find somebody that's doing an absolutely great job for you.

Take time to write a handwritten note and send it to their home address.

And they all looked at me like I was insane.

Two things, one, they've probably never done that before.

And two, sending it home makes a huge difference then giving it to them at work.

Because when you send it home, chances are somebody in the family's gonna take that thank you note out of the mailbox, kind of look at it funny, they're gonna open it up at home, they're gonna read it at home and their family is gonna know that they're being recognized for doing a good job.

Does it make a big difference?

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it's those little things.

So how do your employees feel?

Are they valued?

So, I'm gonna share two things with you.

The first is from 1973, just to show you how much we have changed.

And the second is from last year.

So it's not the same survey.

This one comes from a Harvard Business Review source, again in the 70s.

And these were the six factors that came to the top of this survey for low skilled workers, low skilled jobs.

And they asked workers, why do you stay?

Why do you stay in this job?

Benefits was number one, family responsibilities was number two, difficulty of finding another job was number three.

If you think about today's workforce in those lower end jobs, benefits may or may not be important to them.

Family responsibilities, depends on who they are, right?

Difficulty of finding another job.

No, not at all in the mix, when we think about everything that's out there.

Four and five, friendships with coworkers, this is important.

Five, loyalty to the company, we don't see as much loyalty anymore, right?

And then six, financial pressures.

So again, very different.

Now let's fast forward and look at last year's survey.

Excuse me, again, a different company doing this.

This is Paychex survey.

They looked at 604 employees from small and mid-sized businesses.

So what that means in terms of workers is they have between 20 and 500 workers.

And they also looked at the types of jobs they did.

Were they sedentary or were they active jobs?

So were they up and moving around or were they, you know, sitting still maybe on a production line or at a desk or something like that, okay?

The top reasons people stayed were job stability and meaningful work.

Neither one of these appeared directly on that survey in the 70s.

Now maybe they talked about family responsibility and financial responsibilities.

So, you could look at that a little bit as job stability, but not quite, not quite the same thing we're talking about there.

They also looked at some differences between their sedentary workers and their active workers.

And sedentary workers were 20% more likely to say flexibility in work environment would, might make them more likely to stay at their company.

And if you think about that, it makes sense, right?

If you have a sedentary type job, oftentimes that job may be somewhat repetitive.

You know, you're in the same place, you're doing similar kinds of tasks.

And so boredom factors in there.

So can we rotate folks?

Can we make a little more flexibility there?

I don't know.

It depends on the situation.

But how do we do that?

We look at that a lot with worker, with milkers on dairies, right?

It's a routine job and we want them to do it consistently throughout that.

Active workers were 66% less likely to feel valued for the work they did than sedentary workers.

Again, that, is the work meaningful?

Do you feel valued?

Those kinds of feelings, that kind of culture is what helps to retain people.

If we think about managing workforce, okay, basic HR principles, we're gonna organize, we're gonna staff, we're gonna hire that staff, and then we're gonna direct.

And this top part of the pyramid is the part that oftentimes we struggle with the most.

When we think about organizing, we think about we have so much work to be done, so many people to do it.

So we're gonna have an organizational chart, some job descriptions, standard operating procedures.

We've got our policies, our schedules, our routines, okay?

We have that structure, so people know what they're gonna do, how they're gonna do it, how they're gonna be evaluated for it.

Staffing piece, that's our recruiting, isn't it?

Identifying the workforce needs.

Recruiting is getting the most people for that position.

Hiring is the best person for that job.

And how do we onboard, how do we orient workers?

Are we doing a good job of that?

Are we losing people because they're struggling early on with how they fit in and what they're to do?

And then last, and this is definitely the most difficult part.

That's that directing, that's that supervising, that's what our managers are doing, okay?

We're managing that workforce each day, every day.

We're training and retraining people.

We're providing feedback, reviewing performance.

That helps us retain the best employees, right?

Discipline and termination as it's gonna be appropriate, a little bit maybe with, you know, incorporating incentives, bonuses, and rewards.

But really it's about appreciating people, thanking people, letting them know that they're doing a good job, or they're doing something correctly.

Most people want inherently to do a good job.

And if you give them the right tools and you give them the right training and the guidance, they can generally do that for you.

So what do great employees do well?

Well they do a lot of things well, right?

Good employees complete tasks.

Great employees complete tasks consistently and correctly.

Good employees correct problems when they happen.

Great employees anticipate those problems before they happen.

Good employees work with others, great employees work well with others.

Wouldn't we all love to have great employees?

Communication, feedback.

We talk a lot about dairy.

When we go out and we do a farm visit and we're doing evaluating with students, I always tell them, watch the cows, watch the cows.

What are the cows telling you?

You know, what are, how are they behaving?

What's going on?

That communication and feedback is absolutely critical.

We can tell a lot by that.

When you go into a job site and there isn't that communication, there isn't that feedback, you can tell a lot by that as well.

I had a colleague that we were teaching a management class and he said, well, feedback is like doing a job, he said, doing a job without feedback is like putting together a gas grill without instructions.

If any of you have put together a gas grill, it's pretty scary 'cause it has a lot of different parts and a lot of different instructions.

So feedback is absolutely essential.

You can do it.

It's not always easy, but it is very, very necessary, if you wanna create that positive culture.

Training is another part to this, right?

Why do we train employees?

Because people wanna feel confident, okay?

When you need that confidence to excel in that job, you want to show them that you're investing in them, right?

You want them to progress, you want them to have growth.

And they need to understand what the standards are, what the protocols are.

So training is critical.

Training makes that good employee great if the training is effective, people are willing to learn and the employee is able to apply that training.

So we need training on a regular basis, not just when we're new, for new hires, not just when we're onboarding, but we need to review, we need to refresh.

People need new skills, right?

Processes change, we have updates.

Cross training helps to build that stability in a workforce, especially a thin workforce.

I like to look at this in terms of training pie.

The P stands for plan, okay?

You need a plan, you need some goals.

Not just having a training because it's, we're having a training, but why?

Why are we doing this?

What is our goal?

The I is implement.

Using that structured process to make certain that we're teaching people the things we want them to learn.

And then the E is evaluate, okay, always evaluate training.

Was this effective?

Should we do it again?

When should we do it?

What should we change?

What did you learn and how will you use it?

Those kinds of things.

So training pie.

The other thing, and you guys all know this, variation costs money and so in order to help us eliminate some of that variation, we develop standard operating procedures, we develop protocols.

And the dairy farm, we usually start these in the milking parlor, but we have them for feeding and calf care and everything else.

Your business has these in place as well.

And part of the objective is to reduce variation.

But part of the objective should also be to measure employee performance and also to use those for training and retraining to make sure that we're adhering to the correct SOPs.

So really what we're talking about and how we retain great people is to manage, right?

We have those standard operating procedures in place.

We have good communication and feedback.

We're reviewing employees, we're making sure they have appropriate training or cross training as needed.

It's all of these pieces and parts together that help to create that really positive work environment.

If we're missing some of these things, if we're not doing some of these things, people become frustrated.

Do they always speak up?

No, they don't.

But they become frustrated.

So when we target performance, we want to be as specific as possible.

And I used a McDonald's example here.

So we use those specific goals, okay?

McDonald's wants to fill their counter orders in 90 seconds, very specific.

We have lots of data systems to look at things.

We can use our time clock data, we can use automatic recording data that we have.

Again, I'll use a dairy example.

When we look at parlors and many times we have a lot of automated data in those parlors and we can look at workers from shift to shift, look at the data, it's telling us an awful lot about how those workers are doing their jobs.

Documenting observations and providing some tools for our managers to target performance and give good feedback, okay?

Both positive and negative or constructive.

So again, I know I said this before, but I'm gonna say it again.

People really need that feedback.

It increases clarity, it increases motivation, and it provides those opportunities to learn.

It's really hard to give feedback sometimes.

And it's sometimes difficult to receive feedback.

Sometimes you need to ask.

And if you look at, you know, younger and younger people coming into the workforce, oftentimes they want more feedback.

I've seen this, you know, I've been teaching students over the years, many, many years now, and the students I have now want a lot and need a lot more feedback than five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

They're much more accustomed to that.

So providing that feedback can help people from becoming frustrated in that job and help you to retain your good people.

Alright, so we talked about setting the stage.

I talked to you a little bit about labor and what's happening in a larger area.

We talked about agriculture, we talked about a bit on apprentices, or apprenticeships, excuse me.

We talked about some solutions, thoughts, training, technology.

And finally we finished up with retention, feedback, having those SOPs in place, that HR pyramid and having that good organization, hiring the best people and then retaining them through that directing and supervision and all of the things that we're doing to create that really positive work environment that they want.

I am gonna stop here.

We've got about nine minutes left and hopefully we'll get some good discussion, questions, anything else that you need.

All right, so we're gonna summarize, I have, Ginger already did our university disclaimers and we'll follow up with any questions.

Questions from the group.

It's a quiet group. - Thank you.

Yeah, I have a question for you.

I guess it's probably something, I know Kerry gets this question too, because I helped fill in when she was on sabbatical and I received it a few times.

I'm not sure quite how to ask it.

You mentioned help, working with the Dairy Challenge and working with students, we get questions that they would like to advertise.

Employers would like to advertise jobs through college.

- Mhm.

- Or to figure out how to contact students.

So what's your recommendation for how they go about making that contact if it's career services, if they reach out to departments individually, or how would you suggest they start that?

- Well, there's a lot of different ways.

Penn State as a whole has obviously career services that you can reach out to.

We, in animal science have a student list serve and we often will post jobs on that for folks.

Hang on one second, sorry.

So, depends on the type of position they're looking for, you know, and as well as just online kinds of things that may be linked to the university.

So I guess I would start with maybe career services at the university and then getting to know folks in the departments where they may be drawing students from.

I had a colleague at Penn State Behrend that used to, in the biology department, that he had students that would go out and milk on a dairy farm.

And he had a great relationship with this particular farmer.

It was just one of those things where the relationship had developed.

And he said, you know, I have all these students that are biology students and they're curious and you know, they could be good workers.

And it just kind of developed from there.

But you know, the broader services are great, but sometimes that personal connection works well too.

Sorry.

Any other questions?

- Thank you for that response.

- Sure.

If not, I am gonna stop sharing and hopefully you're able to take some things away.

- Thank you very much for your time and sharing that information today.

We will make the recording available.

We'll post it on our website.

- [Kerry] Thank you, Lisa.

- [Lisa] Yep, have a great day.

- Thanks, you too.