Category: Newsletters

Average productivity is a key component of the changes to the Australian Horticulture Award legislation. In order to determine average productivity, you need to know which workers are competent at the specific task. You need to know the time those competent workers spent on the task. And you need to know the quantities those workers did. When you have all that information, you can determine the average productivity. Now you need to put each worker against that average to determine if the worker is below average, or average and above. For those average and above, you should be paying them the 15% uplift. 

This can be a big ask when managing via spreadsheets. The person doing all this data collection and manipulation, is not doing the job they were doing last year. Who is doing that job? This is where good software tools come into play. Let the software handle the legwork of crunching the numbers and presenting information for decision making. Use your key staff in the roles you hired them for. Automation is the buzz in the horticulture industry. Software tools such as ABCgrower for worker productivity is automation. 

What would it mean to your business if you can see productivity every day? What decisions would/could you make? What opportunities does it create? Productivity is a fixed formula of quantity over time. What you do with this information, however, is a choice each farmer can make. Some ideas: 

• Reward high performers 

• Know your key workers and who to retain 

• Motivate workers using comparisons on what other workers are achieving 

• Identify poor performers, and act 

There’s a really useful Productivity Bonus calculation tool as part of ABCgrower which can be used to encourage and reward your top performers! 
 
Collect by piece for valuable productivity information, use the Convert to Hourly tool to change the piece rate information to an hourly pay rate, and use the Productivity Bonus calculation tool to apply an additional payment to reward your best workers.  

The Productivity Bonus calculator includes a weighting function to account for differences between blocks, for example higher numbers of trees pruned would be expected in a block with young trees compared to a block with older denser trees pruned on the same day.  With visibility to individual’s productivity it is easy to identify top performers and you set the productivity threshold required to earn a bonus payment.   

Together, these tools provide an alternative to piece rate while retaining a motivator for high productivity.  It is particularly useful where your workers have disparate skills and it is difficult to set an appropriate piece rate.
 
If you have questions, get in touch here.