It’s been my privilege to help many farm management teams improve their human resource management practices and increase performance results. Most of the time, at least part of the problem, is a lack of clarity in communications, especially about who does what and when. Managers quickly see this issue when we take time together to discuss it, then we start working on solving the misunderstandings and writing down who is supposed to do what. Guess what, we’re writing job descriptions!
Communicating is hard work and most of us aren’t very good at it. Written job descriptions give us a tool for managers to use with each other, and with employees, to at least get clear on what exactly each person is to be doing. It’s tempting to start with front-line employees for job descriptions because those are the easy ones. Front-line jobs are more task-oriented and less decision-oriented, so it’s easier to write down each of the repetitious duties that should be done. In larger operations, however, most of the confusion comes from communication among managers. Write job descriptions for managers, everyone from the front-line supervisor to the owner of the business. Make sure you get really clear about who supervises which employees and what everybody’s performance expectations are.
One dairy farm had a father, a son, and a daughter as the management team. Dad was the general manager, son took care of crops, and daughter did herd health, records and financial. It was quite unclear who was responsible for the parlor and employees who worked there. They said all three managers were responsible, which told me that, really, NONE of them were responsible. Is anyone surprised that there was employee unrest and performance problems in the parlor? We re-assigned duties in the management team’s job descriptions and clearly assigned the milking crew to the daughter. Her job description included specific duties such as hiring, supervising, measuring results, and giving feedback. As soon as she started to actively lead the milking crew, morale and performance improved, finally they had a leader who would pay attention to them!
Check out the new job descriptions page on Cornell Agricultural Workforce Development for some helpful resources.
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By Richard Stup, Cornell University. Permission granted to repost, quote, and reprint with author attribution.
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