The first step in great leadership is communicating expectations clearly. Job descriptions are a powerful tool to help employees understand exactly what they are supposed to be doing at work. Although communicating expectations may seem obvious it’s actually difficult to do, but job descriptions can help tremendously.
Here are a couple of tools provided by Penn State Extension:
- Job Descriptions: The Building Blocks of Organizations. A helpful guide to writing job descriptions.
- Job Description Generator. A great tool to help dairy farms automate the process of writing job descriptions.
Another great tool for dairy managers is a research report about competencies needed in the dairy workforce: Workforce Development for the Pennsylvania Dairy Industry (2004), Holden, Hyde, Stup, Brasier. Beginning on page 50 are a series of tables detailing competencies for senior- and middle-level dairy managers, and front-line employees. These are very helpful when writing a job description to be sure that you capture all the important duties for the position.
The Iowa State University page is great resource that talks about conducting a job analysis to develop the components of a good job descriptions: Farm Employee Management: Assembly of Farm Job Descriptions.
The University of Nebraska Examples of Job Descriptions for Major Positions on Dairy Farms guide provides several examples of job descriptions for different roles on the dairy. It focuses on breaking down the percentage of time each sub task will consist of for each job, providing further role clarity.
Finally, a few examples are often a great help to get started with job descriptions.
- Example Dairy Manager Job Description
- Example Herdsperson Job Description
- Senior Manager PDF or Senior Manager Word
- Middle Manager PDF or Middle Manager Word
- Dairy Production Tech Word or Dairy Production Tech Word
