The retention lesson that took me 13 years to learn

Authored by: Gregory Hair

When I started SLIDE Living back in 2013, I thought retention was an HR word for big companies. Thirteen years and 300 plus projects later, I've changed my mind. Retention is the whole game in regional landscaping, and most of us are losing it badly.

Here's the part that stings. Every couple of months, I watch a good tradie drive past one of our jobs in a CFMEU branded ute. Same age as one of mine. Same set of hands. Thirty grand more in the bank by Christmas. The maths is brutal, and pretending otherwise breaks trust the second your leading hand notices.

So if I can't beat the mines or civil on pay, what's left?

Pay on time, every time

The best line I've read on tradie culture came from Mandy Semken at Semken Landscaping in Melbourne. A former employee wrote her a thank you letter once. The thing he wanted to thank her for was that his pay always landed on time. Among 7,000 landscaping businesses in Victoria, that was the differentiator.

I read that and laughed. Then I checked our payroll history and stopped laughing.

Because here's the thing. Tradies don't run on quarterly performance reviews. They run on Thursday afternoons, on whether the rent goes out clean on Friday, on whether the missus has to ring the bank again. When the wages hit reliably, the crew sleeps. When they don't, the crew starts looking.

Xero data shows 92% of Australian trade businesses cop late payments from clients. Most of us pass that stress straight onto our staff. The fix is unglamorous. Better cashflow buffers, tighter invoicing, and treating payroll as the one bill that never gets bumped. We moved to a Wednesday payroll run so any bank delay still clears before the weekend. It cost us nothing. The crew noticed inside two pay cycles.

The first 90 days run the rest

My second hard lesson was about new hires. NCVER research says roughly 73% of apprentices who don't finish their training quit for employment reasons, not personal ones. Top reason on the list? Not getting on with the boss or others at work.

We've all done it. Throw the new kid in the deep end on day one. Ute keys, hi vis, off you go. Then we wonder why he ghosts us in week three.

So now we run a buddy system. Every new hire pairs up with a Cert III tradie for the first six weeks. The buddy gets a small bonus and a shout-out at toolbox. The new hire gets someone who isn't me to ask the dumb questions. Industry data backs it up too. Most serious injuries in landscape work happen inside a worker's first ninety days, and the smaller the company, the worse the rate. Throwing the new bloke in cold isn't tough love. It's a statistical hazard.

Smoko is the most underrated culture lever

Somewhere along the way I noticed something. The owners who disappear into the ute at smoko have crews that talk about them. The owners who sit on the tailgate with a sausage roll have crews that talk to them. Big difference.

That ten minutes is where you find out the foreman's daughter is sick. Where you hear that the apprentice's car is dying. Where the bloke who's been quiet for two weeks finally says the words "I'm not doing great."

MATES in Construction has trained more than 300,000 workers across Australia, and their helpline runs 24/7 on 1300 642 111. The construction industry's male suicide rate sits at roughly twice the rate for other employed men. Among the people who die, more than a quarter are technicians and trades workers.

Numbers like that get easier to ignore when you don't sit at smoko. So I sit at smoko. Sometimes the conversation stays surface. Weather, weekend footy, who burnt the snags. Sometimes it doesn't. Either way, the door is open.

What I'd tell another landscape owner

Three things, and none of them cost much. First, get your payroll bulletproof before you chase any other culture initiative. The fancy stuff doesn't land if Friday's pay is shaky. Second, stop hiring like you're recruiting for a one day trial. Pair the new kid with someone who isn't you for the first six weeks. Pay the buddy a few bucks for the trouble. Third, get yourself GAT trained through MATES. It's free, it takes about an hour, and it gives you the language for the conversation when you need it. Albury-Wodonga has MATES presence on both sides of the border now, so there's no excuse on geography.

The civil sites and the mines will keep waving thirty grand at my best people. Some will go, and that's fine. But the ones who stay don't stay because I matched the cheque. They stay because the wages land on Friday, the new hires don't get hung out to dry, and someone notices when they're flat at smoko.

That's what 13 years has taught me. Retention isn't an HR program. It's three or four boring habits, run long enough that the crew stops checking Seek on their lunch break.

Author Bio:

Gregory Hair, Owner, Landscaper, SLIDE Living