What’s Going On with HR in Horticulture?
May 15, 2022 
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges for human resources departments, including recruiting new employees, retaining current ones, and compliance with new federal laws.
What’s going on with HR?” you ask. Well, frankly, a lot. Human resources is a diverse collection of disciplines. We all love a succinct answer. In short, human resources includes anything that impacts the people working in and around the business and may even impact the vendors, clients, customers, and consultants to the company. But even that does not quite capture all that human resources is and does. So, to ask, “What’s going on with HR?” you can quickly see how expansive of a question that is.
Rather than share all that is going on with HR, let us look at some current events occupying a lot of time, effort, and energy within human resources. While the industry, unique operations, organizational headcount, and revenue volume all impact the priorities of the HR function within each business, some commonalities have a high probability of being experienced by the largest number of HR functions across all industries, operations, headcounts, and revenue volumes.
Talent Acquisition
This is the most pressing issue facing businesses today. The sourcing, screening, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding of top talent to either grow the business, stabilize the business, or backfill positions vacated through voluntary or involuntary terminations is taking up an unbalanced and overwhelming amount of HR’s work today. The pandemic is a primary driver of the issue and not just because of the dangers to the health and even lives of the employee population. Many employees are resigning their positions not to go on unemployment or even to move to a competitor, but instead because of their perception of how they were treated in the early stages of the pandemic when layoffs and closures happened; and because of their perception of how they are being treated today with the controversies around masking, testing, and vaccinations. They have discovered during the layoffs in the early stages just what is important to them or the need and benefits of a better work/life balance; and so are leaving to go into different industries, open their own businesses, or into jobs they perceive will provide better opportunity to support themselves and their loved ones. Because of this, finding top talent and convincing them to join your organization is more challenging than ever before.
We are further seeing massive exits from the workforce. There have been significant drops in the labor participation rate. Many attributed this to the pandemic alone, and that is not the case. We have known since the early 2000s that the baby boomer generation would eventually retire. While the pandemic has affected the decline of labor participation, it is primarily the exit of a generation already known to be leaving the workforce that is having the significant impact we are seeing today.
And with those exits, who is left to fill the void? If the labor participation rate decreases, talent acquisition departments have a big problem on their hands. They cannot recruit people who do not exist.
Talent Retention
This is tied closely with talent acquisition and total rewards. It is what many businesses hope is an outcome of the efforts in talent acquisition and total rewards, and that is a mistake. Retention should be an initiative all its own. While the right talent acquisition and total rewards initiatives and strategies will have a significant and beneficial impact on talent retention, there is so much more to it.
To retain talent, businesses must understand that people do not join a company exclusively for the role into which they are hired; they enter a company for that role and the potential for personal as well as professional growth. They look for increased responsibility, contribution to organizational success, giving back to the community, and income growth to achieve their own financial goals.
While companies profess to provide this growth to employees, too many have been quick to replace employees before and even during this pandemic, and it has left a sour taste in the mouths of many employees.
Businesses that are successful at reducing or eliminating the impact of the Great Resignation are genuinely focused on defining how they treated and currently treat their employee population differently and better than their competition. They provide a strong and positive culture that exemplifies caring and support for their people; they develop an active social cause employees welcome giving back to, and they clearly articulate a career path and the learning and development programs that will help their employees meet personal and professional objectives.
The Solution
“Wow — that’s a lot more than I thought,” say business leaders, employees, and stakeholders. “Do our HR teams need additional support with this?”
The short answer is yes. However, recall the problem with talent acquisition mentioned earlier? Well, finding a genuinely strategic HR professional who can lead through these challenges, collect, evaluate, and analyze data to inform sound business decisions, and guide business leaders to solutions that best align with their unique business and challenges is frankly few and far between.
Align yourself with an expert. Whether conducting an HR audit of the entire function enterprise-wide or Interim Executive HR Leadership support, the right HR expert advisor can provide the strategic support your company needs to overcome these challenges. Collaborating with all levels and functions of your business enterprise-wide, they can guide the human capital strategy aligned with organizational strategy and develop a roadmap to meet your needs.
If you have not yet considered or selected a strategic human capital consultant to support your HR function and business, now may be the time. With so much at stake, and so many struggles and challenges, know that you are not alone. Help is here. All you have to do is ask.
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