Work From Home
One of the keys to retaining the great people who work here through bad weather days and the general challenges of life has been thinking creatively about work from home (WFH) opportunities.
Farming work is unpredictable. And that in and of itself can be a barrier to finding and retaining employees. It’s hard enough to find reliable seasonal staff. And then, if you have to stop work periodically for safety reasons, it can be even harder to retain farmers.
When the weather is really bad, or I just predict that we are all going to be miserable working here, I will occasionally tell staff to stay home. This summer we’ve had work days canceled for bad air quality (wildfire smoke) and severe weather (thunderstorms).
People also just have to miss work sometimes for things outside their control, like a child who has to stay home with an illness or or child care that ends early in the afternoon.
If you value the people you’ve got on your team and you want to keep them on board you might consider offering them some work from home hours. I view these projects as a HUGE advantage for my business. There are so many areas of our work that take a back seat when the weather IS good. Right— when the weather is nice we plant, weed, and harvest. On repeat. If the sun’s out, we’re planting, weeding, or harvesting. But your business is a lot more than those 3 tasks. And we need to do those tasks. So, when I’m thinking about WFH projects, I’m also thinking about EVERYTHING that I don’t want us to be doing when we could be planting, weeding or harvesting.
suggested work from home tasks:
all paper wrapper stamping
box-labeling for vase arrangement delivery
package preparation (small boxes notecards, etc.)
card writing for subscription flower club members
card writing for holiday shipping orders and
all bucket washing
all low tunnel tie down strap preparation (cutting bailing twine to length, knot-tying)
blog writing
plant tag cleaning
tool cleaning (sanitizing snips)
dahlia tuber dividing
seed sowing (send home seeds and prepped seed trays or soil blocking supplies with lids)
workshop/course auditing
website auditing
customer service (emails)
website projects (like adding customer mapping points, creating new product listings)
social media - making reels and other video compilations
social media research and marketing (looking in groups for problems to solve with our products,
project management that requires research, communication
database work/order management
deliveries (can work for staff who need to be with kids/can bring children with them)
I’ll revisit this list and share more ideas as I think of them. We’re always looking at our operation and trying to figure out which things we don’t really need to to do here. If those tasks can be saved for bad weather days or those times when people have to leave work early to look after a child, we save them up.
Which projects do you send home with people or save for yourself when the weather is poor?