How Much to Pay Lawn Care Employees to Keep Them

Finding new ways to increase retention and keep your best lawn care employees is key in developing a successful business with a great crew.

In this article, you’ll discover some of the top pro strategies to keep your best lawn care employees from leaving for the competition:

• Establish a solid training program
• Assign new employees with mentors
• Create clear career paths to support long-term growth
• Encourage healthy work-life balance with normal work hours and PTO
• Provide bonuses and other competitive perks when your team conquers goals

When you know how to keep your best lawn care employees in your business, you can minimize hiring efforts and improve services for clients.

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1. Develop a Strong Onboarding and Orientation Process

By developing a strong onboarding and orientation process, you can:

• Demonstrate company culture
• Increase employee job satisfaction
• Secure continued high-quality services
• Show new hires how they contribute to overall business success
• Ensure new hires have the proper training, skills, and processes in place

With the right training and support from the start, you can ensure all new hires have equal opportunities to succeed.

Remember, even the most experienced lawn care pros need to be trained on your company policies and processes.

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2. Adopt a Buddy Program

Pairing new hires up with your best lawn care pros allows you to create a buddy program that sets new hires up for success from the start.

In addition, adopting a buddy program allows you to:

• Streamline the training process
• Provide additional training support
• Give existing team members new insight
• Create meaningful relationships within the team
• Offer mutual guidance, encouragement, and support for all team members

Plus, adopting a buddy program into your lawn care business is simple.

Depending on your company culture and everyday processes, you can easily create an effective buddy program for new hires.

3. Provide Training and Career Development

When you provide adequate training and focus on career development, you can:

• Improve every employee’s individual skill sets
• Develop new career paths and additional opportunities
• Create next-level employes with constantly-evolving abilities

By equipping your team with proper training and investing in your team’s career paths, you can become the leading lawn care business employer in the area.

Take a look at a few great examples of various ways you can invest into proper training and career development:

• Establishing a budget for industry events
• Tuition reimbursement for new skillsets or related job roles
• Adding new job opportunities to promote employees from within your business

Want to know how to find, train, AND keep great employees?

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4. Promote Work-Life Balance

Especially in a hard-working industry like lawn care, it’s essential to promote reasonable work-life balance.

In fact, 72% of people consider work-life balance when searching for jobs. Plus, 77% of Americans working full-time experience burnout.

Which means, you MUST promote work-life balance if you want to keep your best lawn care employees.

Here are a few of the best examples of how you can promote work-life balance:

• Lead by example
• Provide PTO (i.e. paid time off)
• Be flexible with work schedules
• Offer paid sick time and paid leave
• Take employee feedback into account
  • E.g. routine anonymous employee surveys
• Assist employees in meeting personal goals
• Encourage your team to take time for themselves
  • E.g. don’t encourage overworking

5. Share Your Business’ Successes With the Team

Has your team met an ambitious goal or reached an important milestone?

Whenever your business or team experiences success, it’s important to share those successes with your team.

In addition to praising your team for these excellent successes and milestones, it’s also important to properly compensate them for it.

For example, you can share your business’ successes with the team by:

• Providing merit increases at set milestones
• Offering bonuses after specific goals are met
• Adding new unique perks when company goals are achieved

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Keep Your Best Lawn Care Employees from Leaving for the Competition

One of the biggest secrets to running a successful lawn care business is knowing how to keep your best lawn care employees from leaving your business.

When you know how to keep your best lawn care employees, you can accomplish other goals, such as:

• Improving services
• Minimizing hiring efforts
• Establishing a reputation for being the best
• Developing a happy team who takes pride in their work
• Creating happy clients who build connections with your team

Use these simple, effective pro strategies to keep your best lawn care employees from leaving for the competition!

Related: Motivate Lawn Care Employees All Year Long

Originally published March 2, 2023 7:00 AM