February 2010 Management Minute
by Chris Reinhardt, feedlot specialist
Winter in Kansas can be a beautiful time of rest, rejuvenation, and relaxation—unless you’re in agriculture. In that case, winter in Kansas can be a time of exhaustion, cold, endless mud, and constantly broken equipment. Am I getting ‘warmer’?
Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about our glorious Kansas winters. But I would like to encourage you to find time to consider that if you are exhausted, how are your employees faring this long winter season?
If work hours have been abnormally taxing to all involved, consider providing extra time off. This may be especially essential if the hectic schedule of spring planting time will not allow for any extra breaks. Maybe there just aren’t enough people to do what needs to be done as it is and therefore there can be no additional time off.
Perhaps there are jobs which could be deferred or outsourced. On the one hand you can’t afford to increase short-term cost outlays by outsourcing equipment repair or maintenance. But burnout, frustration, and dissatisfaction are inevitable if we don’t actively prepare for and prevent it. And the natural product of that burnout is turnover. The costly part may be that the turnover could happen when we can least afford to be short-handed: calving time, spring planting, harvest, weaning, the fall run.
Consider workplace burnout like a huge boulder rolling downhill, gathering steam, directly towards your place of business at the bottom of the hill. The boulder has inertia, which could be defined as its ‘unwillingness to change direction’, and the ‘unwillingness’ is increasing. The only way to intervene is to invest energy and resources to stop or turn the boulder away from your workplace. The longer you wait, the more resources you’ll need to turn the boulder. Your INTENTIONALITY OVERCOMES INERTIA. Things will stay on the same course until you decide to actively change their course.
Keeping your workplace satisfying and rewarding in order to keep your good people engaged and working hard will require that you are an active participant in determining the course your work environment is headed. For more information, contact Chris at 785-532-1672 or cdr3@ksu.edu.
