As part of our business development in Africa, Afrisource is looking at Namibia and benchmarking the data there and part of looking at the people and management profit driver was to identify what the characteristics were of the farm managers and what was it that drove their businesses? Defined culture If we’re looking at HR principles that we can implement, what are the actual characteristics of good performing farm managers,

This is where the situational analysis tools (SWOT) plays a big role. Look at your current workload, what are the average hours worked per person per week? Do you actually know this? Have you got timesheets? Do you understand when you have got your peak periods and your quieter periods and how that fits? What does the productivity look like per FTE (full-time equivalent) or hectare? Do you actually need

Employees are empowered and engaged when the communication is right. Take advantage of every opportunity that you can have to initiate informal but also formal communication processes, this could be from weekly meetings, workshop meetings, or in the lunchroom through to performance reviews and you know most of you would have completed sowing perhaps what’s happening posts sowing to review how that went before things get busy into the next

For any human resource development strategy to succeed it’s important to have a clear vision that provides the roadmap for your farm business and outlines your goals. This allows the business to move from intuitive business planning to more formalized planning, which gives you a communication tool for your team which allows them to understand your direction from year to year to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing from