One of the possibly most relevant areas within agricultural administration is work supervision.
The ability to create good supervision teams is substantial since it directly impacts the annual cost, not only because it is an important item in the workforce, but it is also closely related to the volume of our annual losses. We have been able to see more than one opportunity, just because of the effect of redoing poorly executed work in just one season, costs of 500 US and more per hectare, a bad thinning, a bad de-budging, an incorrect de-leafing are errors that are paid dearly. Even at more micro levels, not detecting a worker without the necessary training or who is lazy and malicious, can cause a great loss when he works for days without being corrected. We talked in a previous article about the impact of poor supervision during the harvest, this can easily be 1000 or 2000 US/ha of less income just because of fruit on the ground, bruises, pitting, open wounds, etc.
Building a good team of supervisors is not only difficult, but also costly, both in terms of training and development. Likewise, for each administrator, manager, head of supervisors, irrigation managers, etc., the quality of their team determines, among other things, the work environment, the ability to delegate, the workload and motivation.
Let's start from the basis that we are not going to create a new team, we are going to work on getting the best out of the existing one, this is the scenario where we want to stop.
To put this into a real context, let's think about the two types of supervisors that predominate in our field:
- The “old school” supervisor, strong-willed, heavy-handed, not very fond of numbers and sometimes of technology, does his job and goes home happily without reporting much about his daily work.
- The youngest supervisor, less experienced but eager to climb the ladder quickly, tech-savvy but impatient and highly sensitive to frustration.
Both profiles, like everything, have their strengths and weaknesses. Now the important thing is to make the most of their talents and to transform that difference, instead of being a negative gap, into a great learning opportunity.
Let's take these two profiles and add to this analysis that both are supervisors with a grade 5 (maximum grade 7). With our experience we can say that it is highly probable that the weaknesses we will find will almost always be the same, regardless of the characteristics we mentioned above:
A.- It is very common for them to have a vague definition of the role, what is my primary and secondary mission and what tools they have to manage. Both limitations do not come with them, but rather are part of a failure in leadership.
B.- Second, there is generally a poor common basis for quantitatively and qualitatively evaluating what they should supervise.
C.- Third, it is common for them to have a poor ability to record how much and how they evaluate during their workday, which makes supervision subjective and difficult to trace.
d.- Fourth, in general the monitoring of this supervisor and the quality of his work is not done regularly, and if it is done, it is often based on an impression rather than on numerical data.
Finally, one conclusion is that neither of these two supervisor profiles necessarily determines the cause of poor supervision quality, that is, both will have the same growth based on a good work system and of course a motivation (even if it is not their own) to improve.
Our service consists largely of helping to create the B and C pillars, that is, defining evaluation parameters, but along with this we design digital tools, simple but effective for their quantification and monitoring, these are created according to the producer's needs and not necessarily for computer convenience. With this, it is possible to build a robust system based on (reliable) numbers that allow weekly monitoring of the objectives and compliance of each supervisor.
The results are multiple and always profitable:
1.- More reliable teams, with better management of evaluation criteria.
2.- More effective supervisors. A supervisor with better tools and more training can supervise even 100% more people than in certain tasks.
2.- More decisive and effective teams when faced with problems.
3.- Supervisors with better technological tools (less paper and typing).
4.- Supervisors more empowered by their role and capabilities.
5.- Area heads, administrators and managers are more satisfied with performance and expenses in their supervision areas.
6.- Less economic losses due to poor supervision and poorly executed work.
To learn more about our work, schedule a meeting at: www.compasagrosistemas.cl.
