The short- and long-term of it

If you had asked me, before I became a superintendent, what were going to be the most challenging aspects of the job for my future career, I don’t think I would have put hiring a team very high on the list. I guess I believed that was something that would just take care of itself. Hire the best people. Move forward. Bada bing, bada boom. Simple.

But simple it is not.

Although hiring and retaining a staff has definitely become more challenging in the last few years, it has never been as easy as I had originally thought it was going to be. This is an industry where turnover is simply part of the deal.

One way to keep a little control and not get overwhelmed is to think of your crew in two parts:

• A group of full-timers (long-termers)
• Seasonal workers added to complement the full-timers during busy months (short-termers)

Approaching it in this way — and starting with and taking care of that first group — will make the “Building a Team” concept much more manageable.

I should mention that keeping those long-term folks has gotten much more challenging in recent years. But let’s put that on hold for a second and address the seasonal staff part of the equation first.

The short-termers

A good analogy to a superintendent hiring the seasonal part of his or her staff involves comparing it to being a head coach in college sports.

As a college coach, you recruit players to come play at your school, wooing them toward your institution and away from the competition, either down the road or even across the country. Nowadays you can even offer them money — something not available to collegiate coaches in the past. But it’s still temporary. You only have these young men and women for a few years, if that. You then build it all over again. Any success you had with these people will not carry over. You must start from scratch every few years or, worst case, every year.

In this fashion, superintendents resemble college coaches. We have to continually woo and hire short-termers. But that does not make them any less valuable to us. Finding the right people for these positions is positively vital and often essential to annual success.

One important factor in hiring seasonal workers is trying to get folks who might possibly be interested in working for more than just one season. I love nothing more than hiring a seasonal person who turns out to be a hard worker and actually comes to work every day, and then having that person return for a second summer. Or, if you are extremely fortunate, even a third! This is rare. Normally those “quality” short-termers are on their way to something else in their careers. You are a bridge or a stepping stone.

But that isn’t such a bad thing. Embracing this turnover and accepting that you are going to lose good, well-trained workers every year is really the only way to truly not get exasperated by it. Think of them as what they are and understand it’s simply part of your job to move on without them.

The other key factor when hiring seasonal workers is utilizing the golf benefit privilege to its full extent. I think this is an even more effective tool when hiring seasonal workers as compared to full-time workers. Don’t underestimate the value of this privilege for many young folks looking for a job. They can’t play 18 holes for free after finishing their shift at McDonalds.

The long-termers

I’ve been fortunate to have hired a fairly strong group of long-termers over the years. These workers stayed with the course for many years. In some cases, they remained for a couple of decades. Although I would consider this a mostly positive thing, it can catch up with you. One day you arrive at work and realize the youngest person on your full-time staff is in their late 40s.

Added to this conundrum is that I also tend to like to hire two or three retired “seasonal” folks each year for a non-physical job like mowing rough or fairways. This can really elevate the average age of those on the crew.

Don’t get me wrong, I love having older folks on the crew. Heck, I’m one myself. But having a mixture of young and healthy with the “seasoned” workers on your crew is essential. It can be a physical, demanding job, especially in the heat of the summer. It only makes sense to have enough folks on the crew who can handle this physicality combined with the weather extremes of golf course maintenance.

I mentioned earlier the somewhat newer problem of actually retaining the long-termers. Anyone reading this article will not be surprised by me saying it has become harder in the last few years to not only hire but also retain our workers. Our long-term staff has definitely not been immune to the phenomenon.

The golf industry and the workers who comprise this industry have been left a bit behind with skyrocketing wages in other industries. Golf course maintenance workers, in particular, are finding that they can make more money leaving the industry and finding work in another field.

One example: My assistant came to me last August and gave his two-week notice, stating he was going back to school and switching industries. He had been in golf course maintenance his entire working career after studying it in school.

It is in all of our best interests to try and keep our long-term, loyal employees from flying the coop and heading for the greener grasses on the other side of the fence (golf maintenance pun intended). As simple as this sounds, it can only be accomplished with money. Paying them a wage lower than what they could get by switching industries is just not sustainable for the future of our industry.

So how do we go about changing this? Well, it pretty much starts and ends with convincing ownership, general managers and boards that the labor budget, as it currently stands, is no longer adequate. Wages need to be competitive with jobs outside of golf course maintenance, not just with the golf course down the street.

Labor budgets need to be reflective of what is happening with jobs worldwide. In the past, I was directed to keep wages at about 54 percent of my annual budget. To be honest, I could never do this. It always ended up around 57 percent. That number is now at 64 percent, and it honestly needs be even a tad higher.

Golf popularity is strong, and revenues for most golf courses are also robust. Sure, this is going to peak — and probably already has begun to at some level — but that doesn’t mean we are not in a good place as an industry. The only way we can stay there long-term is by keeping the people who are vital to keeping golf courses in great shape to want to stay in the industry.

There are many ways to build your golf course maintenance team. As much as I hate to say this, in today’s world, the No. 1 factor for all of those different ways is most likely being able to offer a high enough wage to generate interest.

Without that first step of getting them onto the diving board, they are unlikely to ever jump in.

Ron Furlong is the golf course superintendent at Avalon Golf Club in Burlington, Washington, and a frequent Golf Course Industry contributor.