For most, spring is in the air! The smell of flowers blooming, the fresh buds on trees with spring cleanups underway. You have pushed your last pile, shoveled your last walk, accounted for tools, made repairs and closed the door of another snow year. With everything that needs to be done to wrap up the season, what most forget to do is an end-of-season review with yourself and team. This is a crucial step to a successful next season.

Reviewing items in real time is critical for feedback and training, but the reality is that’s difficult when you’re in the trenches during the season. A year-end review gives you a chance to dive deeper into issues that occurred and allows you to fully address everything, and not just one-off situations. In these reviews you will likely find the gaps in training and abilities.

So where do you start?

Add this review into your end-of season to-do list. You want to make sure you review the following in order to identify training that can be done in the off-season to improve performance the following season:

• High level review: Start, Stop and Continue with your self and your team
• Set goals
• Team member review
• Collect and use data

Start, Stop and Continue

What is "start, stop and continue"? It is a reflection point with easy-to-use metrics that allows for high-level review without getting stuck in the weeds. This method forces you to think of actionable items that will produce results.

Ask yourself and your team, without thinking of one-off situations, what you would like to start, stop and continue doing to reach company and personal goals. This exercise is a personal reflection on contributing factors of success and failure.

When you write your own reflection, review your metrics, events and personal involvement. It is essential to find your own gaps within your reflection. Pick the top 3 key metrics that work best for you within your company’s goals. Once you have the metrics, write out the start, stop and continue items. I find it best to free flow write without reviewing the document until I am done to avoid overthinking each situation.

Review each section, see if anything is overlapping or repeated, and ask yourself the root cause of each statement. From there, narrow your statement and ask yourself what is really going to move the needle in the right direction? Within that space write obtainable goals that are defined within a certain timeframe that can be measured and tracked. Ideally, you want 3 to 4 goals, or one for each section—more is neither better nor obtainable. You can always come back once you have achieved those goals.

Perform this exercise with your team—this can be used on all fronts of the team from the front line to management. Depending on the size of the team, you may want to include breakouts that involve front-line leadership together to allow for open and honest communication. Have the team write down their own "start, stop and continue." Guide them by asking for the top 1-3 ideas in each section. Once that is completed, come together as a group and review.

Take note of the feedback you receive, especially if it is consistent. These exercises of personal reflection will reveal how the team is performing, along with their fears, pain points, and what they are most proud of.

Once shared, find the commonalties within their "start, stop and continues." Dive in with the team on the root cause of each one. Pick one for each section that will move the needle. Have the team come together with a plan on how they will achieve these goals and set measurements and timeframes around them.

Start, stop and continue is a great opportunity to identify root causes of issues and what training you need to build for future team development. It will also allow your team to evaluate the entire season—not one or two situations. It will allow them to align as a team, especially with front-line management. Note: it can be beneficial in larger settings to pulse survey frontline workers on improvements as well.

You can follow this same exercise to review by team, property, event, client, asset management and more. Since it is broken into manageable metrics, you can create, manage and measure goals in each segment. When writing the goals, make sure they are within company metrics and are obtainable and not overwhelming. If you utilize this in other segments within the company or outside of your management, ensure you are not reviewing one-off situations, unless it has critical consequences.

Team member review

The next step in documenting for training is to review with leadership whether people are in the "right seats." I mean this literally and metaphorically. Review each team member on company fit/culture, performance, development and understanding/knowledge before season’s end. Is there someone that is not catching on to driving a loader or plow truck? Is there a site suffering from lack of leadership or ownership? Did someone stand out and step up on multiple occasions?

Collecting data

Real-life data will resonate with team members more than a hypothetical scenario. This real-life data will identify commonalities and point out training gaps from reports, feedback and photos. You can utilize these genuine situations to train current and future team members:

Photo review. Most of us have tons of photos from the season of things we see in the field or from clients. Most times these photos are never put into storage. At the end of season, review your photo logs—upload them to the cloud or a shared space for training purposes.

Client feedback. Review all the feedback that you receive from your clients. Having postseason conversations with clients on how you can improve can be critical for training. Document and store all the feedback you received.

Repairs. Take photos of repairs that are needed to sites and equipment. Review with the team prior to closing the season. Note on maps where site damage is occurring to include in preseason checks and training.

Get out of the weeds

In conclusion, reviewing the season outside the trenches is critical. This is when you can see the whole forest and not just the weeds. Collecting data, training, and evaluating throughout the season is key, but so is what you do with that information. Evaluating this information and implementing obtainable objectives at the end of the season will set you and your team up for success for the following year.

"Start" example

1. Start statement: Proactively educate clients prior to season.
2. Start root cause: Need to educate clients on expectations versus what is correct (e.g., oversalting).
3. Start goal: Have education materials for clients by September; schedule meetings to review in October; schedule follow-up after the first event.
   
   

Team Start, Stop and Continue

1. Start: Improving communication. A resolution example could be teamwork training and proactive team communication, training front-line leadership on jobsite management, etc.
2. Stop: Overservicing. A resolution example could be scope of work training for the team.
3. Continue: Training. A resolution example would be to ensure this continues to be successful. Embrace this as a win. Reiterate how this was successful with examples when training new team members and with existing team members after the season. Dig in more on why it was successful and how can it be improved.
   
   

Critical questions

• How many times did you witness ___________________________(the action)?
• How long has team member been in _________________________(the role)?
• Did they receive training? Did they comprehend the training? Was it assessed?
• Was there follow-up training?
• Were expectations delivered and understood? Was there confirmation?
• Do they have the capacity to move forward?
• Is it trainable? Do they have the willingness to learn?

During the end-of-season team review, it is essential to answer these questions, especially before moving forward on negative evaluation. In some cases, it is assumed that if the information is given then the person must have comprehended it. In other cases, the person will comprehend but if the skills are not used consistently people can forget. Is this person a good fit for their role but may not have the capacity to do more currently?

In most cases the skills are trainable, but in some cases the person may not be willing to learn. That is OK, if the team member understands where that fits within your company. If you answer "no" to any of these statements, it will highlight where you have gaps within your training program. Find commonalties in team members and this will identify key training components that are missing.
 
Jenny Girard, ASM, is an area manager for New York-based RM Landscapes. Contact her at jgirard@rmlandscape.com.