Scotland’s experts on farmer co-ops and food industry collaboration, we work with food and farming businesses to make them more profitable, competitive, and sustainable - #workingtogether to shape the future, today.
All our work helps facilitate farmers and food and drink businesses to work together effectively. Over the years we've expanded and developed subsidiary businesses - getting the right people together and making innovative advancements - to help benefit food, farming and rural Scotland.
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04 June 2024
We've been working on ideas for helping our co-op members to tackle this big issue.
David Michie shares more in his latest blog:
"Employing and managing staff is a big challenge. In fact, our co-op members tell us that it is their number one issue. Recruitment and retention of staff, new ways of working, different work patterns, developing skills, and planning for the succession of older staff are all challenging Scotland’s agri co-ops right now.
We in the SAOS Co-op Development team identified this was such a big challenge through our business review work, where we speak directly with our co-ops to understand their challenges and identify opportunities to help. The scale of the challenge was confirmed by some of our co-op managers at a workshop in the winter where we were able to drill down to get at some of the specifics.
I don’t think these employment issues are restricted to agri co-ops. I think they are affecting a lot of businesses in Scotland right now. Lockdown has changed the workplace and worker attitudes, and technology has had a huge impact on the way we work. There is more flexibility, with many jobs now being done remotely. There are also fewer people looking for jobs. Which is probably also a consequence of lockdown. As well as Brexit. This trend of fewer people being available to do work, and more people wanting to work ‘their way’, means there is a real need for some new thinking on employing and managing staff.
At SAOS we have come up with a new idea to help our co-op members get on top of this challenge. Partnering with Greenburn HR, we are offering a series of “Planning to Succeed” sessions in late summer, where we want to get operational managers together to share their experiences, learn from HR professionals, explore some new thinking and, most importantly, put together a plan that they can then take back and implement in their business. There is so much we can learn from each other and sharing and exploring ideas is a great way to come up with really valuable insights and potential solutions. We’ll also be discussing how to plan to succeed through managing staff performance, having the right remuneration packages in place, and by recruiting the right people in the first place. These operational improvements will all help improve performance and make business run more effectively. These sessions will give managers a bespoke plan to make this all happen.”
We’ll share more information on these sessions very soon, watch out for the email!