Landscape Employees Discuss Hourly Wage VS Performance Pay!

So where I worked before, it was very. They encourage you to work harder, but there's no reward behind it. It's just go harder or leave, basically. And after coming here, it's definitely very much rewarding. The whole P4P system.

It only pushes you to do better and more efficient work.

And it just. It encourages better worth ethic in anyone coming in. Yeah, it definitely encourages you to say something to someone if they're not going fast and they're doing something a slower way and you maybe know how to do something better. And it just makes everyone look out for everybody else. Just keep encouraging and keep pushing harder.

Hi, I'm Eliza, and I was going to talk to you guys a little bit about P4P and how I felt about it and kind of how I felt at first, but versus at the end. I've been with Augusta for a couple of months now. Like, six months now. It goes by really fast, but at first, I had never worked for somewhere that had P4P, and so kind of wrapping my head around it made sense. But also, like, just physically doing it was a little bit of a hurdle at first because it's just a really quick pace. And I started during the season where it's kind of harder to make all your P4P because of how quickly the grass is growing. So at first, my mindset was kind of like, holy smokes. Like, how does this even work? Because it's just hard to keep up with the grass when it's growing that long. But once the grass kind of chills out and over a longer period of time that you work at Augusta, it just sort of starts to make more and more sense, and you become much more efficient.

So I definitely just like getting in better shape for landscaping and then sort of seeing how the people who have worked at Augusta for a longer time.

How they go about a job site, like, they're very methodical about, like, what's the fastest way and where we can be the quickest. And so once I kind of figured out all those sort of tricks, it made a lot more sense. And then I was making better P4P. And then the better P4P you make, the more you want to go even faster because you make more money. Yeah. So definitely at first, I feel like I sort of thought it was maybe not the best system because it incentivizes people to go fast, but at the same time, you're gonna still want to produce a good product because ultimately, if you mess something up because you're going too fast, you're Gonna have to go back and lose money on it. So there's kind of a check, like a balance for you to make sure that you're doing a good job. And at Augusta, like, quality is definitely something we all strive for. And so I think you just want to do a good job and you're in contact. Actually, even though the pandemic made it so that you didn't see your customers as much, I feel like the Augusta customers are definitely willing to come out and talk to you and especially any particular customers, and they'll tell you exactly what they want. And we have a lot of notes on everyone.

To make sure we're doing everything to specification. So, yeah, I think overall it incentivizes you to go quickly but do a good job because otherwise you're going to waste your time going back and having to lose money doing something you could have done, taking an extra two minutes to do.

My name is Ben. I work here at Augusta Lawn Care Services. When I first got hired on Mike as well as Nick explained to me what P4P was, and when I was working at my previous landscape company, I had the kind of ethereal idea of what P4P was already. How the current system of just an hourly wage wasn't conducive for good work ethic in the landscaping industry. And so I already had a like pay for performance idea in my head. But seeing what they did here makes me much more confident in the value of the way that that works. My approach.

My approach to P4P is probably unique in the sense that I always want to do the best job that I can. And so if that means sacrificing a little bit of my P4P for the customer, I do so so that the customer is always happy. But in essence it's just an, an encouragement to do the best that you can in the most efficient way possible. It could be a double edged sword though.

If someone doesn't have the mentality of the customer always first they can take it and be too efficient. And even though that that slips up, you kind of get the opposite reaction than you have with an hourly wage. With an hourly wage, someone will look at a job, see that it's super easy, and then wait in the work truck for a few hours just to build up some hourly time and then do the job because they know that they're going to get paid more the more that they're there. The opposite effect downside of P4P is that if someone is super efficient, they can leave things less than perfect. On a job site and still get that bonus. And so you have to balance between doing the right thing and doing the best job that you can and also being efficient as possible. And I think where that lies is thinking about the customer and what they want. While it's not a perfect system, it's the best system that I've seen so far as far as as how to pay landscape employees.

With our yellow slip.

Application, on average, it gets weeded out. So if someone, on average, doesn't take the appropriate time to do a job or is overly efficient, that will show through the next revisit on a property or how dissatisfied a customer is or such. That and the other. So the way that a yellow slip works is if someone gets a yellow slip, we need to revisit in order to meet the customer's expectations so that we don't lose the client and to rekindle that relationship with that client so that we always are knowing that we did our best for whatever service that we provide. And so another employee will go and remedy that yellow slip, which I have today.

And then the person going, they get. So there's the person who went really fast, and then they got the big bonus, but they skimped out. So then you, for example, go back and fix it. You get some of their bonus money, right?

Yes.

Because you went back and fixed it.

Yes.

Right.

Okay.

So. So there is an accountability system for people who try to cut corners with it. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's the really beautiful balance between the P4P system and the yellow slip system. They complement each other very, very well. And it plays into the entire culture of Augusta, too. We always want to set up everyone for success, and we always want to do our best for the client as well as for the other co workers, employees. And so when we get P4P, we should be congratulating the other people that are getting the P4P. And when we get the yellow slips, we need to understand that those things happen and that it's not.

The worst thing that can happen and that there's always a solution to any situation.

Hey, guys, My name is Austin here at the Augusta location out here in Bellingham. My thought on P4P through versus hourly.

With it for, like, kind of like the bigger picture. I believe it makes you think about generational wealth over just coming to work instead of just for, like, a paycheck. It gives you kind of like the bigger picture with your team and how your day goes with everybody. It makes you want to think just a couple steps ahead and also think about what they're needing as well.

And just since I've been here, switching to P4P, it's definitely helped out a lot and changed my life. And since being hourly at the beginning, since I've been here for almost like three years.

Switching to P P4P at the beginning, starting hourly, like, yeah, of course, like, feel like you're working hard, but since switching to P4P, it feels nice knowing that you're being rewarded. I'm not really the type of guy to go after if I'm not feeling like I'm being rewarded. I'll just keep on working hard and keep on going at it until it. It shows and actually feels like you are being worthy. I always felt like I was a top performer and since switching to P4P, I could see on the paychecks that I am being rewarded instead of when I was on hourly and grinding at just trying to grind it out and hope for $1.50 raise or just a dollar raise there.

Since then, it just shows that you are being worthy and being shown the love. Since switching to P4P, it just shows that they care and that it's just not about, hey, you're coming here to a paycheck just for the boss and for him to profit from it, because that's not who he is at all. As well as you can tell, he's out there trying to help other people make more money in scent and be there for everybody as well.

So with P4P, it's really incentivizing the guys to take ownership of every single job that they step on, every house, every property they step on for that day. They're in charge of everything that goes on at that property. So for me, moving into an office manager role, it's actually taken a lot of stress off my plate, given that the guys have more responsibility and more ownership of every job that they have on their schedule for the day. So to give you a specific example, we had a client last week who, after the crew had left, said, hey, they missed a couple beds in the back of the yard. You know, we're not that upset, but we definitely, you know, we're paying for that service. We want the Leafs cleaned out. We want it nice and tidy. So for. For some office managers, for some owners, it can be stressful. You're like, oh, man, now I got to reroute it. Now I have to go back there tomorrow. Now I have to figure it out. Now I have to schedule an extra visit to a client that Already should have been serviced. But when you're on P4P, those guys have a budgeted hour or budgeted time for that property. So all I did is I just went on the dispatch board, I saw that day, had spent just under the budgeted time. And it doesn't matter because it was a customer complaint, whether they were overtime or undertime. Still just want to look at that for reference. And all I did is I just sent him a text. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Blank had called and they said that we missed a couple yards in the backyard. So when you're done with your route, please make sure you go back there and get it taken care of and then it's totally done with. As far as my side, as long as I trust my crew, which here at Augusta we have a culture of trust, as long as I trust my crew, I know it's going to get done. And for those guys, they know it's coming off their performance dollars. So the next time that crew is at that house, they're not going to forget to do those couple beds in the back that we missed because they had to go from a house that wasn't very close and then go around their route on their way back to shop, which was a roundabout way to get back to shop, wasting time, wasting gas. And they had to stop, make a special stop for like 10 extra minutes of cleaning that they shouldn't have missed in the first place. So for me, from a routing standpoint, from a managerial standpoint, it's great because it's such a less stressful situation because I know the guys understand the ownership that comes along with P4P. They know that they have the job notes. They have the description of work that needed to be done. They know that they missed some of the described work that the customer is paying for. And it's on them to go back and fix it and make sure the customer is happy. So from that standpoint, it's an amazing asset to have when you're a manager, an owner, to be able to have that P4P system, to know that the employees are being paid by performance, so their performance dollars are on the table. If they make a mistake, it's not on you as the owner to fix it. It's just on you to facilitate and make sure that the customer is happy and that your team actually gets it taken care of. So from that standpoint, huge weight off my shoulders. I love everything about it in that.

Sam.