The first decision that the management takes is if they should own the team and infrastructure to manage their commercial landscape or hire a professional team to do so.
Most professionally managed companies and organizations understand their core business. The top management would like teams and resources to focus and deliver on their core competence. They establish clear directives in the form of policies for their executives and organizations. These policies define which roles would align with their core competence and which roles don't. Those roles that don't align with their core competence is outsourced.
However, astute management does not leave it there. They will define the goals or key result areas for the landscape contractor Management will further establish the linkages to the Performance Management System (PMS) of departments and individuals within the organizations to ensure that the contractor can successfully deliver on the goals setup by the management.
Very often management is personally very fond of gardening and would like to manage the landscape inhouse. Managing the landscape maintenance inhouse has its advantages. The management can directly control the day to day activities of the labor and supervisors. There is a direct control on purchases of materials and expenses. With no contractor in the picture the overheads and profit paid to the contractor is money saved.
However, realities of managing a home garden and a commercial landscape are quite different. Management cannot give their limited working time to managing the landscape. Yet their goals of having a well managed landscape are essential for the image, brand and work experience of the company.
The day to day management of labor can be quite challenging. You appoint supervisors to manage the labor, then a manager to manage the supervisor. But the managers often have other more important tasks and don't have the professional training to manage a commercial landscape.
Managing labor laws and compliances are always a sticky issue for owners of commercial landscapes. Therefore most corporate owners prefer to sub-contract the labor to a labor supply contractor.
While this may seem to be an out-sourced function, it usually is not. The labor supply contractor does just that. Supplies labor. They supply labor for security, housekeeping, and gardening.
The day to day management is done by owners themselves. The labor contractor's supervisor does all urgent tasks diligently. Even tasks not related to landscape maintenance. So if there is a function in the safety department, the garden workers will spend the day moving plants in and out of the function. Landscape tasks for the day are skipped. Say some plants die in the process of skipping garden tasks, the contractor can always say he was following orders and needs more manpower. Garden workers are often working at the homes of senior managers and staff. Everybody is usually happy, but the landscape is usually mediocre.
Most labor supply contracts you find labor taking their own sweet time to do a task. The contractor gets paid for his inefficiency. Very often you see the labor hanging around places they cannot be seen.. Even if managers choose to take action and remove that resource from the team, there is no guarantee the next guy wont do the same thing. Its one thing to hire people quite another to make them productive.
Procurement is often a big challenge for the operations team. Purchasing process and decision making is designed for big ticket items. So when the team needs small ticket items which are usually last minute, either the process is not followed or the items are not available in time. It is also very difficult to track the materials procured through this process. Materials often get misused or mismanaged.
Well designed and developed landscapes are quite a serious investment for most corporates. Most managers themselves are not professionally qualified for managing the landscape. Either administrative staff or utility managers are hired to oversee the landscape maintenance. While they may be assigned the role of managing the landscape they cannot be expected to manage the landscape themselves. Unfortunately, in most cases they are. If anything goes wrong they are the ones to be held responsible.
With the best of intent, they only focus on sweeping, cleaning, mowing and pruning of all plants in sight. As a result the investment in landscape by the owners looks quite different from what was originally envisioned. In many cases the investment is lost and landscapes need expensive renovations and upgrading.
Instead, their job is to find the right landscape maintenance contractors for the job. Once identified they should be responsible to ensure that the contractor gets the required support do the job they are hired to do. They establish, track and measure pre-agreed goals and key result areas with the contractor.
