bells and whistles or gamification. Tying the training to their career advancement is motivation enough. “If they choose not to engage with it,


they’re probably not engaged with Ryan Lawn and Tree, and that’s important,”says Matt Evans, director of arboriculture training for Ryan Lawn & Tree. “I would rather have 30 people who are engaged and wanting to develop themselves and join in the conversation, versus the other 470 that didn’t care a hoot about being there at all.”


A trainee who is a go-getter can


move up to specialist one within about a year. “We’re not dictating to them to get the training done, with the exception of anything that’s safety or compliance related,” Evans says. “We’re providing them an opportunity. They choose not to take advantage of the opportunity. It’s really on them but the worst thing we could do is check them off on things and give them a bump in pay because that doesn’t teach them anything.” Word says they keep their employees engaged by making the training topics applicable to what they may see in the field at that time of the year. “We also try to work in a friendly competition a couple of times a year to sharpen skills, but make it fun at the same time,” Word says. Word says there’s no shortage of training topics for them to cover, and it never hurts to cover the same topic again, especially if they see reoccurring issues in the field.


CONDUCTING TRAINING Word says they conduct weekly training for each team where they focus on a


specific topic as well as safety. For new employees, they have first-day and first- week training. “We also have additional training


sprinkled in throughout the year, some in the form of competitions to make it a little more fun,” Word says. “In the winter months, we do a lot of focused training and often bring in an outside person to teach specific topics.” Currently, Blackjack’s division man-


agers are responsible for executing the training, but Word says he is seeking to fill a full-time employee training and development position. Word says they try to mix up the training methods from being in the classroom to hands-on field training. “Occasionally, we’ll have designated


crews even meet at a client’s property to look at a specific topic, like how to prune a mass planting of a certain plant,” Word says. Davey Tree’s commercial landscape


service line has two annual week-long training programs. One is called the Davey Institute of Grounds Manage- ment (DIGM), held in March and CLS Advanced Leadership Training, which is held in August. Both of these programs require the employees to meet specific qualifications before they can apply for the training program. Davey also held their first Spanish-lan- guage DIGM last year. All courses were taught in Spanish. “We hope to take that company-wide


next year because the response from our Hispanic workforce was amazing,” Fitzgerald says. “They really appreciated that we did that.” Fitzgerald says they prefer to conduct hands-on training, which is why they


“All Davey employees have access to our LMS, which allows them to take hundreds of different courses in the horticulture industry, and not just on plants and insects. We also have courses in communication


skills, sales, leadership and management.” - Shawn Fitzgerald, technical advisor for The Davey Institute’s commercial landscape service line


require their employees going through DIGM and the advanced leadership training to come into their headquarters in Kent, Ohio, for a week. Additionally, Fitzgerald will visit branches to lead training as needed. He will ask in advance if there is anything they’d like him to cover specifically. “A manager may say, ‘Yes, we need help with our seasonal color displays,’” Fitzgerald says. “So then I prepare a pro- gram and schedule a couple of days to stay and work with the crew and actually install some seasonal color displays and give them suggestions on how to do it successfully.”


Photos: Davey Tree


National Association of Landscape Professionals 15


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