Landscape architects design gardens, parks and open spaces, then watch contractors build them. This is how to run designers, horticulturists and site supervisors when the work grows slowly and seasons matter.
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Share your requirementsA landscape architecture practice designs outdoor spaces such as residential gardens, township greens, hotel grounds, parks and rooftop terraces. A typical studio has principal landscape architects, junior designers who produce plans and 3D views, horticulturists who know plants and soil, and site supervisors who guide contractors on the ground. Work spans a long arc: concept, tender drawings, planting plans and months of site execution. Seasons matter. A plant placed at the wrong time dies, and the client blames the design. Drawing work is steady, but site work is scattered across cities and depends on contractors and nurseries the studio does not employ. Clients are developers, hotels and homeowners who often reduce the landscape budget last and expect the same look. For the wider sector, read HR for construction and real estate.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in landscape architects. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Planting must happen in the right months, but client handover dates ignore this and the studio is blamed for dead plants.
One horticulturist knows which species suit a site, and when they leave nobody can answer a client's question.
Landscape is the final item in a project and the first to be trimmed, forcing designers to redraw at the last minute.
The studio's site person advises a planting contractor who answers to the client, so authority is blurred.
Young designers produce plans from drawings and photos, and learn only later how roots, drainage and sun change a design.
Specified plants are not available in the size or count needed, and substitutions are made quietly.
Supervisors spend long hours outdoors, with limited rest and drinking water, during the hottest or wettest months.
Once the garden is handed over, watering and pruning lapse, and the studio's work fades.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Organisation Design; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a landscape architects business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A planting calendar for each project, agreed with the client at the start, so deadlines do not force wrong-season planting.
A planting calendar for each project, agreed with the client at the start, so deadlines do not force wrong-season planting. Link it to your workforce plan.
A shared species and supplier library with notes on climate, soil and care, so knowledge is not locked in one person's head.
A shared species and supplier library with notes on climate, soil and care, so knowledge is not locked in one person's head. Store in documentation.
In each contract, who can instruct the contractor, who approves substitutions and how disputes are escalated.
In each contract, who can instruct the contractor, who approves substitutions and how disputes are escalated.
Each junior visits at least one running site every month and writes a short note on what they learned.
Each junior visits at least one running site every month and writes a short note on what they learned. See learning steps.
Any change of plant species is logged and approved by the designer before purchase.
Any change of plant species is logged and approved by the designer before purchase.
A written maintenance schedule and a handover meeting with the client's facilities team.
A written maintenance schedule and a handover meeting with the client's facilities team. See safety routines for outdoor staff.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Bringing juniors to site and building plant knowledge across the studio.
A shared library, role definitions and supervisor authority notes kept in one place.
Heat, rain and tool hazards for site supervisors who work outdoors.
Hiring horticulturists and designers who know both plants and drawings.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
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A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
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A founder's guide to building job grades, titles and billing levels for a growing IT services firm, with a step-by-step method and a grade description outline.
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Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
9 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Agree the planting window and aftercare terms in writing at the start, record any client-driven timing changes and keep species and soil notes on file.
Create a shared species library, ask experts to write short notes after each project and pair juniors with them.
They should have clear written authority on quality and substitutions, with a route to the client for cost or schedule issues. Ask a qualified professional to review contract terms.
Schedule monthly visits, ask for a short note afterwards and rotate them through supervision under a senior.
Record the change, show what is lost, offer a phased plan and track the redesign hours. Quiet absorbing hides the real cost.
We can help with a project role map, a learning path for juniors, a knowledge library and staff records. Legal questions go to a qualified professional.
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