A landscape contractor builds gardens, lawns, hardscape and irrigation for villas, parks and commercial sites. Projects have a design, a crew and a handover date. The owner's HR task is keeping skilled crews and making sure machines and plants are handled well.
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Share your requirementsA landscape contractor takes on new gardens, turfing, paving, pergolas, water features and irrigation at villas, hotels, offices and public spaces. Work moves in phases: levelling, drainage, hardscape, planting and finishing. Crews are made up of masons, gardeners, machine operators and helpers, some on payroll and some on gang contract. Machines such as earth movers, rollers and trimmers need trained operators. Plants are living stock bought from nurseries and arrive on a schedule, and delay or poor care can kill them before handover. Monsoons make planting easy and construction hard. The owner juggles several sites, and the final handover is judged by how alive and tidy the garden looks. See also HR for facility management.
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 contractors. 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.
Stock arrives and waits at a site with no one assigned to water it.
Workers are taken for a project and released, so skill and trust are lost between jobs.
Earth movers and rollers are handled by people who learned by watching.
One leaves debris or damages work done by the other.
Monsoon is busy and summer is slow, and pay and employment rise and fall with it.
Each site gets short visits and drainage or level errors are found late.
Carrying stone, soil and trees hurts backs and hands.
The client says the lawn is patchy, the contractor says the client over-watered, and no record shows the condition at handover.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Operations and Governance; Learning and Development; Health, Safety and Wellbeing. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for facility management, not in general.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
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.
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 contractors business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A named person for watering, shade and storage, from the moment stock arrives.
A named person for watering, shade and storage, from the moment stock arrives. The learning and development process can cover plant care.
A small paid core, plus a list of past gang workers who can return.
A small paid core, plus a list of past gang workers who can return. See employee information management.
A practical check by a senior operator before anyone works alone, noted against the name.
A practical check by a senior operator before anyone works alone, noted against the name.
A site plan that orders hardscape before planting, and a daily clean-up rule.
A site plan that orders hardscape before planting, and a daily clean-up rule.
A plan for slow months such as maintenance contracts or nursery work.
A plan for slow months such as maintenance contracts or nursery work. The attendance process can hold the roster.
Date-stamped photos and a signed condition note at handover, with a maintenance plan for the client.
Date-stamped photos and a signed condition note at handover, with a maintenance plan for the client. See HR documentation.
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.
Plant care and machine checks taught and recorded.
A crew list that includes gang workers and past hands.
Seasonal rosters that keep skilled people between projects.
Lifting, machine and site safety on busy projects.
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 facility management, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Housekeeping, technician and security staff at client sites leave for reasons head office rarely hears. How to ask, what to look for and how to act on it.
7 min readRead article
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 article
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.
6 min readRead article
A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Name a person responsible on arrival, provide shade and water and avoid delivery before the area is ready. Photograph condition at delivery and at planting.
Link projects to maintenance contracts, use slow months for training and nursery work, and keep a return list. Fair pay and steady contact help.
A practical test on the machine, supervised by a senior operator, covering safety, controls and common tasks. Record it.
With photos, a condition note, a care plan and a signature. Offer a short maintenance period to protect both sides.
Fewer when projects are in early phases. Set a limit, review it each month and add supervisors before quality drops.
We would ask how plant stock is looked after, how operators are tested and what crews do in slow months. A good opening project is an operator check, a crew list and a handover note. Scope is written down for you to accept or change.
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