What’s It Worth?

Jennifer Polanz

Data compiled by Industry Insights

Positive attitude. Responsible. Hustle. Hard-working. Enthusiastic. Motivated to learn.

For the past two years, we’ve worked with AmericanHort to survey the industry on salaries and benefits. For the
15 years prior to teaming up with AmericanHort, we called it the Wage & Benefit Survey, and now with the partnership it’s a more robust questionnaire yielding additional information that can help retailers and growers figure out how to attract the best talent out there (and pay them accordingly). This year, we asked about the qualities of employees you’d like to clone as our annual open-ended question. The responses were seen in many of the replies from both growers and retailers.

What we only saw pop up rarely in the answers is plant knowledge. Perhaps that was a given? Or perhaps it’s something that can be taught, whereas these other skills are more about the person and how they show up to work rather than what they know at work.

And while we didn’t have the amount of responses we’d like to have this year (of course, we want everyone to participate to give us the best data possible for the entire industry), there were a few areas where we could tease out some discussion topics.

For example, on the wages side, consider those attributes described earlier. What dollar value can you place on them and what they bring to the business? Let’s take the position of cashier. If you found someone who’s responsible, motivated to learn and has a positive attitude—as the person who has the last interaction with customers (and the one who’s ringing out your inventory)—what’s that worth?

On the benefits side, there may be a bit of a disconnect between benefit offerings and offerings for attracting and retaining new employees. In this year’s survey, annual bonuses seem to be very popular, ranking pretty highly across the board in current benefits, and benefits that are considered important and valuable. Yet, taking a look at the benefits offered for attracting and retaining employees, it’s goose eggs across the board for signing bonuses and retention bonuses. So, while not everything is about the money, some things are about the money.

And that bottom line of doing nothing to attract or retain employees? It gets harder and harder to convince people of any age to work at your operation unless you have something additional to offer because the other retail businesses you’re competing with for workers certainly offer more.

In a recent survey conducted by Paychex on 2025 priorities for business leaders, employee engagement and retention was in the Top 3 concerns under the People Management category. The No. 1 employee retention strategy was improving benefits. And the cost of losing those employees? Turnover costs on average $9,379 per employee, the survey found. It’s expensive to continually turn over employees. GP