Getting it done: Tackling the staff crisis (Part 3)

Cover image courtesy of Lindsay Park Racing

It’s been 12 years, give or take, since Lindsay Park upped sticks from South Australia to settle in Euroa. In that time, the operation has hardly skipped a beat, remaining where it was put by Colin Hayes all those decades ago, at the forefront of Australian racing.

As one of the largest racing yards in the country, it’s had immeasurable success for a long time, but equally, it hasn’t been protected from the staff shortages crippling the industry.

Lindsay Park has struggled, like many, to find track riders and stable staff to keep the place ticking over and, in an operation with some 180 horses in a relatively rural location, it’s become a gigantic problem.

“Staff are the backbone of this industry and they’re becoming few and far between,” said Sophie Hayes, Lindsay Park’s general manager. “We will advertise and have zero applicants with experience, so it’s a scary position that the industry’s in.”

To date, Lindsay Park hasn’t shied from the issue, which is as much about survival as tackling the problem on behalf of racing. Last year, it kicked off a unique, in-house track rider program that taught much of its ground staff how to ride morning work.

“That was a major success for us, but our ground staff have all largely gone through it now and we don’t have the numbers coming through,” Hayes said. “Unfortunately, riding horses seems to be a dying art.”

If you ask Hayes, she’ll tell you that the steady flow of foreign workers was critical to Lindsay Park for decades. Its disappearance owing to COVID has been catastrophic, and the international borders have been very slow to reopen. The regional location of Lindsay Park is also a challenge.

“We’re able to find staff for our Flemington yard fairly easily,” Hayes said. “But regionally, in Euroa, it’s a struggle.”

Private trackwork, better hours

Just two years ago, only a handful of months into the onset of COVID around the world, a Skills Impact Survey on behalf of the industry found that trackwork riders were the greatest occupational shortage facing the sport.

This news didn’t surprise Lindsay Park, and it didn’t surprise a lot of racing yards around the country that were already battling to fill saddles every morning.

At Euroa, Lindsay Park had about 180 horses in work and it wasn’t in a position to sit around and procrastinate. Its staff shortages predated COVID, but COVID made things significantly worse and something had to be done. As a result, the staff system it had already put in place became very important.

“We operate off a split-shift system here at Lindsay Park,” Hayes said. “We have a morning crew that are here from 5am until 11am, and the afternoon crew are here from 9am to 5pm. At the moment we’re trialling the morning shift from 6am to 12pm because we have the benefit of a private training facility. We don’t have to be off the tracks by any certain time.”

The pre-dawn starts are a constant thorn in this wider conversation, with stable staff in Australia enduring frightful, early starts.

Who wants to start work at 3am in the morning, and who in their right minds would want a career that demands it? With most of the metropolitan racecourses demanding that trackwork be wrapped up by 8am or 9am in the morning, Lindsay Park has no such concerns.

“The trialling of the 6am start came about only recently,” Hayes said. “At this time of year down here, it’s not light until about 7am or 7.30am, and because it’s been so wet, our sand track, which is under lights, has been flooded out. It hasn’t been safe for the staff and horses to use, so we’ve got another track that we can use but it’s not under lights.”

As such, Lindsay Park pushed its morning starts back an hour and, by most accounts, it’s been taken up really well.

“There’s been a really positive response,” Hayes said. “We’re wondering now if it’s something we should do through the winter months every year, while in summer we don’t have that luxury because it gets so hot.”

When Hayes says the staff response to the later starts has been good, what exactly does she mean?

“Specifically, our staff are enjoying the later start time,” she said. “It could be as basic as having that extra hour in bed, but also some of them work two jobs. As an example, of the 75-odd staff that we have here at Euroa, the later start didn’t suit three of them, and not for any other reason than they had to get their second job.”

The working week

For the regional work force, holding down two jobs is a common thing. It’s also a common thing among students and hospitality workers, so in some cases, the early starts suit people.

However, the feedback at Lindsay Park is that the extra hour later is a good thing because the life-work balance is important.

“That’s definitely something that has become more important to our staff, and staff generally,” Hayes said.

At Lindsay Park, the morning crew is responsible for most of the trackwork responsibilities. Traditionally, the operation has had a 1:4 ratio of staff to horses, but with current staff shortages being as they are, riders are taking out 10 or more horses each morning to gallop.

However, it’s a slick machine.

The morning crew has what it calls ‘the hub’, a central location where the next lot of horses is ready and waiting for returning riders. Horses are swapped and riders set off again, rarely having to tack and untack, wash off and cool down.

“It’s a hop on, hop off system,” Hayes said. “We team up a stable hand and a rider, and the riders literally hop on and hop off. It’s a very efficient system. With the staff situation the way it is right now, our riders are getting through up to 11 horses every morning.”

At 9am, Lindsay Park’s ‘afternoon crew’ clocks on with a more transport and movement-orientated focus. These staff members handle the afternoon feeds and getting each horse out of its box later in the day.

“They’ll handle whatever the trainer has prescribed for that horse, be it an afternoon walk or a swim,” Hayes said.

The split-shift system has been operating at Lindsay Park for as long as the yard has been at Euroa. During the employment process, people are taken on as either morning or afternoon staff. The two rarely interchange, which is based on skillset and experience.

“We don’t have people working across both shifts,” Hayes said. “You’re either on one shift or the other, and that seems to really suit people. For example, women that have children work on the afternoon shifts because they can drop their kids at care, come in and work, and then leave to get the kids.”

The Sundays

It’s a fairly logical system that is, in fact, fairly complicated to execute, and that’s because Lindsay Park also has in place a Sunday rota for its morning crew. Staff on that shift work only every third Sunday.

“The every third Sunday came in only about 15 months ago, when JD Hayes took a more significant role in the business,” Hayes said. “He was really strong in implementing it for a better work-life balance, which is important to him as a young man.

“He could see that working 13-day fortnights was tough on the staff, so we asked ourselves how we could do this differently.”

As such, the typical working week for the morning crew at Lindsay Park is 5am to 11am (or 6am to 12pm) from Monday to Saturday, and then every third Sunday rostered on. It means two Sundays off and one on, and a 76-hour working fortnight.

“The staff are happy with it because it seems to offer that better work-life balance,” Hayes said. “It’s an administrative nightmare but it goes down well. Most stables offer that 13-day fortnight, but we are two Sundays off and one on.”

It seems like an exacting routine for staff, but the reality is that the Lindsay Park roster is a creative twist to the average Australian situation.

The average working week in this country is 37.5 hours and, by the last government count (2021), almost 40 per cent of employed Australians worked either 38 or 40 hours a week. It’s slightly higher than figures a decade ago.

While Lindsay Park’s staff work across 13 days in the fortnight, which is probably different to the standard two-day weekend, the working day is shorter, making up six hours instead of the standard eight.

In addition, staff receive raceday pay on top of their usual wages, and the early finishes each day allow for a second income, in some cases.

Real problem, real solutions

For an operation the size and scope of Lindsay Park, meeting the staff crisis has been a challenge.

Last week, we spoke with Three Bridges Thoroughbreds about its five-day working week (which might eventually squeeze down to four), but that sort of flexibility is much more difficult when there are 180-plus horses in work and so many more heads to count.

Things like payroll are more complex, and also Workcover and just filling staff numbers. It’s been a never-ending difficulty that has been amplified in the last two years.

Nevertheless, size has had its advantages for Lindsay Park too, and in two ways in particular. It’s large enough to offer a fully functional canteen for its staff every day, and plans are in the pipeline for an onsite childcare facility.

“Our canteen was really about staff retention,” Hayes said. “It’s something that Lindsay Park provides at cost, which means we don’t make any money out of it. I think we charge $5 for a half-serve and $7.50 for a full serve, and every staff member can get fed.”

The childcare facility, on the other hand, will accommodate only certain members of staff, but it will tap into a huge potential for Lindsay Park – that of working parents or parents returning to work.

“There’s a real day care problem in Euroa,” Hayes said. “We’ve had a lot of women not be able to come back because they can’t get into the Euroa day care centre, so hopefully by this time in 18 months we are running a day-care service for the staff right here.”

Lindsay Park is investing a lot of time into this option, and Hayes said she has nine staff members that would use it right now, if it were ready. The company might just be the only racing facility in the country to head down this path at the moment.

“Like the canteen, it would be run at cost and not for profit, just so we can get staff,” Hayes said. “We want to do it properly though.

“We want to make sure that people using it can still get access to government rebates like the Child Care Subsidy (CCS) and so on, and while it’s still very much a work in progress, we think it will solve a problem that we have as to why staff can’t come back to work.”

Reality bites

For Lindsay Park, the industry staff crisis is an ongoing conversation that constantly requires attention and creativity.

“Between myself as general manager, and Matt Pumpa, who is our chief operating officer, we talk about the staff crisis and strategise it for a huge percentage of our week,” Hayes said. “It’s always in the back of our minds, and because Lindsay Park is a very diverse business, we also can’t get maintenance assistance. It’s not just the riders we can’t get.”

Like Toby Liston at Three Bridges Farm, Hayes said the Australian workforce has been difficult to tap.

“We’d love to give Australians jobs but we’re having to look overseas to sponsor suitable candidates to come and ride our horses,” she said. “And I think it will only get easier when people start to return to Australia on working holidays again.”

It’s a sad reality but a reality nonetheless. Lindsay Park has 45 full-time employees plus casuals in its morning crew, and then 10 across the afternoons plus casuals. That’s not including the likes of vets and vet nurses, which makes the Euroa facility a beast when it comes to managing staff.

Nevertheless, Lindsay Park hasn’t sat on its laurels through any of its staff issues, and it doesn’t intend to do so any time soon.