Doing, not talking: The industry’s staff crisis (Part 5)

Cover image courtesy of Westbury Stud

In the lifespan of this series so far, one of its overwhelming conclusions has been that something had to give. We’ve talked to Three Bridges Thoroughbreds and Lindsay Park Racing, plus a raft of Sydney trainers, and each was adamant that recruitment was nigh impossible with the hours expected of staff.

Who, for example, wants a career in trackwork with a 3am kick-off each morning, and who would sign up for stud work with a 13-day fortnight and weekend work?

So it was no surprise when we spoke to Westbury Stud in New Zealand this week, hearing the same thing. Russell Warwick, the operation’s general manager, said for years they’ve had trouble recruiting people because candidates won’t accept the hours.

When we checked in with Mike Fleming at Bhima Thoroughbreds, a much smaller operator in the Hunter Valley, it was the same story.

“When we were interviewing young people, you’d tell them about the 12 days on, two days off and they’d look at you and head straight for the door,” Fleming said, speaking with us this week. “As an industry, we have to change what we’re doing because most people want to work nine-to-five jobs, Monday to Friday, and that’s just a modern reality.”

Largely, it’s considered that the days of long, thankless hours are over, albeit not by everyone. Last year, corporate professional Jordan Kong, an everyday American, posted a thread to social media that the best thing young people could do in the modern workforce was endure weekend work.

She was shouted down heavily, some suggesting that one's willingness to work long hours did little more than advertise your willingness to be overworked. Even Elon Musk, the brains behind Tesla, agreed with Kong when he declared that ‘nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week’.

However, the reality for farms and yards in the horse industry is that everyday employees aren’t out to change the world. They’re out to pay the mortgage or tuition fees and, more and more, they aren’t interested in the traditional burn associated with long hours and weekend work.

It’s why the staff crisis has become just that, a crisis, and why Westbury Stud and Bhima had to do something about it too.

Those days are over

Russell Warwick has been in the horse business for 40 years, starting off at Cambridge Stud, setting up Westbury Farm in 1990 and remaining in it through the Eric Watson years before the Gerry Harvey era began in 2008.

“It was a long time ago when I first started working in studs, but you never questioned how much pay you got and you never questioned what hours you had to work,” he said. “You took whatever education you got as an enormous opportunity, and I think that's what’s probably changed today.

“A lot of young people want to come and work in the industry because they love the idea of being outside and working with horses, but they don’t understand that they’re also getting educated and earning a lifetime skill that they can take with them anywhere.”

Warwick admitted that the work-life balance was more important than yesteryear. It’s something that Toby Liston of Three Bridges also recognised, as well as the team at Lindsay Park.

“Young ones aren’t interested in working weekends anymore, or aren’t interested in 12 hours a day,” Warwick said. “But it’s like anything really, whether you want to be a sportsman or anything else, if you want to be top class at it, it’s down to how much you apply yourself and put in the hard yards.”

There’s a degree of push and pull here, and it goes beyond the racing and breeding industries.

Employers want their staff to be excellent, and to excel at their trades, but they know the sacrifice and hard work that has been traditionally required to be top class. Many of them have been through it themselves.

Equally, staff want to excel, but it seems like the younger workforce want to get there quicker, and without the expected slog and sacrifice. It’s a generational thing, according to some.

“But we also have to understand that not everyone wants to get to that level,” Warwick said. “For some of them, it’s about having that balance of being able to enjoy doing a job working with horses, provided they can also have a balance with their personal life.

“We all know that the horse industry has always been heavily swayed towards hours at work as opposed to hours doing social activity on your own free time.”

If COVID taught the world anything, it was that the best things in life were free. Time with family, bike riding with the kids and connections with nature, these were overwhelming trends in the two years of lockdowns and isolations.

In a way, it has changed the way young people look at the world and its opportunities because, during the darkest days of the pandemic around the world, people cared less about their jobs and more about the connections in their lives.

Has it created another hurdle for industries, just like racing, that have traditionally grappled for staff?

The Westbury system

At Westbury Stud, Warwick said things needed to change, and about three or four years ago they did. The operation, which runs two locations in Auckland and Matamata, introduced performance reviews first and then a ‘10 by four’ roster, among other things.

“We’ve become a lot more professional in how we manage our staff,” he said. “We’ve been doing performance reviews for three years now, and they can happen annually or they can happen two to three times a year.

“A lot of people look at performance reviews as a time when you sit down with people and tell them what they’re doing wrong, whereas we see it as a two-way conversation between us and our staff, and it’s a way for staff to tell us what they need from us.”

Warwick says his staff have, in the past, told him they needed more tools to do their job, or that they wanted more exposure to other facets of the business. He said his experience of the performance reviews is that he gets a more responsive workforce.

After that, the ‘10 by four’ roster is another thing. On the surface, it’s a complicated internal system, but in fact it’s a version of a staff rota not unlike that of Lindsay Park's.

“We introduced the ‘10 by four’ roster in August last year,” Warwick said. “We had kept hearing that young people weren’t prepared to work every weekend and long hours, and, after hearing this for three years or more, we said that wasn’t going to change so we had to.

“We explored different ways to run the roster and so now, effectively, our permanent staff are on the ‘10 by four’ which splits the number of staff in half.”

On Wednesdays, Westbury Stud has a full complement of workers, both full-time and part-time. On the remaining days of the working week, it has 75 per cent of its staff rostered on. On the weekends, 50 per cent of its staff are on.

“We also changed up the idea of what management was,” Warwick said. “I didn’t like the idea of having too many managers about the place, so we changed that title to ‘team leader’. So our senior staff, who are responsible for the rest of the staff working well together, are called team leaders.”

At least one team leader is scheduled to work every day, be it a weekday or weekend. Sometimes there are two or three.

“Instead of cramming all our workload into a Monday to Friday, we now spread it around the seven days of the week,” Warwick said. “We’re finding that it has worked really well, and it took off especially well at our Karaka base.”

Westbury Stud has found a clarity with this system.

Staff know what days they’re working and which days other staff are working, and the system revolves every week. It means each person’s roster will roll in and out of weekends on the ‘10 by four’ system.

“One week on the 10 by four will include a weekend, but then the second weekend will include another two days of the fortnight wrapped around it,” Warwick said. “So while they might end up working every second weekend, the next weekend they know they’re off on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.”

It’s a system that’s well-known to the police force, for example, and many other shift-related careers.

It’s been in place at Westbury for just shy of a year now, and some of the established staff can’t remember how they did things in the ‘old days’.

“Some of the comments we got back from our staff that have been with us six and seven years were interesting,” Warwick said. “They can’t remember how they used to do it before, and they wouldn’t change it.”

The COVID exodus

The Matamata arm of Westbury Stud requires 20 people to operate efficiently. The Karaka base is a little different, filling up its positions with the full-timers and then supplementing them with part-timers and casuals.

“There are areas that we still have to work on, and there are pressure points,” Warwick said. “You can’t just say we’re going to be a 7am to 3pm business, for instance.

“In the stallion barn, we’ll have a team that starts serving at 6am but their workday finishes at three in the afternoon, and then the other team will come on and do the later serves. So there are some areas of the business where the new hours don’t accommodate and align, and we have to make little tweaks here and there.”

Generally, however, the Westbury Stud roster has left everyone better off. It’s not perfect, and Warwick doesn’t admit that it is, but it’s about having a more content workforce. He says the days of hoping people will work all the hours under the sun are over.

Additionally, Katie Page-Harvey had put a word in his ear last year about the severity of COVID’s consequences. She’d said that many Kiwis would leave New Zealand when they could, chasing employment in Australia and beyond.

“After about 18 months of COVID, Katie rang me and said that New Zealand had a tough challenge ahead,” Warwick said. “While COVID contained us by not bringing in people, when the gates did open, it opened the door for a lot of people to actually leave New Zealand.”

This is probably something that Australia hasn’t had to experience, and it makes the Westbury point-of-view fairly interesting. How much of its potential labour force disappeared after two long years of world-famous lockdowns in New Zealand?

“We definitely felt it,” Warwick said. “Probably not so much at the Karaka level, but as an industry we certainly have.”

Working less, same pay

Up in the Hunter Valley, Bhima’s new staff system is in its infancy, the brainchild of Kate Fleming, Mike Fleming’s wife.

It’s one that has staff enjoying eight days a month off, with them working one weekend and then having a four-day weekend the following week.

“Our roster at the moment means that when you work a weekend, you have either Thursday and Friday or Monday and Tuesday off with the following weekend,” Mike Fleming said. “We’re hoping it will make staff a lot more productive and give them more downtime.”

Like Westbury’s system, Fleming said it’s not perfect yet.

“Like anything, there’s got to be a little bit of a compromise,” he said. “It means that on the weekends there’ll probably be more done, rather than just the get in, feed, check and get out, which a lot of farms operate on. And it also means that we’ve had to put on a few extra part-timers to fill those busy days when we’ve got staff off.”

The Bhima system is only a few months old and, as such, Fleming doesn’t know how effective it will be long-term. However, he’s noticed its clout pretty quickly.

"When we were looking to fill a couple of positions recently, when we advertised the roster of a four-day weekend every second weekend, we went from having no one apply to quite a few applicants apply,” he said.

If the proof is in the pudding, there’s the pudding.

Farms and yards have been deafened by the silence when they’ve advertised for staff, but when the work-life balance is part of the advertised package, the results are almost immediate.

“At this stage, everyone is pretty happy with how it’s falling,” Fleming said. “Will it be effective during the breeding season? I don’t know. But right now we’ve got a few extra people around and we’ve been able to get folks away on holidays for some downtime, and I honestly feel like that will come back to us as employers.”

Like Russell Warwick, Fleming remembers the hard yards of how things have been done traditionally. He said the structure was rarely questioned, but that’s not how it works in the modern workforce.

“With young people coming through, they want their weekends,” he said. “And you’ve got to remember too that a lot of young people coming into this industry are arriving from pony clubs and eventing backgrounds, and they want their weekends to go and do things.”

In the thick of the Hunter district, Fleming is in touch with this younger, equestrian audience. There’s plenty of it around him in Scone, so for he and Kate it’s a balance of respecting that new attitude to work and life, and still getting the work done around the farm with the same efficiency.

“Farming, livestock, racing stables… people are beating up on social media about 3am starts, night racing and twilight racing,” he said. “A lot of the feedback on it is that people are working 50 to 60 hours a week and earning nothing for doing it.

“A couple of people have asked me: 'If I’m working my staff less, am I paying them less?' But no, my staff are still getting paid the same as they were three months ago before we changed to this.

“Our theory behind it is that we’ll get more productivity from them on the days they’re working because they’re working less and being more respected.”

It’s a far-sighted goal and, by all accounts so far, it's one that is both logical and catching on.