How to motivate teenage garden center summer employees

Editor’s note: Welcome to Ask HR, our staffing advice column. To ask about hiring, benefits, employee development and training or succession, send questions to pcoleman@gie.net. They will be anonymized and answered by the BEST Human Capital team.

Q: I hire teenagers for summer work in my garden center. Some are great, and some are distracted by being a teenager. I’d like to communicate better with them and maybe even build future employees. Do you have any tips?

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Human Capital

Ben Molenda: You are helping these teenagers develop good habits and social skills, just as much as they are helping you. If you take the time to get to know them and help them improve as humans, their appreciation will show in the form of hard work.

Regardless of age, learning about your employees and their perspective about the job will result in them feeling valued. That’s the No. 1 driver of employee retention. However, there are bound to be bumps in the road.

Attention spans

According to the National Institutes of Health, the average attention span for adults working on a task can be up to a few hours, while the average attention span for teenagers working on a task is 35 minutes.

Work with your department leaders to assign your teenage employees a few different tasks to take care of during their shift and write them on a big board. If you see them losing focus on a task, ask them to take a five-minute break outside and come back ready to start on a new project. Once a project is complete, have them cross it off the board and give them a five-minute break before starting the next.

Even if all the projects aren’t fully completed, you will still have less work to do and less of a headache trying to force a teenager to do something, which is nearly impossible. Also, when communicating with your younger staff, keep in mind that even adults only have a conversational attention span of 8.25 seconds, per NIH. Don’t lecture!

Money talks

Try to incentivize your teenage employees to pay more attention to their work with cold, hard cash.

Set up competitions with cash prizes to create the best end-cap display, an attractive new signage design to use throughout the store or the most impressive social media campaign. An important aspect of these example projects is that they will be in the public eye. This creates pride for the participants and provides additional motivation: Their work could have a real impact on the store’s success, but it’s also something their friends and family could see.

Prizes don’t have to be more than $5 to $10 if you run the competitions at least a couple of times per month.

A few words to the wise: Be selective when deciding who to include, and avoid picking the same winner repeatedly. Also, do not incentivize sales programs with teenagers — you do not want to scare away customers with money-hungry, angsty teens.

Ben Molenda is a senior human capital adviser (PRC) at BEST Human Capital & Advisory Group, excelling in executive recruiting, business analysis, workforce planning and predictive hiring trends in the green industry.