It was not an industry that attracted a lot of women. And it sure wasn’t considered flashy. Sound familiar? No, it’s not home improvement retailing. It’s residential and commercial pest control. But, like in our industry, times are changing.

Case in point: Abell Pest Control is a leader in the Canadian market. And the company’s HR lead is a woman. Meet Sara Cromwell, director of people excellence. Abell now has 23 locations across North America. Cromwell oversees the HR for all of them.

She’s been a director for almost four years, a role she took on right before Covid. For 15 years before that, she served as the company’s HR manager. Cromwell says she “kind of fell into the role.” She was at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. taking political studies, but wondered whether she’d ever get a job in that field. She ended up at her father’s firm in payroll. “You often get into HR from one of two paths—either recruitment or payroll,” Cromwell observes.

Eventually she was cold-called with an invitation to apply at Abell, but she admits the pest control industry didn’t sound very attractive—especially for a woman. But after she met with the management, her attitude changed “and it was love at first sight.”

The right attitude “starts at the top.” Her boss, John Abell, is a strong supporter of his team. “He trusted me fully and let me bring my authentic self.” She says it was a “terrific choice” for her.

Nor is she alone. Over the past decade, Abell has doubled in size, while the number of women in management roles has grown 116 percent. But women are filling the ranks on the front lines as well. As people consider Abell as a possible employer, they can see more women in senior roles, which has encouraged young women to join the company as technicians or in other operations roles.

“Women in operations have gone up 73 percent, a change that has been both organic and intentional, says Cromwell. “We really did focus on supporting women—we support everybody—but we really support women throughout their journey. We understood that there were some things that were holding back women from taking on roles in the company.”

Working on the front lines of pest control does not come across as “sexy,” she admits. “It requires working in a job confronting cockroaches, or bedbugs jumping everywhere, and you have to look confident.”

But when it comes to recruitment, women may be less likely to apply for a job if they don’t feel they meet all the criteria. They are more “risk-averse” Cromwell says, while men can be more likely to push ahead. “So we re-examined our job postings and reconsidered the qualifications.” For example, the requirement to be able to lift up to 40 pounds might come up only a couple of times a year on the actual job. The requirement was eliminated.

What makes Abell Pest Control a successful workspace, one that everyone, women included, can thrive in? “I think it’s to build an environment where people can bring their true authentic selves to work without being slapped down, without being told, ‘this is the way we do this,’ or people feeling they need to mirror the behaviours of the leadership team,” says Cromwell.

“You don’t get diversity of thought or diversity of innovative products when everybody thinks the same way. The more trust your people have in the leadership and the decision-making process, the more I feel they’re able to bring their true selves to work.”

“That’s the basis of a great workplace: how much trust do your people have in you?”

Hardlines was recently at the grand opening of a new location for Wolseley, the specialty plumbing distributor. The opening of the location, just east of Toronto, had all the trappings of a well-run opening day: lots of food and refreshments, in-house specials for contractor and plumbing pro customers, and a table-top show featuring some key suppliers.

But in addition, one of the tables had two Wolseley employees in it. Dakota Sheppard and Daljeet Obhi are part of Wolseley’s Talent Acquisition Team. They’re based out of the company’s headquarters in Burlington, Ont., and their job is to create awareness of the opportunities within the company for new hires—using existing staff as ambassadors. The team’s slogan is, “Join the Pros.” Sheppard and Abhi travel to Wolseley locations across Canada and encourage existing staff to talk up their own jobs and careers at Wolseley to attract more talent.

They told us this was the first time they tried setting up a booth on behalf of the Talent Acquisition Team at a store opening. But it sure seemed like a great idea to us!

Laura Freeman is the executive vice-president of human resources and chief human resources officer at Orgill, Inc., the giant Memphis-based hardware wholesaler.

So many companies now put huge focus on attracting new hires, promising great benefits like unlimited vacation days or non-stop snacks on the job. But how do you focus on the people you already have and not take them for granted amidst all that outward-looking effort?

“When you think about your workforce and how it has changed, a lot of it has been around technology,” says Orgill’s HR lead, Laura Freeman. “Some of us think ‘Oh, that’s easy.’ We have to really think about those skillsets that not everybody feels comfortable with. That means ongoing investment in existing team members, but also finding a good fit for them.”

For example, says Freeman, “When it comes to upskilling, tech may be a tough one for some of team.”

The other thing is keeping people engaged, Freeman explains. “What does that mean? I want to be recognized for the work that I do. And it doesn’t have to be monetary.” Recognition is important, but even basic concepts like this can get lost in the shuffle. “As a manager, sometimes you just forget those things.”

That means more focus on guiding managers on your team to embrace and employ concepts like recognition that are tailored for individuals on your team. Teach your managers that people need to be valued and want to be respected, Freeman urges. It requires two-way communication: get input when change is afoot and include and explain the changes to your people.

“Take time and talk about the goals and how an individual worker is contributing to that. These are things that must be kept in mind when considering upskilling. You have to really make sure you’re meeting your employees where they need to be met.”

By HR and health & safety consultancy Peninsula Canada

Mental Health Research Canada has found that one in five Canadians live with mental health challenges. Employers will certainly feel the effects of this in many ways, such as decreased productivity and increased absenteeism.

According to a new survey by Peninsula Canada, the workplace stigma around mental health appears to have lessened, with 43 percent of employers stating that they’ve witnessed people talking more about their mental health in the last 12 months. Although more workers are talking about mental health, employers can still do more to address and support mental health in the workplace. Here are four tips to get started.

Create a mental health policy for your workplace. Your mental health policy should set out the protocol to follow when an employee makes a mental health disclosure and requests an accommodation. It’ll help provide clarity to both employees and supervisors on what to do in such a situation. Include your mental health policy in your employee handbook and share it with your staff.

Be transparent in communication. Supporting the overall wellbeing of staff will help to create consistency and transparency with their teams. Burnout and job-related stress have become common in the workplace. Employers can do their part by keeping routine meetings for check-ins and communicating in advance when change is coming.

Connect employees to mental health resources. Employers need to evaluate their company benefits. There are several areas to consider from a mental health perspective. For example, does your policy include mental health coverage, time off policies, or an employee assistance program? Investing in resources can provide support for any employees struggling with mental health issues and can get the assistance they need.

Promote wellbeing. Employers can encourage well-being in various ways. These can include encouraging regular breaks, offering flexible work, and ensuring staff are using their designated days off.

Peninsula is an HR and Health and Safety consulting firm serving over 80,000 small businesses worldwide, including dealers in home improvement. Clients are supported with ongoing updates to their workplace documentation and policies as legislation changes. Additionally, clients benefit from 24/7 employer HR advice and are protected by legal insurance.

Laura Freeman is the executive vice-president of human resources and chief human resources officer at Orgill, Inc., the giant Memphis-based hardware wholesaler. Hardlines interviewed Freeman earlier this year during Orgill’s spring dealer market in New Orleans. Although she had been on the job just a few weeks, she took the time to share her insights with us.

Freeman came over from the grocery industry. She had spent the previous seven years heading up HR as chief people officer at Schnuck Markets, a family-run chain of over 100 supermarkets in the American Midwest.

Many a hardware executive has come over from the grocery industry. We asked Freeman what learnings she felt she could bring with her to the hardware distribution business. She identified some similarities. “A couple of things: one is just the dispersed workforce and the hourly workforce. How do you connect with them? So in the supermarket industry we had multiple stores in multiple states. Here, we have our distribution centres, but we also have our different business units, like CNRG,” she observed, referring to Central Network Retail Group, a group of 144 stores under a variety of banners owned by Orgill.

But at the front lines, it’s all about the people and understanding their needs, regardless of the sector. “Especially with the DCs, with the hourly workers, what are they looking for? What attracts them to us? How do we become that preferred employer? It’s so very similar to what it was in the supermarket industry.

“There’s a war on talent, and you certainly want to get the best talent.”

Freeman admits that the recent news of layoffs had been largely in the tech sector, while retail remains a tough sector to hire for. “It’s hard to find the right people, to find the right talent.”

Customer service remains a priority in any business, whether it’s the shopper in a supermarket or a customer on the other end of the line in the distributor’s call centre. “That’s what differentiates a great business.”

Freeman says the changes happening in the workforce during the pandemic had started well before the pandemic. “Even pre-Covid we were seeing our workforce change. It was not all of a sudden that it started changing—it was just accelerated.”

Organizations today have multiple generations of employees working side by side. Each generation has unique needs and goals. The core values of an organization have to resonate for everyone from Gen Z (“where’s my career going?”) to Boomers (who may appreciate the stability that being an employee can provide).

“From an HR perspective, you really have to think about that employee proposition across all different areas and then across all the different generations you have in your workforce today.”

Building materials suppliers found themselves in the eye of the storm when the supply chain worldwide began deteriorating during Covid. That disruption affected everything from the products in the warehouse to the people handling those products.

Each distributor developed its own strategies to cope, and CanWel Building Materials was no exception. We spoke recently with Marc Seguin, president of CanWel, who shared his thoughts on staffing strategy before and after Covid.

“What did we do at CanWel to offset some of the supply chain crunch? First of all, for internal resources, we kept our full staff in our offices and operations. We put the right protocols in place to protect our people, but we decided that we needed the resources because our customers were relying on us,” Seguin says. “Some of our competitors decided to let people go for a period of time or operate with a skeleton staff. I think our approach helped us to provide better service levels.”

Seguin believes home improvement was hit harder than other industries. For example, supply was affected directly by staffing, “because all of our warehouses are staffed by people that work in demanding conditions. They are at the lower end of the salary grid many times. And it has created quite a bit of turnover. And to this day it’s still a huge challenge to find people. He points out that a lot of people migrated from urban centres during Covid, putting further strain on recruiting people.

Not only was it hard to find new people, it became difficult to replace the workers who left. “We were able to hire a lot of new resources—but we operated with less staff, so people had to double their efforts,” Seguin says.

“We were fortunate to have long-time employees that are good workers. They work hard. They are dedicated. They love our company and we have good dynamics. But we need to resource ourselves better and it’s going to remain a challenge for quite a while.”

These labour issues are not going to sort themselves out in the near term, Seguin believes, even with immigration. “No, I think we’re not out of this for quite a while. Because it’s a structural and systemic problem.” He is calling on the entire retail home improvement industry to become “more progressive” to make this sector more attractive to potential employees, “like hybrid work solutions, improved working conditions, better benefit packages. We are something of a primary sector. I think there are solutions we will all have to adopt to some degree.”

This month we talk with Zaida Fazlic, vice president of people, culture, and change management at Taiga Building Products, the national building materials wholesaler.

Ask a simple question: what’s changed? and Zaida Fazlic, HR lead at Taiga Building Products, has a thorough—and thoughtful—answer, one that involves compensation, company culture, and coaching.

“A lot of companies and employers are feeling pressure from the employee side on wage increases. They’re feeling the pressure. It’s a difficult position to be in because, yes, you want to provide that for your employees, because we all understand the cost of living has gone up.”

However, raising salaries may be a tough decision to make, with the possibility of the economy entering a recession. “You have to make sure that you’re fair and on-market with that, but there are all these other things as well, as an employer, that you can focus on to motivate your employees.”

Those “other things” can and should include maintaining a good culture. That, says Fazlic, requires business leaders to focus on their managers, who in turn interact with employees. She cites Gallup polls indicating that middle management is the most important part of your ability to retain employees, because they are the link between C-suite executives and frontline workers.

Those managers must be aware of increasing pressure from below as well as above. “They’re kind of stuck in the middle.” But the pressures aren’t strictly generational. Though values may differ among age groups, Fazlic says, “there are basic things that all humans need regardless of your gender, age, et cetera.”

Fazlic regularly takes a couple of days out of her office to get out to branches and spends 10 to 15 minutes with individual employees. “I like to meet as many as I can, to put a name to a face and to get feedback.” Being out in the field meeting workers is an important part of her role, and now connecting with managers to guide them is part of that. “Being a good manager is basically like being a good coach. You’ve got to be able to give good feedback, you’ve got to be a good communicator, you’ve got to be able to inspire people. These are not easy things!”

That kind of pressure means coaching and leadership development are important at the management level. Things like giving tough feedback effectively can create a lot of stress for managers. These leaders need to be taken care of. “It cascades down all the way from ownership to executives to management. What they model cascades down all the way to your front line.”

By HR and health & safety consultancy Peninsula Canada

It’s finally spring, making it the perfect time to get organized and get rid of clutter. Rather than falling into the same routine, why not refresh your workplace and spring clean the HR department?

Here are some tips on how to best organize your HR department:

Prepare for a surge of vacation requests. It should come as no surprise that this summer will be a very popular time for travel. But how do you properly and fairly manage vacation requests? To avoid any issues, employers should make sure they have a good system in place to prepare for the surge in vacation requests. The vacation policy should inform employees of how far in advance they must request their vacation. It should clarify the procedure for making the request. The policy should also list the reasons a request may be declined.

Employee files. When was the last time employee files were looked at and updated? It’s important to check employee files to ensure all the information needed, such as address and emergency contacts, is up to date. It’s also important to have only the files that are required so you don’t have a pile of unneeded paper taking up space.

Policy check. Are all policies and employee handbooks up to date? Not only is it important to ensure employees are made aware of all changes, but handbooks must be current and compliant with any legislative changes.

Review projects. Looking over the status of current and future projects will help keep your team on track. Checking due dates, tasks, and responsibilities will not only ensure the project is done on time but will also be able to see if there are any gaps in the process and handle them ahead of time.

Peninsula is an HR and Health and Safety consulting firm serving over 80,000 small businesses worldwide, including dealers in home improvement. Clients are supported with ongoing updates to their workplace documentation and policies as legislation changes. Additionally, clients benefit from 24/7 employer HR advice and are protected by legal insurance.

How many times have you gone through the hiring process, set up a new worker in the schedule, then waited on Monday morning for them not to show up? You are not alone.

A study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business has determined that small businesses across Canada are dealing with this growing trend in the hiring process. More than one-third of small business owners said they’ve hired people over the previous 12 months who never showed up or stopped coming into work shortly after starting. If that isn’t concerning enough, some job candidates stopped responding before they even got the job, said 37 percent of respondents, who found that job seekers failed to reply to requests for interviews or further information that would have secured them a job.

“Employers are already having an incredibly hard time filling certain positions. Ghosting is not only a frustrating waste of their time, but it’s a big drain on their already limited resources,” said Dan Kelly, president of the CFIB. “Job candidates and employees don’t have to take or stay in jobs they don’t like, but they should at least communicate their intentions clearly to their employer instead of leaving them scrambling and wondering.”

Shortages of skilled, or semi-skilled and unskilled, labour continue to limit business growth for 53 percent and 38 percent of businesses, respectively, according to the latest CFIB Business Barometer. Over half (52 percent) of small businesses have yet to return to normal revenue levels and 58 percent haven’t repaid their pandemic debt.

The CFIB has speculated that many unemployed persons are happy to remain on EI and apply for jobs even though they have no desire to get hired. As the federal government is working on potential reforms to the Employment Insurance system, the association has urged Ottawa to take into consideration the impact of potential EI changes on small businesses.

“We’re hearing from business owners who have experienced ghosting that some candidates prefer to stay on EI for as long as possible and may be applying for or taking jobs just to satisfy the requirements of the program,” added Kelly. “While the vast majority of EI recipients may be looking for work in good faith, any changes the government is considering making to the program should not disincentivize people from accepting or starting jobs, especially with the current labour shortages we’re experiencing.”

As an owner of Mountain View Building Materials, Joel Seibert shares many challenges facing business owners today, including the need to find and keep good people. Mountain View has two locations, one in the Calgary market and the other in Kelowna, B.C.

Working with Pete Baran, CEO of Blueneck Consulting, who has acted as a mentor and business coach to Seibert over the past four years, Seibert developed an employee retention and motivation strategy, which he presented in a seminar called “It’s Time to Get Your Sales Team Excited to Sell” at the Western Retail Lumber Association’s Building and Hardware Showcase, held in Winnipeg earlier this year. (Part One ran in our February edition of HR Advisor).

Using the personality profile of each salesperson (based on a breakdown developed by the McKinsey Institute), Seibert laid out three steps to connect with those employees: understanding and identifying, providing transparency and clarity in your communications, and developing a system of rewards including salary to incentivize and compensate those workers. In this issue, we look closer at how Seibert provides that transparency in his workplace.

Start with well-defined job descriptions, he says. Letting staff understand clearly what they can—and cannot—do provides strong guidelines for managers and staff alike. It can also enable workers to feel more assured and confident in their roles, knowing what they can say “yes” to when dealing with a customer.

Seibert lays out some clear ways to provide clarity and transparency. These include setting challenging yet attainable targets, not just annually but on a more immediate and attainable basis each month. And each week, he uses one-on-one meetings to get supporting information from each salesperson that can help them achieve their sales goals.

“Together, we review where they are in relation to their targets and expectations,” he says. From there, both sides can discuss upcoming opportunities and identify key customers that could help drive sales, and then set priorities for the week.

Above all, he stresses that the company strategy must be openly discussed with the team. Don’t shy away from tough questions either, such as collectibles, which can plague any dealer. And be sure and ask what your salespeople need from you to succeed. A great company is built, he says, when both the employees and the employer are working in unison toward each other’s goals and vision.

“Getting your new team members excited about selling begins with us!”