For a start, I prefer it as a departmental signifier to 'Human Resources'. I'm nobody's resource. I'm a person. I'm my own man. The same applies to all the staff I work with. What we had, cliché or otherwise, was a team. We needed to matter to one another, we needed to like each other, respect one another, value each other. Although I have written a lot about what I did with my time in this job, that is because it is largely autobiographical in nature. The ideas depicted were mine in large part, although I hope I listened to the expertise of my colleagues too. However, none of these ideas could have reached fulfilment without the co-ordinated input of the team as a whole, and that included the gardeners, the Admin Assistant, the tea-room and seasonal staff and the volunteers, whichever discipline they helped with. But nobody was a 'resource', with all those horrible connotations of expendability. We were a set of working parts bolted together, and gripped onto one another tightly.
For this reason, I felt I had to defend my team from the pedantic approach of Human Resources, a department whose main purpose seemed to have developed over the years that I had been of working age, from that of representing the personnel, to tenaciously defending the employer against any possibility of litigation from awkward staff. Everything they did seemed to be tied up in regulations, and had lost sight of the people factor entirely.
I remember once we were all sent a formula for calculating the holiday entitlement payable to seasonal staff in lieu of time taken off. The formula was a nonsense, and was consistently ripping people off by at least 50% of their dues. The reason for this was that the hours payable were calculated according to a couple of reduction factors, for which the HR department did not understand the basic arithmetic. For example: let's assume for convenience sake that the basic working week is 40 hours. It wasn't, but that is a nice round figure for these purposes. A seasonal assistant would work only 6 months of the 12 a full-time employee would. Furthermore, they might be contracted to work only 4 hours a week, not forty. For the sake of argument, a full-time employee would be entitled to 20 days holiday. Therefore, in order to establish entitlement, we had to reduce the 20 days by first a factor of 6 twelfths and then by 4 fortieths. This comes out at one day's pay due for a summer worked. Where HR went wrong was in failing to understand that the basic unit of the calculation had to remain constant through the whole computation. That one day was one day of full-time entitlement, in other words, 8 hours. HR insisted that it should be paid at the four hours that the person was contracted to work, thus doing them out of half their holiday pay. Now, in financial terms it wasn't much, but I wanted my staff to be treated fairly, so I pointed out the mistake. Surprise, surprise, I was just a gardener, and they were trained in HR, so nobody believed my irrefutable arithmetic. It took months of arguing to finally prove my point, by which time, all Property Managers, none of whom had noticed the problem either, had to recalculate on the basis of a new formula provided by me, and backdated payments had to be paid. In my case, I was also aware that most of my staff worked far in excess of their contracted hours, so I kept meticulous records of the hours they worked and paid their holidays based on actual hours worked, not on contracted hours, which was a piece of patently unfair pedantry promulgated by HR. This benefited the staff, and no one had the temerity to question my figures, which I could have proven anyway.
When I took on my last apprentice, I can't remember exactly, was it a couple of years before I moved on? I had HR to deal with again. Back in Scotland in my previous job, I had also taken on an apprentice just before leaving and I wasn't able to see him complete his term either. I did find out that he graduated top of his year, though, and I also know that he later gained a position as a National Trust Head Gardener in his own right. He was a success. Not all my selections had gone as well, and I had had three other apprenticeships finish before full-term, so I was keen this time to get it right. We had the usual number of older career-changers applying, with their rose-tinted view of the job based on varying degrees of hobby gardening, but there was also a local lad who stood out for all the right reasons. My policy was to involve all the permanent staff in the recruitment process, meeting and chatting to all the applicants and arriving at a semi-democratic decision as to who we thought would fit in best. We were unanimous in wanting this young man on our team, and submitted our findings to HR who had drawn up the job specification for the role. Our candidate did not perfectly fit the list of required qualifications and the response I received from HR was that we would have to choose someone else. Red rag to this bull in my very expensive china shop. This was a school-leaver who had spent his spare-time earnings on buying himself a greenhouse to pursue his passion. This was someone with a real feel for the job, and a genuine all round nice guy to boot. I fought, I kicked, I screamed, and they relented, with a couple of conditions, of course. No matter, we had the apprentice we wanted, and he proved to be the asset we all envisaged. He is now employed on a regular contract and has been there nearly as long as I was. If you ever find this place, amongst other things, he is responsible for the peach tree in the Peach House in the walled garden, as well as sharing in all the other work in the garden. Sorry, Squire, I'm going to have to put these pictures up, of a trainee in training. First taking Cineraria cuttings -
Then potting them up in plug trays in our lovely potting shed where our team of volunteer propagators often worked -
And finally, some much-needed turf work -
As for his post-qualification experience with peaches, well -
As a general philosophy, by the way, I think it is important to make the most of specialist skills, and to encourage enthusiasm by allowing individual team members to operate in the disciplines they are best at. However, I also believe that a small team works best only if everyone is capable of having a competent go at all aspects of the work. I am very much against a system I have seen at work in some gardens, whereby each member of staff has their allotted area of responsibility, by which I mean a section of the garden, and then they spend all their time in that part of the site, except when covering for holidays or sickness. This leads to unhealthy competition, and as some gardeners are better than others, some parts of the garden look less well-managed than others. This works against my whole-garden philosophy, wherein every part should be looked after to the same standards. And it can also lead to less dedication when covering someone else's area in their absence, due to a desire to get back to your own section. Encourage skills, by all means, but employ them across the entire site. Don't divide the area up into geographical areas of responsibility.
I know this has been a long post, but in conclusion, I would like to say that when I left, the place was in good hands. We had just recruited a new gardener to replace the new Head Gardener, who had stepped up from being the mainstay of my team to being responsible in his own right. I never got to work with the new man, but he seemed ideal, and as it turned out, they all got on splendidly, and enjoyed themselves far too much for their own good! My successor has now been there longer than I was, and I couldn't have handed over to safer hands, a man with all-round skills and wide knowledge, an artistic as well as technical sensibility, and far less cantankerous than I could ever be.
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