How we encourage staff development

Here at Urban Landscapes, we recognise the importance of the development of both our staff and our clients. In an ever-changing industry, this staff development and training allow us to maintain and enhance our knowledge and skills, ensuring that we have a cohesive relationship with our clients and they are always provided with the highest quality of service.

We have developed a company culture that provides excellent opportunities for all team members to develop, with dedicated training either on live projects or at our Landscape Training Academy, investing in our staff is of paramount importance to us. At the start of every year, we allocate time to training and staff development, ensuring that we provide learning opportunities for all members of our team. We have developed a training matrix that allows our team to track their progress and see what they need to do to achieve their goals and reach the next level in their training and development. We review their achievements, goals and abilities every 6 months in an appraisal.

2021 was an exciting year in lots of ways for the Urban Landscapes team, but particularly in terms of development opportunities. Our site staff completed a full week of training that focused on several areas including; training in Abrasive Wheels, CAT Scanning, Excavator and Dumper Training and Avant Loader/Fork Training.

During the year we also had allocated training days with The Landscape Academy for new training and refresher training in several areas including on-site survey and setting out, stone paving and porcelain paving.

In addition to the training courses that we provided last year, all of our staff completed health and safety courses, including fire training and first aid. Health and safety plays an integral part in our business, and all our staff are required to complete a full day of IOSH training or a ROLO course at the start of every year.

We also actively encourage our staff to get involved in understanding more about our business operations. We had several interactive discussions as a team last year about our performance as a business, providing them with an insight into our costs and how they are proportioned. As a team, we also collectively looked at our business goals and the improvements that we would like to make across the business such as our mission to become more environmentally conscious.

We have a great passion for what we do and we want to continually improve our skills to ensure that we are providing a high-quality service to our clients. We actively encourage any staff who want to enhance or develop their skills and try to be as flexible as possible when it comes to development opportunities. Our staff can request time to do this during the evening or weekends and a member of the team is always happy to supervise and guide them.

In addition to staff training and development, we also recognise the importance of team building. Over the years we have been go-karting, bowling, hover crafting, and occasionally just having fish and chips in the local park, or pizzas in our outdoor kitchen. We are looking to continue this in 2022, and we plan to book out several days to enjoy as a team as we feel this is important for team members’ mental health and wellbeing.

We will continue to encourage professional development for all of our employees, as it enables Urban Landscapes to compete at the highest levels within the industry, providing a high-quality service, by highly trained, satisfied and motivated staff.