TRENDS: ROBOTS & BATTERIES
White.“ I thought, these are landscapers, they get their hands dirty every day, these guys don’ t care about gas fumes. The truth is, they really do care.”
“ As we started to get more feedback of the change [ from gas to battery power ], you notice how much those fumes got soaked up into your clothes and soaked up into their lives. The feedback loop has been really positive. Their quality of life has increased right through sound and vibration and pollutants or lack of.”
“ As we start to hire a younger generation of team members, we’ re seeing them put a higher value on their health and their well-being. They see their dad or their uncle who can barely walk at the end of their career because of the way they’ ve used their bodies and they don’ t want to go down that same path.”
White’ s shift might have been simpler since California is mandating the shift to batteries. Not the case for Greyson Walldorff, founder & president of Lawn Capital.“ We had a pretty tough time in Atlanta. No one is forcing us to switch to batteries. We’ re an outlier. And we lost a lot of employees – management, operations people, people in the field. Every time we converted [ from gas to battery ] or added battery equipment, we lost people.”
“ Today though, it’ s established, proven and working with the workforce. It’ s in our culture; we are an electric-based company. For that reason, we have higher retention. People appreciate it now. It changed the workforce. It changed who we hired. It changed our culture.”
Along with the preferred use of battery equipment these businesses are seeing, there is a gamification developing.“ We started to see the younger guys saying,‘ Hey I got my battery to last 3 1 / 2 hours today on the blower,’ like it’ s a competition,” said White.“ We started to have those individuals do the training after hours or in the morning instead of the supervisors or the leaders doing the training. It’ s the peers doing the training. Certain people in your company are going to step up and be advocates for this transition. You have to make sure you give those individuals stage time to share their positive experience.”
Trend 2: Robotization
Robotic mowers are building a history in America, and it started with primarily Husqvarna automowers, the originally dominant robots bound by boundary wires buried in the yards of early adopters. That technology is quickly being replaced by mowers using satellite and GPS control, or other vision-based service.
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