3 Minute Read

Picture this: It’s Monday morning, the sun is shining, it’s early spring, and you’re feeling upbeat about the start of your landscaping company’s busy season. You pull up to your office with a smile on your face, ignoring the buzzing phone in your pocket. It can wait, you think to yourself as you approach the door while enjoying your first sip of coffee.

Then suddenly, your mood changes. You walk in and find your normally cheery office manager looking frustrated and concerned. It’s first thing in the morning. This cannot be good.

In a matter of minutes, she informs you that your new skid-steer is broken, your biggest client has requested a rush job with impossible deadlines, and to top it off, three of your best employees have decided to leave your company to work for your competitor—effective immediately.

Even worse, this is the second wave of resignations this month. At this rate of turnover, it will be challenging to maintain enough crew members to keep up with current contracts, let alone grow your business, and increase profits.

But what can you do?

You’ve already raised salaries and added as many employee incentives as you can comfortably afford. On the other hand, if you don’t do something, you’re at risk of losing more than your top talent. Without experienced crew members, you’re gambling your most profitable contracts. And, in essence, your business’s future.

Ready or not, it’s time to come up with a new plan. It’s time to think outside the box.

To regain control and keep pace with your clients, obligations, and competitors, you’re going to need to stabilize your staffing levels. And to do that, you’ll need to offer your employees something desirable and unique. Maybe a new incentive or bonus plan. However, to prevent your finances from going upside down, the program must also be both practical and affordable.

It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to be.

In fact, there is an effective and affordable solution that can help you motivate your current employees, solve your turnover problems, and keep your competitive edge. Better yet, it’s cost-effective, simple to learn, and easy to implement and maintain. The program is called early wage access—and it’s proving to be a valuable employee recruitment and retention tool for landscaping companies nationwide.

Ready to find out more? Good! Let’s dive into the details.

Early wage access is an affordable, simple-to-use technology solution that helps you recruit top talent, retain employees, and streamline your administrative processes.

How? Allow us to explain.

Early wage access allows your employees to withdraw funds against a portion of their earned but unpaid wages. The program functions as an organized, cost-efficient solution that enables you to grant your employees the peace of mind and convenience of a payday advance without the added risks and additional administrative processes that accompany traditional employee loans.

When your business signs up for the program, each employee is given a personal account and reloadable debit card that keeps track of their logged hours and net earnings. Once connected, they can log in, view activities, and withdraw funds right from their mobile devices. Best of all, there is no cost to you, the employer. Rather than exposing your business to expensive enrollment fees or paying a blanketed premium for access to this service, employees pay a minimal fee for each transaction.

It’s that simple.

Of course, you’ll maintain visibility into each employee’s earned wage balance and transaction activity as well as retaining the ability to enable—or disable—the earned wage advances per employee. However, no extra steps are required on your end. Individual hours are loaded directly from your Aspire Landscape business management software upon approval, and the program automatically keeps track of allocated wages and fund disbursals.

Aside from the initial setup, there is no need to continuously reconcile financial records or adjust payroll each time an employee initiates an advance. The early wage access program internally manages all the information for you. Even better, your company won’t have to fund—or reconcile—these employee advances. The early wage access program fronts the funds in exchange for the small fee (just $1 per each $100 of earned wages) paid by the employee, and the transaction is reconciled automatically with the program when payroll is processed.

At the same time, while early wage access might sound like a business-centric program, the clear winners are your employees.

In fact, for the 80% of American’s living paycheck to paycheck, early wage access can function as a much-needed lifeline by saving them from the anxieties of looming debt obligations or unexpected expenses. Besides enabling employees to adjust their pay date to meet individual financial commitments, the program adds a layer of security for funding unanticipated and potentially expensive events.

What’s more, without the added stress of cash flow issues, employees stay happy, productive, and engaged. All of which contribute to heightened performance and job satisfaction levels.

Equally important, adding an intangible benefits program delivers a powerful message to your employees. Aside from cultivating mutual trust and fostering an environment of company-wide support, deploying a system like early wage access allows you to emphasize your company’s commitment to your employee’s success and well being. And while you can’t put a price tag on that peace of mind, it certainly equates to much more than an extra dollar per hour.

-------------

Ready to discover how early wage access can make a difference in your organization? Click here to watch our recentlly recorded webinar to learn more about the Aspire Pay OnDemand solution.


If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also want to read, 5 Secrets to Attracting & Retaining Top Talent in Your Landscaping Business.
Robin Mefford

Robin Mefford

Robin Mefford joined Aspire Software in 2019, and she currently serves as director of brand and product marketing. Robin is based in St. Louis, Missouri, where she lives with her husband and two French bulldogs, Hops and Barley. Robin is an avid mountain biker who loves hitting the trails in her spare time.