Some gardens produce peppers, pumpkins and tomatoes. Others grow squash and leafy greens. Still others spring forth in flowers of many hues. At Haberman, the company garden grows collaboration and problem-solving skills as well as kale and arugula.
Its garden shows the way employers use the earth and seeds to grow their teams and wellness programs.  My piece in Fortune.com gives an ample harvest of ideas and advantages.  So here I share one gardening story and some advice for managers or leaders who want to give a garden a try.
Liz Morris Otto was the first employee hired by Haberman, a media and marketing company that started on the founders’ kitchen tables in Minneapolis. Fred Haberman was a storyteller, not a gardener, yet when he heard someone talking about CSAs – community supported agriculture – he said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a garden?”  Otto, who has been gardening since she was a girl, offered up some expertise and a plot on her farm, 45 miles west of the company offices.
The Haberman gardens, started in 2009, are are evolving in approach and how workers participate. What has stayed the same: Everyone gets to enjoy the vegetables, and anyone who works in the garden gets first choice.
Otto’s story of a memorable moment in the gardens takes place during a major planting, with a team of gardeners who hadn’t worked together before. They drove out to the garden together and got started. “I’ve never seen a team work so well together,” she said. “They worked in such synchronicity.”
Near the end of their four hours, a storm started blowing in. Yet some tasks remained, including staking the tomatoes to hold them off the ground. “I remember telling a couple of guys – ‘The lightning’s coming but we have to get these stakes up. We have maybe 20 minutes left to work.’ ” Otto recalled. The men worked quickly, pounding and tackling other tasks.
The lightning was all around -  yet the team finished, wet and overjoyed with accomplishment.
“You’re learning something new together. You’re laughing because it’s out of your comfort zone,” Otto said.
Now Haberman includes a report on the gardens at each weekly staff meeting, and Otto said, “people have a sense of ownership on one plant.”

Lightning and learning both are important but so is the sense of joy and stress reduction that gardening can bring.  Again and again in my interviews for the Fortune.com piece, I heard how the gardens could bring positive feelings to crew. Employees who garden on a break, “come back with a really good feeling.  It’s healthy, fresh air;  for some people it’s really a godsend.” said Steve Bates,  Society of Human Resource Management online editorial manager and author of a gardening book.

The gardens at Chesapeake Energy’s Oklahoma City headquarters seem like a godsend to at least one employee, a senior geological technician we will call Ron. Before he started gardening last year, he would often wake up in the middle of the night “stressing out about spreadsheets,” recalled garden coordinator Kathryn Goodwin.  After gardening for a while, he would wake up and think about his plants or turning the compost pile and get back to sleep.  “It reduced his stress levels… It really filtered down into his work life.”  (I did not speak to Ron, which is not his real name, but gardening has been used as therapeutic tool for ex-prisoners and many others, so I tend to see this stress-reduction as a real fruit of employee gardens.)

“It really does make people happy,” said Goodwin.

Come back later this week for a second post offering advice on starting your own employee’ gardens this year. I also hope to post a couple of photos from the Haberman gardens (if my seeds of learning how to upload photos bloom!)