How to Create a Compliant Culture In Your Cannabis Business

In Episode 3 of Ask The Regulator podcast, BuildMySOP’s Kady Cravens and Tom Mohan sat down with the cannabis industry’s “BS detector” herself Kristen Yoder to discuss the issues that are costing cannabis business owners tons of money and creating unsafe environments for employees.

Some of the reasons are too many Cannabusiness owners are receiving fines that could have been avoided had they invested in proper employee training and recorded protocols and operation procedures through a set of standard operating procedures.

Just as important as having systems in place, our experts agree that business owners need to understand best practices in managing employees.

Employees need to feel they are valued, working in a safe environment where they are protected and respected, but too often in the Cannabis industry employees are underpaid, undertrained, and working in a toxic environment.

In our first installment of this three-part series of posts, we explored the importance of cannabis business owner’s knowing their city and state’s laws, regulations, and requirements concerning their business and how this helps protect the business, employees, and consumers.

In this post, we continue to highlight important points from the Episode 3 AskTheRegulator podcast and discuss how cannabis business owners can create a safe and motivating environment to prevent employee turnover and properly train and maintain employee efficiency.

HOW TO CREATE A COMPLIANT CULTURE IN YOUR CANNABIS BUSINESS

How To Create A Compliant Culture
Define Good Work Relationships
Value Your Employees
Create Clear Paths Of Communication
Management Training
Provide Safety Training
Next Steps

This is the second installment in a series of posts exploring cannabis business owner’s responsibilities to their business, to their employees, and to their consumers.

How To Create a Compliant Culture

In order to protect assets and build a safe work environment, cannabis business owners need to know how to build a compliant culture so that they make and save money and protect their employees and consumers.

The best practice is to establish a work environment that enables efficiency and safety from the very beginning. It is much harder to attempt to establish this type of work environment after the business has been operating in a relaxed fashion for a long time.

First, owners need to take on the responsibility of taking their role seriously and acquire effective leadership skills.

Too often, the industry is riddled with owners who are inexperienced and overwhelmed with the amount of responsibility they have and are unable to lead their team in a productive way.

Truthfully, many owners got into the industry simply because of their love for the plants and want to share their knowledge with the consumers.

But they soon learn the massive responsibility it requires to operate a cannabis business, and unless they stay committed to growing as a business owner, they will put both their business and employees at risk.

Define Good Work Relationships

Owners need to establish good working relationships with their employees, and support respectful relationships between managers and employees.

The way in which an owner treats their employees can set the tone for how employees are expected to interact with one another. It’s is a powerful role and can have a very positive or negative impact on the business.

Owners also need to create an environment where there are clear boundaries in the work relationships with employees. Consuming marijuana with employees is never a good idea for a multitude of reasons.

If an owner has an employee sample program, comply with the amount that employees can legally carry out of the business. Remember, the owner’s job is to protect the business, the employees, and the consumers.

Value Your Employees

The way that owners value their employees is usually evident in the investment they put into employee training and efforts in retention.

Valuing employees is an effective way for owners to create a sustainable work environment, which in itself can save owners a lot of money in avoiding high employee turnover and the costs associated with replacing them.

By valuing employees, owners are creating an environment where a positive work ethic is rewarded and upheld.

In work environments where employees are shown more respect (and even compensation) for their work, employees and managers alike can feel safe approaching problems with solutions in mind, thereby creating a more productive and collaborative workplace.

Too often, employees are underpaid and treated unfairly in the cannabis industry, and if a business wants to advocate for change and strive for more growth, the investment in good employees will pay off.

Create Clear Paths of Communication

Too often, the cannabis businesses operate like a start-up company and employees are expected to take on many roles in order to get the job done.

This can easily feel overwhelming and create uncertainty with the procedures required of each task.

Without having a clear set of communication paths for employees to refer to, they tend to either avoid reporting to anyone out of fear of ‘rocking the boat’, or they don’t even know who to report to.

So important issues can go unnoticed, unreported, and ignored and can cause inefficient or even dangerous situations.

When employees have a clear set of expectations and protocols relating to their tasks, they have more confidence in their performance.

But when uncertainty or questions do come up, employees need to know the appropriate point of contact they’re expected to report to.

When the “After the Cannabusiness Buzz Team” interviewed Kristen Yoder for an article, she shared that balancing growth in an industry that’s constantly evolving “starts with open, real-time communication among all pieces of an outfit: sales, compliance, legal, supply chain and distribution. Every cog in the wheel must be doing its part and communicating with the other cogs if you want your company to survive and thrive in the regulated cannabis market.”

Creating clear paths of communication that employees are expected to funnel through can create trust while maintaining organization and deterring chaos in internal and vertical communication.

And in most cases, employees will be required to report to managers who are their more common point of contact than the owners themselves in the business.

Management Training

Facility managers are often the go-between the employees and the owners and have the most contact with employees in the business.

Obviously, they also have a lot of responsibilities to the employees, the owners, and the consumers and can get overwhelmed without proper support.

Our AskTheRegulator hosts and guest have witnessed a lot of concerning issues when it comes to cannabis business managers and have noted a lot of burnout among facility managers and owners.

The burnout is often caused by:

Not having the tools they need to be successful
Not having support from fellow managers or from owners
Not being respected by colleagues
Not feeling trusted to perform their job well and independently

Just like everyone working in the cannabis industry, managers need proper training to learn how to approach problems in effective ways.

As Yoder pointed out, it’s easy for managers to fall into feeling empty and not valued while they work hard to build another person’s dreams.

So again, owners who show that they value their employees will have more success in their business than those who choose not to.

Provide Safety Training

Consumer and employee safety should be considered the most important part of operating a cannabis business.

Since owners are vulnerable to lawsuits and fines, they need to take a proactive approach to safety training and employee accountability.

The business is at risk if the product is not safe for consumption, and unfortunately at this time in many states, the cannabis laboratories where products are manufactured are not consistently being held accountable for unsafe or inaccurately labeled products and are putting consumers and dispensary owners at risk.

This puts more pressure on the owners to protect their business, and one crucial way in doing so is investing in employee safety and performance training.

And it also puts more at stake for the Budtenders who are directly selling the cannabis to consumers.

Yoder shared her personal experience in her own podcast episode “Why Does It Usually Suck To Work In Cannabis?” where she was reprimanded by the owner of the dispensary she was working at for refusing to sell moldy weed to a customer that was a medical user.

She felt like her integrity was on the line, and that by selling harmful weed to a consumer, the owner was also liable for a lawsuit.

It was this very incident that provoked Yoder to start her own podcast where she wanted to warn people who were eager like she was to work in the cannabis industry because of their love for the product.

And its situations like this that should steer the cannabis business owners to do the right thing and always act in a way that protects the business, the employees, and the consumers.

Next Steps

Business owners have a ton of responsibility in their operations and it is their job to implement practices that will protect their business, their employees, and their consumers.

Often, managers and employees alike will fall in line with the culture that has already been created, and if the company culture is toxic, not supportive, unsafe, and lacks integrity, then the employees will often perform likewise.

By creating a work culture that invests in employee training and encourages collaboration and problem-solving, owners will have an easier time with retaining good employees.

Likewise, their business can thrive if they set the tone by practicing business with integrity and honesty.

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