Creating Your Competitive Advantage: Part 2

Welcome to our Cannabis Operators Blog and to our Learning Community!

In Part 1 of our Creating Your Competitive Advantage Blog, we explained why your customer’s experience is greatly impacted by employee turnover with a direct correlation to your bottom line.

In this blog, we’d like to provide you with a framework to help you retain the team members you want, thus decreasing all the negative factors surrounding employee turnover.

Over the past couple decades, there have been countless studies and theories explaining the importance of “Employee Engagement”. At The Advisory, we want to help you simplify your operations.

We want to give credit to Partick Lencioni for his seminal work “The Truth About Employee Engagement”. He was one of the pioneers in this field and his framework has been copied multiple times.

First, please understand that what we are talking about is creating a culture that recognizes your team members as vital to your operation. As simple as it sounds, most businesses ignore the importance of Employee Engagement. They don’t understand why they are not meeting their growth goals.

Compensation is certainly important to your team members. Through 25 years of research and consulting with businesses, including non-profits, and governmental entities, we have found that while compensation is important, it is not a major factor in creating an engaging culture.

However, if your dispensary is offering $3.00 an hour less than your competitors, the word will spread quickly, and your recruiting and retention efforts will not be successful. Your team members still need to feed their families.

The good news about compensation is that until you move into upper leadership positions, most dispensaries have a comparable pay scale.  That being the case, let’s look at the other factors where culture becomes your competitive advantage. Remember, your Market Zone also applies to employee recruitment.

1. Invisibility

Your team members are human, and they want to be treated as such. While your CEO or Board need to embrace an employee engagement culture, they probably don’t have many hands-on interactions with your employees. This is the responsibility of your “direct supervisors” and managers.

Your manager(s) need to exhibit a genuine, personal interest in their team members. Get to know them as people, not just as employees. Once a new team member is legally on-boarded, most of the rules regarding what questions you can ask during an interview are now open to share.

If you are a dispensary manager with 20 direct reports, this might seem overwhelming. However, if you lower your employee turnover rate by 25% annually, you will have the time to do this right. Personally, I would much rather spend some quality, one-on-one time with a good employee as I would endure yet another recruitment process.

To help simplify this process, your managers should keep a file on their team members’ shared information.

• Family: married or single, kids and their ages

• Kid’s school activities. Showing up at a daughter’s Volleyball game will have an incredible impact on your team members.

• Civic involvement

• Hobbies

• Passions: learning, music, travel dreams, sports

Having this information will help you create those “Moments” that make an impact on an employee.

No one gets out of bed in the morning to program software or sell marijuana related products. They get out of bed to live their lives and work tasks are only a part of their lives. They want to be managed as people, not as workers.

2. Impacting Lives

Have you ever wondered why professional athletes, rock and movie stars are so miserable when they make more money than most of us can count? And why the school janitor or bud tender can love their jobs despite making a fraction of a rock star’s money.

Human nature makes people need to be needed. They need to know that they are impacting others is a positive way. When your employees feel like they are not helping others, they begin to die emotionally.

It is the manager’s responsibility in an engagement culture to remind their team(s) everyday that they are making an impact. Lencioni suggests that there are two critical questions to ask to help define whether a person is making an impact.

Who. Who am I helping?

This is a simple question to answer for those in the service industry, such as dispensary employees. Their impact is not in a sales transaction, it is in helping the guest find the right product to deliver the life-changing results they are hoping for.

How. How am I helping?

Maybe your team member is helping to reduce a customer’s stress or anxiety, or to provide a mood change, or to help reduce medical pain. In countless interactions with guests every day, they are making an impact.

Even CEO’s and Board members want to make an impact on their “internal customers”: their managers and support team.

3. Immeasurement. I’m using Lencioni’s term because I couldn’t find a synonym.

This means that a team member cannot clearly determine how they are doing on the job. “Employees who can measure their own progress or contribution are going to develop a greater sense of personal engagement than those that cannot”.

This is important: your team members don’t want their success or progress to be dependent on the subjective views or opinions of other people. They need to be able to quantify their progress.

It’s great for a dispensary to share corporate revenue or market share goals with their teams, but employees won’t see how their everyday jobs contribute to those goals. They need goals they can measure.

A great example is when a marijuana operation provides a high level of employee training. This would include conference attendance, on-line professional development opportunities, webinars, etc., where your team members can assess their own learning progress.

Summary

Creating an employee engagement culture is not difficult if the right people are committed to making it happen.

If a dispensary CEO or manager isn’t interested in making a positive impact on her/his team members, then maybe they should start looking for another job.

So here it is. Creating a positive culture of employee engagement where employees are recognized for who they are as people, where they know who and what impact they are making on the lives of others, and where they have a clear understanding of how to measure their performance and progress, will be your competitive advantage.

Your customers will recognize that your dispensary is different from your competition. Not because your products are different, but because they are treated like honored guests by a team of people that know they can make a difference in their lives. You honor your guests by honoring your employees.

In addition, your employees will want to stay with you knowing they make a difference, thus reducing employee turnover.

Your culture is your competitive advantage.

Thank you for joining our learning community. As always, if you have any questions about employee engagement and creating your competitive advantage, do not hesitate to contact us. We are here to help you simplify your operations!