As a cannabis company that employs cannabis professionals, strategizing all the ways you can become more profitable is a top priority. Whether it’s bringing down the cost of compliance, streamlining the supply chain or improving customer satisfaction, reducing the expense of running your cannabis operation is just smart business planning. 

But how much of your strategy are you putting into your employees? How do you empower their productivity and increase their engagement to drive toward company objectives? Are your employees simply showing up to work, punching the clock? Or do they take an interest in your customers, your products, and your overall mission, and why should you even care? 

Finally, what role does your business technology play in all this?

Consider this quote from renowned business and sales whiz, Zig Ziglar, “Workers have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.“

Employee engagement is an even more timely topic in the face of the COVID-19 disruption. When an employee is engaged, there’s a 41% reduction in absenteeism. There’s a 17% increase in productivity and upwards of 60% decrease in turnover. You’re able to align an employee’s role with the company’s goals and give them the power to do things that they weren’t able to do previously. 

“My job is cooler than yours”

Your people want to know they matter and that you have their back. They want to feel like their work has meaning, not in a grand save-the-world sense, but their contributions to the company, its culture, and ultimately your bottom line. 

Cannabis companies are increasingly discovering the correlation between customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and profitability. 

This makes sense. As the industry continues to legitimize and legal marijuana stigmas fall away, cannabis workers are less in the shadows and more proud of what they do. They probably even enjoy telling their friends how much cooler their profession is since more and more cannabis companies and workers are showing up on LinkedIn. When your employees feel valued, they are more productive, more engaged, and willing to go above and beyond in ways you never thought possible.  

The right tools

To devise a sustainable framework for your cannabis company’s employee engagement requires that you supply your staff with the right tools, resources, and training needed to do more than their job description. Why? With this foundation, they learn new talents, enhance old skills, and feel the benefits they get in return go well beyond a paycheck. 

“Turned-on people figure out how to beat the competition. Turned-off people only complain about being beaten by the competition” Ben Simonton, author of Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed.

Visibility for the win

Of course, there are various ways to empower your employees, but turning to your cannabis Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is a realistic opportunity with measurable results. Here is where your Cannabis ERP can play a part. With an employee-focused view of your entire workforce, including each department, you get full visibility into your ecosystem, from accounting to sales to warehouse teams and operation managers.

Cannabis companies go into business to sell a cannabis product (or service). You didn’t get into this business to administer all of the data created, but the process of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and tracking time still needs to be done. Too many companies still rely on spreadsheets; an error-prone, cumbersome, and inefficient method considering the technology exists to make the process easier, more accurate and offers real-time visibility. Can you say the same for your spreadsheet accounting? 

Learning is growing. Growing is Profitable

Today’s cannabis professionals expect their leadership to provide them with the means to grow professionally within the industry. Now is the time to align employee skills and career aspirations to your company’s objectives and succession plans. Linear paths no longer define careers, they’re defined through experiences, learning agility and becoming a hybrid professional. Your budtender may want to learn operational skills, while your accounting staff may wish to learn more about compliance initiatives. People want to continually upgrade their skills to prepare for the future and survive in this transforming world of work; they’re curious to discover career opportunities within your organization.

Cannabis companies that foster better learning cultures are more likely to outperform the competition. A workforce that can continuously learn and develop are more productive, agile, and engaged. Part of the challenge is delivering an experience that meets the expectations of today’s employees. These experiences are most impactful when they are modern, interactive, and relevant, while company management wants it to be scalable and impactful. Cannabis ERP can be viewed as a learning solution, delivering the experience employees want while simultaneously providing the tools and insights needed to drive business results.

Technology is second-nature

When implementing a cannabis ERP system, ease of use and familiarity is a critical factor. What would it mean to your business if you could empower users, improve collaboration and seamlessly connect across the entire organization? The use of smartphones in the workplace, coupled with these devices’ widespread adoption, has forever changed the user’s expectation in interacting with technology. By refining and aligning your business processes to a cannabis ERP system, you empower your staff in their daily tasks and increase job satisfaction by reducing busy-work.

Millennial employees, for example, might make up a large portion of your staff. This group of people expects a particular type of experience because they grew up understanding technology’s role in making life more comfortable and enjoyable. When you deliver this experience and make it part of your culture, you get the necessary insights to be successful now and into the future while retaining top talent at a lower cost.

Empower your employees to become cannabis industry professionals

Give your staff the tools to make their jobs easier and more efficient while empowering them in an engaging environment. A modern cannabis ERP system improves staff processes and workflows so they can be confident on their path toward professional growth. Your ERP system can now be viewed less as a compiled data system and more of an engagement solution.