This morning, finds The Old Hemp Farmer enjoying his usual cup of organic Indonesian medium roasted coffee with some Siriana Costa Rican Cacao infused with some of Tennessee Homegrown’s finest Cannabis extract, wondering what happened to the beautiful Middle Tennessee Fall weather. Since it’s a little inclement outside, it gives moi an excuse to pontificate once again on the Cannabis industry. Today’s topic is something that Cannabis Professionals and Companies rarely discuss in public, which is how hard it is to attract and keep quality employees. This is one of the reasons that Tennessee Homegrown has expanded slowly. Lee Crabtree and I simply don’t want to hire someone if we can’t give them a good living wage with opportunities to advance. When speaking with my fellow Cannabis professionals, one of their biggest challenges is finding qualified people with a good attitude and work ethic with multiple skill sets and keeping them. Too often they complain that many of the people they hire just don’t pan out because they are either lazy, stupid or have really bad attitudes, so they are continually searching for people to hire. Many of these new Captains of the Cannabis industry are declaring that people just don’t want to work anymore. That’s an easy idea to entertain and embrace but maybe the problem isn’t them, it might be you.
Cannabis companies by and large haven’t addressed issues like working conditions, hours, pay and finally, job classifications. Too many Cannabis companies act like working in Cannabis is a privilege, when too often its hard and repetitive work for relatively low wages. The coolness factor of being around Cannabis gives away quickly to reality that it’s a job that is too often is dead end with unlimited duties. At lot of Cannabis companies, you are expected to do everything. The following is a typical advertisement for employment at a Cannabis Company,
“We need friendly, reliable, hard-working individuals to join our team! The job will consist of sales, customer service, maintaining the store, handling cash, credit card transactions, cleaning, restocking, pulling and shipping orders, and any tasks the direct supervisor might have. Must be above 21.” I’m sure these Cannabis companies will have no problem finding people willing to do anything and everything to get into the business but keeping them might be a different story. The high turnover rate of employees is becoming an increasing problem in the Cannabis Industry. Let’s face it, working in the Cannabis industry isn’t nearly glamorous as we’d like to believe and once people see the Cannabis business as it is, they quit. In Canada, during the last year more people left Cannabis jobs than got hired. Now granted some of this job loss was downsizing but some of this was also job fatigue. Cannabis continues to be a labor intensive industry and if we as Cannabis professionals, we can’t attract and retain a quality workforce, we will continue to have growing pains. Anyway as always Hemp Dawgs and Hemp Puppies keep one eye on the weather and the other eye on the market.
Visit our Tennessee Homegrown web site to try our great products: https://www.tnhomegrown.com
Our Podcast – Full Contact Cannabis: https://fullcontactcannabis.podbean.com
The Wife’s web site: https://www.theoldhempfarmerswife.com
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