How to Improve Employee Productivity in Your Cannabis Dispensary

Employee productivity plays a huge part in your dispensary’s earnings. Since your budtenders are the ones making sales and talking to customers on the floor, they are integral in determining how much money you bring in. Improving employee productivity can strongly improve your profits.

One of the main reasons employees don’t produce to their full potential is that they’re checked out of the work and not engaged with your company. On average, disengaged employees were 18% less productive than their peers.

Underperforming employees can result in serious losses. Disengaged employees cost U.S. employers $450 billion to $550 billion per year. If your budtenders don’t work with each customer to find the best products for them, upsell extra items, or offer great customer service, you could lose out on sales.

So, how do you keep your employees engaged so they can make more sales? Here are a few steps to improve employee productivity at your cannabis dispensary.

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How to Improve Employee Productivity

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Offer Proper Training & Education

When you hire new employees, you need to offer comprehensive training and cannabis education. Your staff should know everything about your products, laws and regulations, and cannabis information like strains and delivery methods.

Budtenders need to be thoroughly educated about your cannabis products in order to sell them convincingly and correctly. They should be able to identify what each customer needs and make recommendations accordingly. They also need to be able to answer lots of questions about cannabis for novices who enter your shop. If employees can match customers to their ideal products, they’re much more likely to return.

Implement Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

Dispensary owners should establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) for all of the tasks employees regularly complete. SOPs are written instructions that describe how to do a routine task in detail. SOPs can be made for everything from running payroll to interacting with customers to completing inventory management.

‍Creating SOPs ensures that tasks are done the same way every time, no matter who’s doing them. This makes it easier to tell when employees aren’t completing their duties properly. Review your SOPs regularly to ensure that they’re up-to-date, and make sure that all new hires have access to them, especially during the training phase.

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Monitor Staffing Levels

It’s important to find the right staffing levels for your business. The number of workers you need will depend on the day of the week, time of day, national holidays, promotions, and even local events or the weather.

Getting staffing right is essential. If your cannabis dispensary is understaffed, customers will have to wait a long time to get service, and budtenders may not be able to spend enough time with each client. If your dispensary is overstaffed, it can lead to employees neglecting their duties due to socializing and unnecessary labor costs.
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KayaPush’s scheduling software shows your dispensary’s analytics and offers auto-generated scheduling forecasts to help you find the best staffing levels to improve employee productivity. It’s incredibly easy to use, stylish, and will help you save money by avoiding over or understaffing.

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Host Employee Competitions to Increase Productivity

Gamifying sales can help you increase employee productivity. You can hold competitions to help encourage healthy competition and make working harder more enticing. You might offer a competition based on highest sales overall, highest sales of one particular product or brand, most positive reviews, fastest to close, and more. 
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Offer a prize that is enticing enough to encourage budtenders to actively participate and work hard at the challenge. For daily or weekly challenges, donuts or lunch are great options, but if you are running a month-long competition, then a $100 bonus or a gift basket of free products are better choices to increase employee productivity.

Encourage Employee Empowerment & Feedback

Your employees should feel empowered to take ownership over their roles. They should understand how their position helps the company achieve its goals. If they feel like they’re making a difference, they’ll be invested in your dispensary’s success.
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Listen to your employees when they feel like something could be done in a different way or more efficiently. Since they’re doing the job on a daily basis, they may have an idea that you wouldn’t. Reward innovation and efficiency with praise and regular pay raises.

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Integrate Technology to Improve Employee Productivity

Technology is making it easier than ever to run a business. Increasing employee productivity is important, but increasing your own productivity as an owner can make a huge difference in your dispensary’s success.
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Use inventory management software to learn what products need to be reordered instead of having employees take counts. Optimize your point of sale system so it can track performance metrics and sales. And use a people operating system like KayaPush to simplify payroll, scheduling, team communication, and onboarding.

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Invest in Your Employees’ Well-Being

Employees who are happy with their pay, benefits, and working conditions are much more likely to be passionate about their jobs. Prioritize treating your employees well, making them feel valued, and showing your appreciation for them. Employees who feel they’re being treated fairly are much more likely to be productive.
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Improving workplace culture and safety will make your budtenders feel more enthusiastic about coming into work as well. Offering great pay, benefits, and working environment makes it easier to retain employees, reducing your need to train new hires.

Monitor Performance and Productivity Metrics

You should track your employees’ performance metrics in order to measure their productivity. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are objective statistics about an employee’s performance, which allow you to evaluate different budtenders fairly. 
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Regularly review each employee’s metrics with them. Identify where they’re excelling and where their work could be improved. Your budtenders shouldn’t feel like they’re being reprimanded, but like you’re working together to improve sales. Consider offering bonuses for high or improved KPIs.

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How Can I Measure an Employee’s Productivity?

It’s important to keep track of how each of your employees is communicating with your customers and making sales. While that can be done by simply observing them on the job, it’s much harder to know how engaged they are in sales when management isn’t around.
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One of the best ways to track employee productivity metrics is with cannabis reporting software. Reporting software can monitor all aspects of your business, including each employee’s sales, labor costs, and revenue trends. This can play a great part in identifying employees that need improvement or praise.

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Final Thoughts on Increasing Employee Productivity

Improving your dispensary’s employee productivity can have huge impacts on sales, but that’s not all. Completing these steps can improve your staffing, training, employee morale, and more.
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KayaPush is the best tool to help you achieve your employee productivity goals. This powerful cloud-based software helps you run every part of your dispensary’s people management, including hiring, onboarding, staffing, payroll, time tracking, and more. It also allows you to track key metrics for your staff members so you know how each employee is performing.
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Want to see KayaPush in action? Book a free demo today!