Staffing Plans for Marijuana Businesses
Similarly to business plans and licensing applications, cannabis staffing plans are often required by licensing authorities during the application process for a legal marijuana business application. Staffing plans also turn out to be a central piece of your daily business management process because the efficient and effective use of human resources is your best route to overall financial success, given the cost of labor in comparison to all other costs.
Our Cannabis Staffing and Training Plan Template contains the organizational chart shown above, plus all of the job descriptions, qualifications, and over 140 training topics that will teach you everything you need to master and organize in order to run a professional cultivation facility. Check out our Cannabis Staffing and Training Plan
The ease that workers experience in understanding and implementing grow site systems is vastly underrated as a business priority in the cannabis industry. With living plants, the timing of treatments such as pruning, watering, spraying, and harvesting is fairly non-negotiable. Adding further complexity to the situation is that, no matter how much effort is put into standardization of processes, each plant is unique and will have slightly different needs, which is why growing marijuana is partly an art, in addition to being a science.
Employees of marijuana grow operations all have different ways of perceiving the health conditions and needs of the plants. Some will have a natural talent when it comes to pruning and nutrient balance, while others will remain totally oblivious no matter how much training they might get.
The general element of human error that occurs in any industrial project, combined with the limited level of personal investment that most hourly workers have into the success of the operation, makes for one of the biggest issues marijuana cultivation businesses must handle on a day-to-day basis. This is an especially salient point when you remember to consider that payroll is by far the biggest expense that you'll incur. You don’t want to waste money on unproductive workers or protocols, or on unnecessary complexity in a system, or lack of clarity in group communication.
Simplification of systems is a must, and managers will find themselves spending lots of time training and retraining site workers to get calibrated to the same standards and practices. Over time, each employee will show his or her strengths and weaknesses, at which point they should be assigned to tasks that suit their natural talents. Some people make great trimmers, while some people are best at finding bugs or watering plants. Always be on the lookout for ways to get the most out of each employee as an individual, without compromising the integrity of the team.
The more tracking you can do, the better. Especially in crew environments where multiple employees handle the same tasks, each person should sign off on the work they did so the outcomes can be tracked to them at a later date if necessary. Take photos of plants on a regular basis, and track back positive and negative changes to both the regimen that was applied and the worker who applied it. This way, the entire cannabis cultivation system can be regularly improved by sharing outcomes with workers and helping them align best practices with best results.