Engaging Employees in Workplace Safety

The long term success of the medical cannabis industry rides on its people. Business leaders will push the overall strategy and direction, but it is their employees who will primarily be tasked with making the company go.  Employee engagement and safety is paramount to any business, and the cannabis industry is no different.  One great way to help foster engagement in the safety program is through the formation of a safety committee.  Safety committees increase buy in among employees, improve relationships between employees and management, help efficiently solve safety issues, and ultimately make your grow facility or dispensary a better place to work.  The discount on worker’s compensation insurance for those in Pennsylvania is only an added bonus!  Below we’ve highlighted a few key considerations when forming a safety committee.

1. Choose your members wisely! It is important to choose employees who are already engaged with the organization and are mid to high-performing employees. Ideally they have some informal influence within the organization but are not necessarily in a management position. Provide opportunity for new members to join periodically throughout the year and also rotate members on a regularly scheduled basis to continually have fresh eyes on the safety function of the organization.
2. Address safety concerns and issues immediately: Not only will this positively impact the overall safety of your workforce, but it will also help your safety committee gain credibility as an impactful program within the organization. Give all employees a medium through which they can submit safety improvements and suggestions. Communicate who is on the safety committee to the entire organization so employees know who to go to with safety concerns.
3.  Include technical training: Equip not just members of the committee but all employees with the skills and training needed to perform daily tasks in a safe and efficient manner. Training on proper lifting techniques, CPR certification, and fire safety are all great ways to ensure a safer employee population. Regularly conduct personal protection equipment assessments especially in areas with a higher exposure to C02, CO, pesticides, and fungicides.

Finally, do not create your safety committee on your own! Partner with a risk management consultant who can advise on choosing members, attend initial meetings, and even provide meeting content.  One great meeting topic to consider right away is employee crime response training.  Be sure to check out Viridis Security Group’s blog on Employee Crime Response Training for more ideas.

– The Viridis Team

 

 

“HOTWASHING” a Cannabis Crime

According to Wikipedia, a “Hotwash” is… the immediate “after-action” discussions and evaluations of an agency’s performance following an exercise, training session, or major event. The main purpose of a “hotwash” session is to identify strengths and weaknesses of the response to that given event, which is intended to guide future response direction in order to avoid repeating errors made in the past.

For this week’s Employee Crime Response Training blog, we sat down with Viridis Security Group’s Director of Professional Services Chris Hinnershitz and Corporate Security Specialist Jim Minninger to “hotwash” the details of a recent robbery at a Sonoma, California medical cannabis distribution center. You can read the full details of the story here.

In a nutshell, this case involves a cannabis distribution center employee closing the business in the evening and exiting, by herself, to her car in the parking lot. Once in her car, she was blocked in by the perpetrators’ vehicle and forced at gunpoint to re-enter the business and open the vault, where, due to cannabis banking laws, there was a stockpile of cash. The criminals quickly canvassed the business before emptying the vault and exiting the property.

Obviously, the growing number of all-cash cannabis businesses presents the opportunity for criminal activity; but with the right combination of employee training and physical security measures the team at VSG believes that risk can be dramatically reduced.

So what details about this CA case stand out for the VSG staff? First and foremost, why was this employee exiting the business by herself?

“The opening and the closing of the facility; going from the parking lot to the building and building to the parking lot is a time when situational awareness has to be elevated,” said Minninger.
“We would obviously want there to be security personnel on duty to escort employees from the building during those times,” Hinnershitz agreed.

And don’t the details of this case scream “inside job?” It certainly seemed like the perpetrators had some cursory knowledge of the exit protocol if not an exact schedule of when employees left the building.

“I’ve been recommending security staff be there an hour before opening and one hour after closing but that shift varies,” said Hinnershitz. “One day it’s 15 minutes, one day it’s 45 minutes.”

This staggered schedule helps to reduce the possibility that a perpetrator can recognize a pattern of behavior in the closing procedure.

What about the behavior of the employee? Was she correct in re-opening the business and vault for the gun-wielding assailants?

“Material or money is never worth losing your life over,” said Minninger.

Once a firearm is added to the equation, compliance is the best procedure.

What COULD have turned the tide in this case were some basic security measures built into the business’s policy and procedure. Things like a “duress button” on the employee’s phone or a secondary alarm code or button on the vault keypad to alert law enforcement of the robbery in real time, are standard features in Viridis Security Group’s physical security offerings.

And training, lots of training! Included in the VSG list of services is probably the most important piece to preventing criminal activity, Crisis Response Training.
The Viridis team has a proven track record of integrating top quality security policies and procedures in other highly regulated businesses, like pharmaceutical distribution centers, schools and nursing homes; but also training those businesses’ employees in crisis response.

This, often neglected, Crisis Response Training allows legal cannabis businesses to…

• Clarify roles and expectations
• Reinforce knowledge
• Improve individual and team (facility-wide) performance
• Evaluate the policy/procedure, plans and staff knowledge
• Identify what works
• Show areas in need of improvement or additional resources

Are you a legal cannabis business owner looking to improve the training of your employees and reduce risk at your business? Check out Viridis Security Group’s list of services, which include both didactic and practical training for these types of situations and others.

“You always revert to your lowest level of training,” Hinnershitz noted.

Why not contact Viridis Security Group now to make sure you (and your employee’s) level of training is adequate to reduce the many risks that accompany this new industry? Request a Free Quote