To hire good workers and keep them happy, cannabis employers appear to be relying on benefits, such as bonuses and vacation time, more than on salary increases. Aon, the human resources consulting firm, noted in its annual survey of company pay practices that there has been “a continuing dramatic shift in the mix of compensation.”
In 1991, spending on temporary rewards and bonuses for salaried employees accounted for an average of 3.1 percent of total compensation budgets, while salary increases amounted to 5 percent, Aon reported. In 2017, those same temporary rewards and bonuses consumed 12.7 percent of those budgets, while raises amounted to 2.9 percent.
We’ve seen an uptick in cannabis industry workers questioning potential employers about benefits across the industries, this tells us that candidates are closely examining quality-of-life issues in the cannabis industry.
Is Your Dispensary Afraid to Raise Base Pay?
The economy is strong, unemployment is at an all-time low, many businesses are turning healthy profits, and the financial markets have surged. But these developments have not translated into robust wage growth for many cannabis industry workers, even though basic economic theory holds that this should have happened.
Instead, wages for many low- and middle-income workers have remained relatively stagnant, in some cases barely keeping pace with the yearly rise in the cost of living and in other cases not keeping pace at all.
Investing More in Benefits Than Base Wages?
One possibility is that cannabis industry employers have become more risk-averse after issues with government regulatory agencies, so they are restructuring compensation to give themselves more flexibility in case of an issue. Investing in benefits is not necessarily a fixed cost, it is easier and quicker to take away benefits – including bonuses and vacation time – if the economy turns sour.
You can give your top performers a nice end-of-year bonus as a retention tool, and you don’t have to raise base salaries across a large number of people. Being involved in placing and moving thousands of candidates per year across the cannabis industry, we see that it’s also proving to be successful in terms of retention.
This, of course, varies across different industries, f you take finance as an example, people are generally more money-motivated than in other industries.
Undergrads Tend to Value Base Pay
Yet many college undergraduates, encumbered with large student loans, want to make good money after college and are willing to give up greater job security and richer benefit packages in exchange for bigger paychecks. Good acknowledged that pay raises that don’t – or that barely – keep pace with the cost of living could be a disadvantage to workers in the long run because their current pay impacts their earning potential down the road.
But, it depends on the worker and their individual needs. For example, as professionals are getting older, benefits like retirement savings plans and premium health insurance might be more appealing. On the other hand, professionals who live in areas where the cost of living is high might seek a higher salary over a standout benefits package.
Although wages haven’t risen in line with the cost of living, it’s not necessarily a disadvantage to the worker. There are several reasons for this. In short, people are generally realizing that money isn’t everything. Historically in the U.S., you were paid well, but benefits were scarce.
For example, paid time off used to be about a standard 10 days. Now we are typically seeing 15 to 20 days as standard. Factors such as one’s manager, the content of the work, the workplace environment, the culture of the business, work/life balance, and the ability to learn new skills can far outweigh the benefit of being paid a little more annually, and people are generally wiser to this fact than in the past.
Paid and even unpaid vacations are also appealing in a society where leisure time has become more valuable to the worker and where whether a worker can take a longer vacation is at the employer’s discretion.
Similarly, it is difficult for a worker to improve some aspects of his or her health care plan – such as the choice they have in doctors, hospitals, and procedures – unless it’s provided by the cannabis industry employer. In this case, it may be more effective to give benefits than a higher salary.
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