Hiring for Culture

For Dragonfly Chief Growth Officer Narith Panh, a strong company culture blends policies, procedures, and benefits to create an environment where all team members can effectively work toward their common goal. “Every single day, people know that when we wake up, our job is to change somebody's life,” Panh tells Cannabis Business Times. “Everybody wakes up with a very clear purpose: ‘I'm here to serve my community.’”

Here, Panh talks about how he leveraged his corporate experience to inform Dragonfly’s hiring practices and build an award-winning company culture.

On inspiration for creating a great place to work and an engaged company culture:

Narith Panh: This mindset comes from my previous 20 years of researching consulting work at Ipsos, a global research consulting company. During that time, I worked with a lot of Fortune 500 companies to help them grow their business, grow their brands, and grow their products.

I had a great opportunity to be able to bring this 30,000-foot view of how to run an organization and to a small company like Dragonfly.

Now we're a 150-person organization serving over 80,000 medical cannabis patients in Utah. For you to grow and scale that quickly, you have got to have company culture right. The policies and the procedures and the benefits you provide help create that culture.

On most important/telling interview question:

Panh: The tongue-in-cheek question we ask a lot is “Are you willing to take a drug test?” That's a very direct conversation because one, you're working for a cannabis company, and if you're not going to be honest and truthful about that, that tells a lot right out the gate. There needs to be a passion for the plant. If a candidate responded with, “I don't personally use it quite frankly. It doesn't make me feel good, but I got my mom off of opiates,” they’d be considered. As long as there's this one degree of separation that allows people to understand this isn't just a job.

RELATED: Dragonfly Wellness: 'We're Lucky to Have a Team That Believes in Us'

On interview process to ensure role is a fit for both the company and candidate:

Panh: If it's a managerial position, a higher salary position, we use a process called top-grading. It's a very thorough interview process: resume screening, a very diligent phone screening that we filter people really quickly out through, and the in-person meeting, which is a three-hour interview. There, we go through your entire career history because it's pretty easy to lie on paper and put things on a resume, and it's pretty easy to fake the phone. But when you start asking real questions and pull back the layers, it's hard to lie for three straight hours.

For our more entry-level staff, we use a framework called “hungry, humble, and smart.” We don't need arrogance; we look for humility. And sometimes in the cannabis industry, it's hard to find. We don't hire on pure talent alone because when it comes to running a 50,000-square-foot facility, I don't care how long you've been doing it, you have to roll up your sleeves, problem solve, have humility, and be able to handle your shit.

We also have a 90-day probationary period for every single employee, which means it's a two-way street for trial. You guys get to work with us for 90 days to see if this is a company you want to be a part of and vice versa.

On promoting productivity while maintaining a healthy work-life balance:

Panh: This is a hard one, because we're still a startup company and we've had to ask our team to move mountains. That balance starts with leadership. If I, as a leader, am sending out emails at midnight, sending out requests at 7 a.m. and expecting a response, most people are going to see that and wonder “Should I respond to him? Should I ignore it? Should I have a healthy boundary?”

You put people in a weird spot. Don't do that. I see people do that all the time thinking, “Oh, look how hard I work. You want to get to where I am? You got to do the same exact thing as I am.” It just doesn't work that way.

Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length, style, and clarity.