Support and Encourage Your Spa Staff: In Turn, They Will Deliver Exceptional Client Services
By ISM on Feb 6, 2008 in Featured, Spa Management
You’ve heard the old adage, treat people the way you would like to be treated. This doesn’t just apply to your clients, it also applies to your staff. Sometimes it’s easy to overlook your employees on a day to day basis. While you might truly appreciate the work that they do, there is no substitute for actually showing it or saying it in some form or fashion.
If your employees don’t feel appreciated or supported they may lose interest in doing a good job. This will only come back to hurt you because unhappy employees will create unhappy clients and this is not good for any business. So, what you need to do is set aside a specific time every day or every week to make sure you are truly encouraging and supporting the wants and needs of your staff, just as you would for your clients.
This might mean having weekly staff meetings, creating an open door policy where employees can come to you without fear of repercussions, providing regular training, developing individual goals, or even just having a pizza party once a month to let everyone blow off some steam. Remember, happy employees will make for happy clients.
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Eunice | May 17, 2008 | Reply
The spa industry is growing at a tremoundous rate and the pace that it is growing now, job turn-overs are high and employee pirating is common. Due to these reasons recruitment costs increases, job turn-over destroys profit, management time wasted, disruptions in operations occur, amongst other domino effect. So, one of the hats that a spa manager has to wear is the hat of a recruitment, hiring, interviewer and human resources manager aside from being an assessor too. So it is definitely critical to get the right people on the bus because they are our bridge to our clients. As I quote myself “If our clients are our bread and butter, our staff are our backbone”.
The last spa summit 2007 (as well as other conferences) that I was able to attend discussed also this topic: hiring, retaining and nurturing the right Class A employees. Please allow me to summarize what I have learned from those conferences and insights from my own experience combined.
When hiring people, trust your gut. Hire first for attitude (meaning the heart), then personality and lastly, the skills. During and prior to employment, check references, ask relevant questions relating to his/her aspirations in the future, what’s their long-term as well as short-term plans and goals? Did they include growth in your spa part of their plans? If they were just referred to by someone, look at the credibility of the person who also referred them. Let the candidate meet different evaluators and let them fill-up an appraisal form. During the orientation or as early as the interview itself be clear on what your expectations are (but do not also forget to ask your candidate what their expectations are too). Do a telephone screen. Assess your candidates’ personality profile, as the speaker told us: different personality will fit in different positions. Like high dominance people won’t last in line positions and high influence people sell and retain well but may talk too much on treatment room.
As managers, we should be able to draft and implement the following action plans (including but is not limited to): (1) a compensation plan that promotes career growth (2) be able to walk our talk e.g. do not play favorites, do not consider yourself far more superior than your subordinates, etc. (3) Great regard for workforce and know what ticks your people and create an atmosphere that makes them add to our bottom line through quality, hospitality and guest satisfaction. Remember we are not always with our guests, but our staffs are. (4) career management (e.g. annual educational stipend, regular training, company orientation, etc.) (5) Assign a coach, mentor or implement a budyy-buddy system or be one yourself. (6) Programmes for employee incentives, recognition, appreciation and SPIFF programmes
Deborah is correct too that you should also give a 90-day probationary period (it depends on the labor law of your country or state but I think this is the period generally acceptable)
Another tip that I got from the summit is that: good applicants do research, while great candidates would have been to your spa.
It depends on the size of your spa, so you can adjust as it deems fit to be applicable on a case to case basis.
Our screening ability and gut instinct will be put to a test here. So, if we failed to hire the right person for the right job we will have problems arising due to that decision.
In conclusion, I would like to share with you a story I read in a book asking what are the key qualifications that corporations are looking for in their prospective employees? A pretty face. An impeccable work experience. An impressive scholastic record. Can anyopne go wrong with that? Yes, said the top 500 corporations. When Fortune magazine asked the Presidents and CEO’s of many Fortune 500 companies what they considered the most important qualities for hiring and promoting top executives, the unanimous answer was integrity and trustworthiness. Now we are talking here of leading businessmen. Not technical skill. Not education or grades but still, the good old-fashioned work ethics built on integrity, honesty and love for work. After nearly seven years in the spa and wellness industry and starting as a freelance massage therapist myself, I have come to realize that an inexperienced worker with a track record of integrity and hard work is much more preferable than a brilliant employee with questionable work ethics. I would rather hire an inexperienced worker whom I can cultivate, inspire and develop rather than an experienced all-knowing staff with questionable work ethics. But one of the trouble when it comes to proving someone’s integrity or being a hard worker even if the boss is not around is…. the absence of school for them.
Eunice
yunesa@yahoo.com