Building A Team
One can spend a fortune on team building, weekends away, coaching sessions – only to have it all fall apart when someone leaves or goes ‘off the rails’ at work. This is often because staff bring their personal issues into the business and because they do, the karma in the spa or salon suffers. This can lead to problems often resulting in the loss of good staff while you get left with the trouble makers.
And yet it is not difficult to build a team to ensure the continued success of your business. The single most important thing is to have a value system, often referred to as a mission statement. These are the values that together make up your ‘spa or salon culture’.
These values normally include respect, love, discipline, punctuality and professionalism but often include many more. These are the ‘rules of conduct’ that staff must adopt once they are in the spa or salon. Tell your staff there is a hook outside the spa or salon on which they must hang all their personal issues before entering the spa or salon. If they can’t do this they should not be welcome in the work place.
Respect everybody’s rights. Everybody has the right to be happy and successful as well as having their own opinion on things. But NOBODY has the right to stop somebody else from having the same rights. This often means not speaking about sensitive issues such as religion or race.
Collective people power. If one does a calculation of each team member’s experience in the industry you might be surprised to find anything between 40 and 100 years collective experience. That is very powerful when the team is focused on creating the ‘perfect spa or salon experience’ for each and every client.
Collective pride and dignity. Everybody’s role is important – reception, operator, apprentice, stylist, owner, are all on the same team when it comes to giving the client the ultimate spa or salon experience. The best analogy that describes teamwork is to imagine your team as an orchestra. It doesn’t matter which instrument you play, if you are playing the same tune at the same pace with the same passion, you will produce the ‘WOW’ factor – when reality exceeds expectations resulting in the ‘perfect spa or salon experience‘.