Keen to try 5 pathways to “Staffing Heaven” in 2014?
Staff is an extension of your company’s brand. Your employees are your testament team and make the actual difference to the overall service your client’s receive. Your business, to be outstanding must constantly strive for perfection; endeavor to grow firstly as a company with a value based team and secondly individually – yourself as the leader and your individual team members.
To provide the best in customer service and to create environments that are sustainable and rewarding to visit and work in you must “Grow You own Staff”.
Grow your own staff and mulch them with a value based team programme and a culture of recognition, reward, learning, challenge, and security.
As a salon owner you will be able to achieve consistent high standards of business growth when you embrace an invariable emphasis on learning and education for your staff. Now combine this with the careful selection of beauty therapy house suppliers and post graduate educators. Both of these sources must have an enviable educational arm that will develop your team and assist in managing and recognizing educational growth.
- I believe that good quality management should be competency based. Your human resource “in house manager’; which is most probably you, needs to be developing and documenting procedures for annual staff training.
- When your business begins creating and growing your own staff to competent levels, providing adequate resource and having monitoring systems in place to enable the deliverance of quality post graduate education and service embedded in sustainable business practice then your clinic becomes “beauty therapy heaven” for your staff.
- Is this time consuming? Yes.
- Is this how you grow fabulous in house beauty therapists that stay for years in your clinic? Yes.
- Will your clients love staff longevity? Yes.
- Will your staff remain loyal to your brand for more that three years? Yes.
If you want to create a beauty therapy heaven, the five key Pathways are :-
- Selection and Induction
- Search – when searching for staff, you should spread your net far and wide. There are all types of avenues for finding staff. eg www.seek.com, Trade Me, Contact School training providers and ask the Principal for new staff members.
- Interviewing Process – remember, you are being interviewed just as much as you are interviewing. Be prepared, be specific, allocate the time, and use personality tests. Always acknowledge and inform the applicant of your business culture, your company values, the history of your business, your customer service philosophy, and be very precise when reading through the position description document and contract.
- Test and Measure - It is vital to find the right fit, remember staff is an extension of your company’s brand. Organise a second interview to test and measure the applicant’s practical ability and professional knowledge.
- Two –Way Communication
- Job Offer – Once you have made the offer, in writing, give the applicant the opportunity to go away and consider the offer as they should be making a three year commitment to your business as you are about to embark upon a positive beauty therapy educational growth programme together. Ask you applicant to consider not taking the position if they are unable to make this professional commitment to your clinic.
- Staff Development and Training
- Induction Process - Margaret Walsh Consulting believes the induction process is crucial to direction, staff behaviors and this in turn has a direct link to their future performance and to top quality professional customer service and a value based team performance. Minimum time required is one week with a full time personal in –salon trainer. Remember this is the forging of a 3 year plus relationship.
- Outline educational training for first 3 months -
- Development of professional training programme over a 3 year period
- Motivation and Rewards
- These will encourage effectiveness at work and exceptional customer service which in turn has clients returning for service at dream rebooking rates and your staff is rewarded and appreciated. A marvelous “win- win” solution for all parties.
- Culture and Standards
- Once you have developed an environment where staff enjoys coming to work at your salon and where they can grow and develop their talents, utilizing the strategies outlined above, you will have created a high performance work place and staff longevity and loyalty will reward you and your clients.
Acknowledge your professionalism and enjoy the fruits of your Human Resource Policy in action.
Written by Margaret Walsh of www.margaretwalshconsulting.co.nz
