Stress Within Salon Teams

With the current skill shortage in salons, we wanted to take a deep dive into what you can do, to make sure your current team is feeling valued, thus more likely to stay!

This might seem incredibly obvious, but it is often overlooked- workplace stress. 

Stress in the workplace can really affect many variables in a business, like the quality of service, atmosphere, team relations, sales, and even employee turnover. Of course, the last thing anyone wants is to lose valuable staff members.

If you want to know how to build and maintain a happy salon to get only the best out of your team, then here’s what you do:

💆‍♀️ Change How You Get Started

I’m not talking about your personal morning routine when you wake up, I’m talking about how you begin work for the day. Some of the best beauty businesses are ones that spend the first 15/20 minutes in the morning planning the day ahead and spending the mornings as a team. Within that time, you and the team can share breakfast together while looking at the appointments for the day. This is a great opportunity to talk about your retail lines, and any particular clients that are booked to come in that day that need a little more care than normal. By spending just a few minutes in the mornings with your team can support efficient success for the rest of the day, which means, less stress, for them and you!

💆‍♀️ One-On-One Time

Having morning team meetings can help strengthen communication amongst the team, but sometimes, that’s not enough, especially if you have an inkling that a particular member of staff is a little distressed, or not acting her/his usually bubbly self. Usually catching up with individual team members twice a month is good, but during busier months, it’s better to be more frequent that that. Look at these 1:1 meetings as a form of market research, feedback, a way to support your staff members and a way to give you more ideas on how to improve each of the employees performance.

💆‍♀️ Let Them Breathe

Unfortunately, some salons are soley focused on money and clients that they forget their employees are still human. I’ve known many beauty bosses to get so booked up day-to-day that they can’t even take a break! As much as we know legally we need to include breaks into the day of our employees, during some busier months, this may still not be enough - if this is the case, where possible, send your staff on a 5–10-minute break to eat and drink something. Sometimes, 5 minutes is all they need to quickly build up their blood sugar/pressure so they can work at their optimum. 

💆‍♀️ Treat Them!

Staff morale should always be at the top of the list. If your staff is unhappy, so is everything else. One thing you can do is find affordable and simple ways to excite your employees regularly. This could be done by getting everyone their favourite coffee, or sweet, or having a quick drink after work. I’ve known people to do some home baking and share it with their colleagues which is a great way to show appreciation for how hard working your staff is.

 💆‍♀️ Activity Day

It’s rare to have a completely empty day in the diary, but it does happen unexpectedly. If that’s the case, then this is the perfect time for an activity day! You can hire someone externally, have a fun creative training day or plan something else - not only is this great for team morale, its also great content for your socials ;) I tend to find having creative training day to be much more affective as you can improve staff mood and skills at the same time.

💆‍♀️Make A New Addition

If you need a simpler approach to start with, then changing something in the workplace environment is a good place to begin. In any workplace where staff morale is high, you can expect there to be a few good things where they work, maybe it’s a good coffee maker, a TV in the staffroom etc. During your 1:1 chats with staff members, this would be a good time to ask what they would like to see for their benefit in the business. It might seem counter-productive for a business to add distractive elements in the workplace, but when your employees are having fun in their downtime it can increase productivity when their break is over. This is because their minds are automatically refreshed and revitalised each break time.

💆‍♀️ Let Them Breathe Part 2

This is one of the most important parts to any busy business; make sure you have a space for your employees to breathe. This could be a quiet room with comfortable seating, or just an area that has a more relaxed feel, so a staff member has the space to sit and calm down. If this isn’t a possibility, then you may need to send them out to get some fresh air instead. Not every person becomes revitalised after the taste of coffee! Sometimes, all that is required is 5 minutes of quiet. 

💆‍♀️ Before I finish…

Mental health is a big struggle that many people face, and it takes longer for some than others to pull through it. You can tell how a business is run purely by the atmosphere and the general mental health of the people who work there. And with everything happening in the world, now more than ever do businesses need to support their staff more. So, that’s why we need to do our part to help others shine.