Spa Workplace Wellness

6 Ways Spas Don’t Practice Workplace Wellness

This year’s Global Wellness Institute Summit in Mexico City will highlight Workplace Wellness as a key issue. Spas are all about wellness, right? We’re exemplars, right?

The reality is, a spa is a mentally and physically demanding environment that is built on the profit-challenged business model of selling services. Right there, you know that employee well-being may not be at the top of the list of priorities for spas. Here are six ways spas don’t walk their wellness talk:

1.  Spas who treat their workers as “independent contractors” instead of employees. Do you really espouse wellness when your therapists don’t qualify for worker’s compensation insurance if they get injured at your place of business? This is also one of the key reasons the playing field is not level in the spa industry: unfair competition from companies who misclassify their workers to save money.

2. Overworking your team. Whether your employees work at your front desk or in a treatment room, good people are hard to find. Many spas are burning out their A Players due to staffing challenges.

  • Watch out for estheticians who are super-skilled and in heavy demand with services like lash extensions or waxing, which involve a lot of repetitive motion. The same holds true for your deep-tissue massage aces. Make sure that their schedules have a variety of activities. Body treatments are a good way to add variety to the massage therapists’ schedule.
  • Set a limit of five massages per shift, even if the therapist wants to do more, while estheticians can perform up to seven facial treatments.
  • Provide the breaks required by law (and common sense)
  • I’m not a fan of the 50 minute “hour” as I think it contributes to injury and burnout, not to mention unrealistic expectations on the part of clients as to what can and should be accomplished in a treatment session. Provide 15 minutes’ breakdown/setup time between each full-session service. Yes, it reduces your earning capacity, but it also reduces burnout and injury (both of which can destroy earning capacity when good workers get sidelined.)
  • Don’t enable or ask employees to work while injured or sick.

3.  Using the wrong /cheap equipment. Yes, it’s more expensive, (but it’ll only hurt for a minute.)

  • Use treatment beds and tables with hydraulic lifts and buy equipment that is expressly designed for the service you’re providing, rather than improvising. Companies like Living Earth Crafts are continuously innovating new designs.
  • Keep your equipment in good repair. It’s no coincidence that one of the key indicators of employee satisfaction in the famous Gallup 12 employee engagement survey is having the “materials and equipment you need to do your work right”.

4. Not providing continuous education in body mechanics and workplace safety. Yes, massage therapists learn a bit about this in school. Do they practice it? With a few exceptions, no. Your other workers, including estheticians, nail techs and front line personnel have equally serious ergonomic challenges.

  • Include some education about ergonomics and working safely in every meeting.
  • Remind your team about body mechanics in your daily “huddle”, with a helpful hint, a new stretch, or a “group massage” before they go on the floor.
  • Identify your best body mechanics role models and hire them to coach their co-workers.
  • Retrofit work stations to make them more ergonomically sound.
  • Bring in outside educators to keep the safety message fresh and engaging.
  • Save Your Hands is the authoritative book and an outstanding program for all team members. They can even train a member of your team to be an Injury-prevention coach.

5. Not providing resources and tools for self-care.

  • Help staff members warm up hands and arms by providing a warm paraffin dip prior to their shift and ice packs to reduce inflammation following their shift.
  • Require that employees are on site 30 minutes prior to their first service
  • Enable them to purchase your great spa products at a deep discount, to encourage them to practice what they preach.

6. Not providing enough (high quality) support Spa employees shouldn’t be stressed out at work: their stress will translate into unhappy guests. But equipment breakdowns, communications mishaps, supply shortages and other operations “fails” create a stressful workplace. Think you can skimp on your support staff, designate “managers” who spend their day in the treatment room, or share your bad mood at work because you’re the boss? Think again.

Workplace wellness is a crucial issue in creating a well world, and it starts with us!

To learn more about ways to keep employees happy and engaged, visit us at wynnebusiness.com. Morale challenge? Trying to create a healthier team?  Contact us at consultants@wynnebusiness.com or call 610.368.6660.

World Class Spa Structure

The Second Ingredient of World Class CX: Structure

We’ve been talking about Core Values, the nutrients that “feed” your company’s customer experience. Now it’s time to move up and actually construct a system that can consistently deliver great experiences.

We’ve all heard about the road to hell and what it’s paved with. If your organization is all about the core values but you have no systems or processes, no structure, no architecture, you’ll fail. If you’re values-driven but structure-impoverished, despite your incredible niceness, people will get mad at you and flame you on Yelp.

One of the reasons I love living in Santa Cruz, California, is that it’s a community where people really wear their values on their sleeve. We are awash in good vibes and good intentions. But it’s not been a great place to go out to dinner.

What do I mean by that? Feather, my server, smiles a lot and greats me with genuine warmth. The organic food I’ll be enjoying this evening was sustainably grown nearby. But poor Feather she doesn’t have the training or systems in place to support her success. They’re out of the very thing on the menu I want most. My dinner order isn’t quite right, or the food comes out cold because the place is slammed and there aren’t enough servers on. The restroom is adrift in paper towels and doesn’t appear to have been tidied up by anyone over the course of the busy evening.

Recently my husband and I dined at a local institution that I hadn’t visited in a couple of years, the Shadowbrook. The Shadowbrook is the sort of lovely, landmark, touristic restaurant where you go for your prom, or take the out of town relatives (the ones you like.) It sits on the banks of a beautiful creek just beyond the beach in the charming village of Capitola. It is enclosed by verdant gardens and trickling streams. A friendly neighborhood cat is always there to greet you as you step into a little funicular railway car to take you down the very steep hill into this magical grotto. Got the picture?

These places are generally lousy. They rest on their laurels (or in the case of the Shadowbrook, their giant tree ferns.) In most of these pretty-face tourist traps, food quality is ho-hum. The service is jaded. The prices are high.

As we were being seated, the hostess asked us if we were celebrating a special occasion. Later we heard other diners being asked this question as well. This, my friends, is evidence of a “system.” The Shadowbrook understands that its guests come there for special occasions–not because there isn’t time to make dinner on Friday night. By understanding your special occasion, they accomplish two things: they identify special needs (birthday cake and candle) and they honor the special-ness of your visit, making you feel good. Over the years, they have learned that it makes sense to ask about your occasion. And now it is incorporated into the process and into your “journey” as a customer.

They are fully aware that they are in the business of creating memories. In fact, the Shadowbrook is a finely tuned memory-creation machine. Step aboard, and your work is done. They have it under control. You are not anxiously gazing around the dining room trying to get a server’s attention or asking to have your water refilled. That’s because they have a powerful system, a Ferrari engine of hospitality.

My husband and I had an exceptional dining experience that night. You would never have known this restaurant had been there since the late 1940’s. They fully grasped the significance of our visit and made the evening a special occasion for two. They were doing something that in our Selvice course we call “making it fresh daily.”

To that end, the service was crisp but never rote. The waiter was immaculately attired. He was professional. He was warms and personable but did not try to become our best friend. The busser was every bit as careful, thorough and professional. There was a sense of pride in the way they carried themselves and communicated.

How? These folks had been trained. That’s an element of structure that is too often overlooked. If you think your team members can just “learn by doing,” think again. Formal training is essential to success, and the “throw them in the water” school of training has been debunked by research.

The food was terrific, too. Better than it even needed to be. Very fresh, lots of local-ness, and perfectly cooked. We left impressed, despite the hefty check, as the cat saw us off at the top of the hill. (I really don’t know how they get the cats to do this.)

Structure is about making the intangible tangible. It’s the Body to your Core Values Soul. It holds things together. It makes things happen. Consistently.

Structure is about doing it the right way, again and again. Its purpose is not to create a brilliant, one-of-a-kind improvised performance. (But it may feel that way when it’s done exceptionally well, as in great theatre.)

How does Structure manifest itself?

  • People Plan
    • Organizational structure
    • Consistent hiring process
    • Job descriptions and performance standards
    • Appraisal and Coaching
  • Codified Standards
    • Processes
    • Protocols
  • Communication Plan
    • Documentation
    • Meetings
    • Training
    • Reviews
  • Information System
    • Software
    • Hardware
  • Physical Structure
    • The design and flow of the physical plant
    • Experience flow, Salesflow or merchandising

Structure is like the iceberg of CX. 90% of it is invisible to the customer–or should be.

There are plenty of companies that are structure-centric and values-impoverished. Any left-brain driven outfit is going to be about structure. Medical offices are All. About. Structure. These are businesses that are keen on instructing their customers on the rules. These are the businesses where you, the customer, are expected to conform to the system, not the other way around. These are the companies where you hear the laborious grinding of gears as service is slowly extruded from the machine.

So now we have Core Values and we have Structure. Any company that masters these two elements must have reached the World Class CX level, right?

Not quite. Our Shadowbrook meal had a little something extra. My next blog will talk about that ineffable, above-and-beyond level, where CX starts to look a lot like Art.