Business Tips
20
face up to conflict Many salon owners avoid dealing with employee underperformance or bad attitude, but facing the challenge is essential for the success of the business and the team, writes HELLEN WARD.
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here’s a wonderful quote from the late French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat’. Doesn’t that resonate with the busy salon manager who has a difficult employee disrupting their team? But just because you might have one bad apple, it doesn’t mean you have to give up on the whole tree. Unless, of course, the issue is starting to affect the rest of the team. If so, you need to deal with it, and pronto. When I meet salon and spa owners and managers in my teaching capacity, it amazes me just how many bosses are utterly terrified of conducting disciplinary procedures. They go to any lngths to avoid it, sometimes hoping the person will leave rather than facing up to the fact that the correct course of action is to alert the employee to their concerns, using proper procedures. Scared sick of getting it wrong and ending up at a tribunal, they often tell me that they let things go under the radar for fear of having to confrong them, which is no
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good for the employer or the staff members. Hope is never a strategy and anything that might spoil the team equilibrium is never good in a service industry.
Means test One of my mentors, Pamela Goff, who headed up L’Oréal’s UK education for many years, had a performance analysis flow chart that I use. At the very top of the flow chart, there are two questions: 1. Is it important and do they know? 2. Could they do it if their life depended on it? If the answer to the first question is yes, but they don’t know, you must tell them (verbally, in writing or both). Nobody can deliver what’s expected of them if they don’t know what it is, so it’s your responsibility to ensure people have proper job descriptions and detailed information, listing their performance requirements. The second question is where it gets interesting. If no, they couldn’t do it if their life depended on it, then it takes you down the ‘training and education’ part of the flow chart.
However, if the answer is yes, you end up firmly on the ‘attitude’ side of the chart. This is far trickier but the crux of the chart arrives at another crucial question – ‘is performance rewarding?’ If it isn’t, you must make it rewarding. However, the stickier question is – ‘is non-performance rewarding?’ If so, remove the reward and make it punishing. This is often an argument I use for instigating a performane-related pay, bonus or incentive system. Why should anybody be motivated to perform if their package is the same as somebody who doesn’t bother to go the extra mile? Nobody needs to put up with an employee who is underperforming or casing issues for other staff. However, any employer has a duty of care to ensure they handle things in the proper manner. But their duty also means they can’t avoid the issue, otherwise everybody will suffer. PB
Hellen Ward is managing director of Richard Ward Hair & Metrospa in London, one of the most profitable independent salons in the UK. hellen@professionalbeauty.co.uk
