10 Steps to a Perfect Salon or Spa Performance Evaluation
It's the age-old question posed by salon/spa owners...
Why don't they ever do things like I want them to?
Well, maybe they never realized they were doing them wrong! If that's the case, there's no quicker and easier way to get staff back on track than with a performance evaluation.
One of the most effective ways to get the most out of your salon/spa staff is to give them lots of feedback. There's a saying in Human Resources that nothing said in a performance review should ever be a surprise for an employee. Problems should be dealt with as they arise, and not saved for formal reviews. And be generous with your praise. What gets rewarded, gets repeated!
The first year, an employee should receive reviews at the one-month, three-month, six-month and one-year marks.
Here are 10 key points to remember when doing staff performance reviews:
- Prepare all staff records and review them well in advance. The worst thing you can do is begin staff evaluations unprepared. Have a written form that addresses each job responsibility, rating each on a scale from 1-5.
- Give feedback on their contribution to your culture: Rate your employees on teamwork, enthusiasm, communication and other culture-related things.
- Avoid being confrontational. Evaluations provide a one-on-one forum for you and your employees to discuss ways to improve performance. A performance problem requires a solution — not a battle.
- Give employees a chance to express their thoughts and feelings — learn to listen. Don’t be one-sided. State your concerns and listen to what the employee has to say.
- Never discuss money or raises. Performance evaluations must focus solely on addressing and improving performance. Save discussions of money for compensation reviews that should occur regularly — and don’t always result in pay raises.
- Be specific with both your praise and recommendations for improvement. Never say someone needs to do better without offering tangible ways to do so.
- Keep tempers under control. Should an evaluation turn into a heated debate, take a 20 minute break to cool off. Resume the meeting and focus on solutions.
- Re-evaluate sooner for special situations. Sometimes you need to schedule a followup meeting in two or four weeks to review the progress of certain problem employees.
- Know when to eliminate problem staff. Not everyone is compatible with every salon/spa environment. If an employee can’t eventually get with the program — it’s in the best interest of the company to end the relationship.
- Always find something to compliment. Look for it; it's there. Discuss achievements and acknowledgements, such as positive client feedback.
- Bonus: Be sensitive: People's identities are frequently wrapped up in their jobs. Criticism is difficult to hear. Offer a dose of kindness and compassion, but be honest. An employee can't learn and grow if he or she doesn't know where the problem is.
After the first year, many companies offer quarterly reviews. While that may seem excessive, developing an evaluation process will help ensure that employees know exactly how they're doing and can make needed adjustments before too long a period has passed. It give management a structure to objectively judge performance and ensure that behavior is held to a consistent standard. The guide for this is the broadband, which offers clear standards for each step on the salon/spa employee growth path.
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