9 Ways to Motivate Your Salon Staff and Grow Your Business

With a great salon that offers only the best services, sure comes a great team of employees dedicated to their work.

As a manager or business owner, your employees’ motivation should be one of your top priorities. A healthy salon employee management keeps everyone in line with common goals, constantly motivating and encouraging all the team members.

Among your other tasks like keeping up with all the logistics or implementing smart marketing ideas for your hair salon, you should know how to keep your salon staff motivated. This is essential to maintain a steady business.

What Are the Benefits of a Highly Motivated Salon Team?

When your employees aren’t motivated, you’re risking a lot. A low motivation level in a team means a low interest in providing high-quality services, and poor quality leads to fewer chances to reach your business goals. 

By keeping your salon staff motivated, you’ll have:

• Happy clients that received amazing customer service;
• Increased client retention rate;
• A lower employee turnover, which again means keeping your clientele;
• A business that inspires trust among your employees and clients;
• Higher revenue.

Now let’s move forward to the 9 tips on how to motivate your salon staff.

1. Choose your team and create a salon culture

When you have to define your business in a few words, what are the first thoughts that come to mind? Those are most probably the values you wish to find inside your team.

Think about the values you want your salon to inspire in people, like trustworthiness, promptness, empathy, etc., and choose your teammates based on that. 

These values will create a positive work environment that will lead to a valuable salon culture, inside and outside the team, making the employees wish to be part of the team.

An idea to keep your salon staff motivated would be to offer them a breakroom packet with some conveniences they could use to relax during their lunch break or in between appointments. That space is also encouraging employees to interact with each other.

There should also be an area away from all the clients, where your team members can help each other, give advice, or even share new strategies before or after the working program. 

These simple yet effective practices can create a strong culture that will motivate your salon staff and determine them to stay there longer.

2. Acknowledge great work when you see it

Set reachable goals with your team and reward them for the great job they’ve done. If one of your teammates shines in particular for that set goal, don’t be afraid to reward him/her with something extra. Not super extra, though, as you want to keep a healthy competition.

This is one of the best ways to motivate your team and bring benefits to your salon at the same time.

Praise and recognition are intangible assets, showing someone that they did something remarkable. By acknowledging their worth, you’re motivating them. This will help your employees set further goals, constantly improving their performance. 

Besides celebrating their team’s accomplishments, make your employees shine on your social media profiles by featuring their incredible work.

Just like in the following example:

This takes us to the next point.

3. Maintain a healthy competition balanced by team spirit 

Working as a team is one of the most important things for a business to work and grow. It is also good to sprinkle a little healthy competition among them by offering specific incentives to the employees that reached an objective. 

A competitive spirit among employees will encourage them to work towards outstanding performance. Not to mention this will keep your salon staff motivated.

Set a specific goal, come up with fun ways of tracking your staff’s work, or simply add a board in a separate space or the breakroom and add any changes to the competition.

Make sure you communicate the rules and that your employees treat this competition lightly, without messing with the team spirit.

4. Invest in training

As a manager or salon owner, you should make sure your team has access to professional training. In the long run, this will benefit them and also your salon, as they will be able to charge higher prices for their services. 

These training sessions can be in-house or outside your salon.

In-house training can include:

• An onboarding training session in which you can include your salon’s story, your expectations from employees’ interactions with the clientele, specific processes you apply to the day-to-day work, and other information you find relevant for their excellent integration in the team.
• Meetings in which you and your team discuss a specific skill.
• Sessions in which your employees take turns and show the latest technique they’ve learned.
• Sessions in which you can invite representatives from brands who have the products you use and ask them to bring in all the industry’s novelties.

Outside the salon courses can be:

• International conferences with various speakers and workshops.
• Paid courses where your employees can learn a new skill.

By ensuring that your staff is up to date with all the industry newness, you’re securing your business’s stability. Clients will continuously come and demand only the best services, and you’re there to offer them.

Moreover, this is one of the best ways to motivate your salon staff because your employees will appreciate your dedication and desire to invest in them. Every employee wants a workplace where they can thrive, learn and grow. 

A study by The Harris Poll shows that 70% of staff members would probably leave their current workplace to take a job with a company that invests in employee learning and development. 

5. Keep your staff engaged and involve them in business meetings

To keep your salon staff motivated, you should organize for your employees different meetings where you can set goals together on both an individual and a team level.

Also, to help keep them motivated and feel valued, they would like to feel included in business decisions. 

A great idea would be to ask for their advice when you want to make a decision. Your staff is in contact with your clients regularly, so they’re the ones who know best what your customers need or want. 

Employees who feel involved in the business decisions are more likely to show interest in the business’s success and perform at their job. 

Besides being a way to keep your salon staff motivated, business meetings are also a great communication facilitator. Meetings are the best events where employees can share ideas and solve issues, leading to improved services.

6. Celebrate every milestone with your employees

Just as you celebrate each employee for their success, you should also involve your employees when your business meets an achievement.

If you had an incredible week, month, year, make sure they know it. There’s nothing more motivating for an employee than knowing their efforts are paying off.

Share the success with your team, as they are partly responsible for it. You could organize a special team-building after such a great event.

Ready for the next point?

7. Organize team-building activities

Working in the beauty industry means a slightly different way of organizing your employees. They could work in shifts, as they’re probably renting the booth in your salon. In this case, it can be pretty difficult to keep your staff motivated and connected.

There is a perfect solution for getting them all together: team buildings, monthly outings, dinners, or team activities.

By organizing these events in different settings, you’re ensuring different levels of communication between your employees, securing good team dynamics.

Working in a place where all the employees are connected gives them a sense of belonging, and this is a great way to motivate your salon employees.

8. Create a work environment that nourishes creativity

A pleasant working environment influences employees on their day-to-day work. So, you have to make sure your salon has all the basics your employees need, such as good working stations, proper lighting, music, and a decor that is eye-candy for both your employees and customers. 

Having a well-organized salon, without much stuff exposed on the desk, contributes to increasing work productivity. You should consider checking these salon organization and storage ideas. All of these will help your employees stay focused and creative. 🙂

Moreover, you can place the latest trade magazines in your reception area, so you can keep them up to date with the most popular hairstyles for women or everything else that happens in your industry. Your employees will be tempted to try new things and experiment with new looks, and that’s a huge plus for your salon.

9. Perform a salon employee satisfaction survey 

Whenever you bring something new to your salon, or you’ve started to apply some of these previously mentioned techniques, you should perform a survey to get your employee’s feedback.

Create an employee satisfaction survey so they could answer anonymously. It will help you see the areas where everything works smoothly and also where you still need to improve.

Final Thoughts

Keeping a great staff atmosphere in your salon can sometimes be challenging, but once you learn how to motivate your salon employees, you’ll also create the perfect dynamic for a productive team. 

And by the way, speaking of productivity: if your teammates don’t use yet an appointment scheduling software for salons, it’s time to do it and start using your time more efficiently. With Goldie, scheduling is a breeze. It will help you easily keep track of all your salon appointments and reduce client no-shows using automated text reminders and payment processing. Not having enough time in a day? Let your clients book themselves online on your free booking website, created with Goldie. Spend less time on managing appointments and more time on doing what you love! Download the app from the App Store or Google Play: it’s totally free. 

You can let us know in the comments section below what other ways you use to motivate your salon staff. Can’t wait to see them! 🙂