The six-step guide to revolutionizing your employee performance management
Innovation is key to any business’s success – especially when it comes to your employee performance management.
With SaaS leading the way, older and ineffective performance management tools -- annual reviews, employee self-evaluations, limited sales reports that never tell the whole story -- are becoming obsolete. What’s replacing them? The latest cloud performance management system that aligns employees with business goals and directions.
Current spa software allows you to evaluate employee performance on a granular level, so you can see what’s really going on, then take the appropriate actions to improve employee effectiveness.
Here is a six-step guide to optimizing your employee performance
1. Set goals and articulate them. Make sure you and your staff are working towards a common objective and that you all know what that objective is. Don’t assume that people know what is expected of them. You know the old adage about making assumptions. Create and communicate clear guidelines and job descriptions.
2. Track performance. Developing and tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is important for success. Book4Time’s Technician Report Card accurately tracks employee KPIs so you don’t have to. These metrics are delivered to you in an easy-to-read report that tells you everything you need to know about what is going on with your staff, and they include but are not limited to:
- Fill ratio
- Client retention
- Client referrals
- Retail penetration
These detailed reports alleviate the pain of manual calculations and guesswork and allow you to see exactly who is meeting expectations, and who needs some extra attention and guidance.
3. Communicate and listen. Keep the lines of communication open. Communication about employee performance should be regular and ongoing. This means creating an atmosphere in which your employees value your opinion and feedback, and feel comfortable coming to you with questions or concerns. It does not mean micromanaging your staff, which is, in fact a sure way to set people up for failure.
When the time comes to provide feedback, do it kindly, objectively, and fairly – and ensure that the conversation includes positive feedback as well as constructive. If the employee is falling short in certain areas, point to only those specific areas and don’t generalize when discussing opportunities for improvement.
Once improvement goals are established, make regular check ins to ensure that everyone is on track.
4. Plan for success. If you have a retail penetration goal of 20% and some employees are not meeting that, devise a plan to help them improve. Talk with your staff, listen to them, and identify obstacles for removal.
Perhaps someone needs some coaching in effective sales tactics. Or you could hold a sales contest as an incentive.
5. Be realistic. This is important: be realistic and realize that you might have to be flexible. An excellent massage therapist or manicurist might not be a great salesperson – and maybe that’s OK.
Maybe your customers love that particular therapist not only because he gives a great massage, but because he is a warm, quiet personality and a great listener. So he kills it at client retention and his card is always filled, but he doesn’t sell as many body scrubs as you would like.
Your top salesperson, on the other hand, might be a whiz at moving those scrubs but have a more gregarious personality and be less frequently requested. She’s still well liked enough, though, and what she doesn’t do in repeat clients she makes up for in sales.
Maybe everything is just fine the way it is. Both employees bring value and there is no reason to change the way either of them does things.
You can get all this information from the Technician Report Card, and from there make the appropriate decisions on what actions to take.
6. Set an example. The best managers are the ones who set an example for others. They are generous with praise and stingy with criticism, and they aspire to do better every day, inspiring people to do the same.
Set your performance management on the right track with Book4Time’s Technician Report Card, available with Book4Time software.
Book4Time’s secure cloud-based spa software solutions help spa and salon management handle employee performance, payroll, online spa booking, spa reporting, customer communications, and much more all in one place. www.book4time.com