After you hire your new spa employee (we hope there is a job description) do you continue with scheduled performance reviews? Our experience has been it does not matter if you are a spa or near spa and size does not matter - your employees will be happy with this as part of their employment experience with you. I will share with you an email article that arrived this morning from my attorney about the value of Employee Performance Reviews - simple and to the point (I know this is a departure for an attorney but believe me it is good and worth a read):

http://www.gcglaw.com/resources/benefits/performance.html.

Just a note, because I work with financial statements a good deal of time - there is in fact work being done in the financial world to develop a method to place a value on employees so that it can appear on the business balance sheet as an asset!

We do employee reviews. We have been doing it monthly as we just opened in May. We have found it to be a wonderful tool both for the employee to know what we're thinking and for us to know what the employee is thinking.

Originally I thought we would do employee reviews 2x/yr, but it will just be annually, unless there is a specific issue we need to monitor more closely. How do you find the TIME to do everything!?! Policy and procedure manuals (did one, but it already needs revising), job descriptions, (same: need revising), performance criteria, evaluations, interviewing, hiring, counselling, I need a Personnel Manager. It's just me and 10 employees! Time: that's one of my biggest problems...

I can just see it now - "sorry, you're ruining my budget - I'll have to let you go." Sad that it's sometimes so close to the truth!

Every now and then after someone has departed our employment I get a good lesson (sometimes a superb lesson) in just what they did cost us! If I could put a dollar value on it I'd probably have to commit suicide!

valM

See, this is why I like being solo. Just when I think that running my little business is stressful all I have to do is read a few posts about running a day spa and I feel better.

Performance review should be taken more seriously as a monitoring tool (and a psyche session) for the business and it's employees. Major corporations have put them in place to off set mini problems that can turn into large problems and/or liabilities.

I know most spas and healing arts workers don't want to hear the word corporation, but I will contend that some great tools can be pulled from them Here are a few good things performance reviews contribute to;
Leadership - and recognition of team leaders, growth and laggers
Strategic Quality Planning- you can introduce procedures and long term planning more easily
Information gathering and analysis of that information
Human resources development and management - improve training- check on progress -introduce training
Quality control and operational results- sustain your objectives and keep yourself and your team on track
Employee and client satisfaction- review of personal, professional and client issues in safe setting
Liability - limit liability by knowing what is going on at intervals rather than when it explodes
Decision making- facts for pay raises, incentives, warnings, firing's, idea generating, and paperwork tracking for your own insurance purposes.

It sounds like a lot of work, but like anything, once you make it a permanent part of your schedule, you can roll with it.

Enjoy your day!

For anyone new to this thread, are you doing regularly scheduled employee evaluations? If not, why? If so, how often do you do them and what benefits do you see as a result?

It's important to remember that a performance evaluation is NOT, necessarily, an obligation to increase or even discuss an employee's compensation (an idea that makes many employers shy away from doing evals!) It is merely an opportunity for you, the business owner, to make sure that your people are performing up to expectations such as clientele growth, retail sales activity, reliability on the job, and so forth. You're not obligated to increase their pay in doing this but may well find out whether or not what you have been paying is being met by the quality of work you thought you were paying for! Just make it clear when hiring that you will be doing reviews regularly, and what those reviews are about. That should eliminate any potential misunderstandings about them.

Oh, Michelle, all of these aspects of running a day spa depend on your personality; your style, your spa, your themes, etc.

I see the Employee Evals as an opportunity to fine-tune! Yes, I regularly: ask my employees for their input on projects, ask my employees open-ended questions to get their feedback and feelings, and discuss their performance in more informal, caring ways. I'm not a corporate type, myself, and my employees/spa/clientele/community appreciate that.

90-Day Evals are coming up, too.
Nina