How staff motivation can benefit your business

One of the key challenges that salon owners frequently quiz 3.6.5 Hairdressing director Ken West about is how to motivate their team. For Ken, team motivation must begin with the owner who needs to have a clear – and quantifiable - vision for the salon. Once that vision has been communicated to the team, the next crucial step is to give them a reason why they should work toward this vision. To do that, the salon owner can adopt two approaches: telling them that ‘unless you achieve X, Y will happen’ or by saying ‘when you achieve X, Y will happen’. But it’s essential to realise that ‘Y’ does not necessarily mean more money. You need to understand what an individual’s own personal motivation is to find the ‘Y’ that matters to them: do they come to work simply to earn enough money to live? Do they just want to be a part of something? Or do they want recognition for what they do? Once you’ve identified what inspires them, you can use these tactics to have a motivated team that really works for you:

1. Think hard about how cost effective your team are and set them minimum performance standards.
2. Have clear promotion criteria so they know how they can progress and how they will be rewarded when they do.
3. Create opportunities that excite your team. That could be about providing creative opportunities or going into business with them to open another salon or a franchise.

Ken West was speaking at Salon London 2016 as part of the NHF Business Workshops