In Salon Terms, What Are the Characteristics of Teamwork?

There’s more to building a successful salon business than just taking care of each client’s hair, skin and nails. Taking your salon to the next level means finding ways to encourage employees to become real team players who contribute to growing your salon and making it successful. Since your stylists need to work side by side each day, encouraging teamwork means helping your staff find positive ways to interact, resulting in happy customers and low staff turnover.

Share your vision and the mission of your salon with your employees. Set goals, such as providing a certain number of color or skincare services each week or improving customer service and attention to detail. Explain how each staff member plays a role in reaching these goals. Provide concrete ideas on how to reach the goals. For example, if your goal is to improve customer service, ask your team to check in with clients to see if they want reading material or a beverage when they arrive or while waiting in the chair for the next stage of their treatment.

Providing ongoing training is a characteristic of teamwork since it shows you’re dedicated to helping your stylists reach their full potential. Draw on each of your employee’s strengths to build your team, such as encouraging team members with stronger skills in hair styling or giving manicures to train others with fewer skills. Reinforce outside training, such as asking one of your stylists who attends a color trend class to share what she learned with the others.

Create a fun, caring atmosphere to develop your team culture. This means hiring new cosmetologists who fit in with your team so there’s no friction. Train your staff to maintain a positive attitude in front of clients and in the back room where they eat lunch and take breaks. To help staff understand the culture you want to create, ask each person to explain the type of teamwork that makes an impression on her. Using a whiteboard, write the characteristics, such as fairness, good attitude, flexibility, positive attitude and helpfulness. Then, ask each person to rate themselves on these characteristics as a way to look for areas of improvement and to better understand the teamwork culture.

Your employees constantly work with clients, so they hear about the likes and dislikes of the people in the chair all the time. Allow time at the end of each staff meeting to solicit feedback about how customers can be better served and to identify new products in which clients expressed an interest. Encourage your team to bring up issues, such as too much drama on the salon floor or team members talking too much about themselves, rather than listening to the client. Rather than focusing on individuals, discuss ways to change the situation as a team so everyone feels responsible for improving the way the salon operates.