August 2006 Issue
Carefully hire people who
share your vision and are will-
ing to follow your quality con-
trol and educational guide-
lines.
Establish a probationary
period even with experienced
hairdressers, stating that their
employment is at will and is
not a contract for employ-
ment. Refer to my book
Creating Your Salon
under
the chapter how to write an
employee hand book. I per-
sonally place all new employ-
ees on a 6 month probation-
ary program. At the end of 6
months I will determine if I
want to add to my staff as
permanent employees. This
works well because your new
prospect will try very hard to
follow your educational and
quality control guidelines.
What I really want to accom-
plish in this 6 month period is
helping my new staff member
establish positive attitudes
and strong work habits in the
beginning of their employ-
ment. It's much easier to
establish positive work habits
as opposed to negative ones. I
also want to make sure they
understand and are following
my quality control and
educational guidelines.
Review Terms of employ-
ment and employee hand-
book. Once again refer to my
book creating Your Salon for
this information. This is
critical and a very first step in
training and developing your
winning team. How can you
expect your staff to perform if
they do not know what is
expected and how those
expectations are to be
measured.
Salon Orientation
Procedures
· Introduction to staff members
· Review educational and quality
control guidelines
· Customer handling procedures
· Salon cleanup duties
· Review telephone etiquette
· Clean up duties
· Review compensation
agreement
· Let them know who is in
charge when owner not
available
· Assistant duties
· Downtime duties
· Review product & service
prices
· Review your artistic guidelines
· Help and observe other hair-
dressers
· Review job description
· Observe and learn from master
stylists
· Review work schedule
· Booking procedures
· Assistant duties
· Define dress code
· Customer handling procedures
Beauty
School
MISSION
STATEMENT
To inform and educate
committed professionals
who want to know more
than how to
cut and style hair.
There is widespread dissat-
isfaction with our beauty
schools by many salon owners
for not adequately preparing
young talent for a competitive
and changing job market.
Some of these criticisms are
valid while some are not.
Keep in mind beauty school
curriculum is designed to
protect the public health and
safety of the consumer, and
pass their licensing exams.
Basically they are doing
their jobs. Nine or ten months
of beauty school is not
enough time to teach them all
the skills and gain hands-on
experience needed to compete
in a changing and competitive
job market especially, if they
want to work in an upscale
salon.
In my opinion, an appren-
ticeship or internship program
would solve many of our labor
problems; unfortunately salon
owners are not speaking out
load demanding such a pro-
gram. In the absence of an
apprenticeship program, the
following guidelines will help
you develop and train your
winning team:
Training & Developing
Your Winning Team
Continued from page 1
school. I have had great success
hiring young talent, they are much
easier to train and develop. At
least you won't have a lot of bad
work habits and negative attitudes
to deal with. The drawback to
hiring young staff members is
lack of hands on experience and
the cost of training them.
Implementing a Junior Stylist
Training program will solve this
challenge see next issue.
I
