When your teams do an amazing job at providing outstanding customer service, hitting their retail targets or securing their client rebookings, it’s nice to provide praise via incentivising a job well done.
This however said, there is no one correct answer for how you incentivise your teams. Different business has larger budgets, a variety of staff members and a diversity of targets to hit, so it’s hard to find a one-fits-all approach to suggesting advice on incentives.
Do what feels right, run with what is comfortable for you and change the incentives to continue motivation and inspiration for therapists to hit.
When do I incentivise my staff?
There are a number of different ways to incentivise your teams and individual therapists, these can range from tangible goals such as percentages and dollars to customer service and feedback, which are just as important as bringing in the big bucks! Changing these milestones on a monthly basis is a great way to keep motivating the therapists and not allowing them to be complacent in their role. This also ensures that the ‘highest retailer’ is not winning the prize every month, which can be discouraging for other staff members.
Here are some reasons you might incentivise your therapists;
– Highest retailer
– Most units sold per month
– Most dollars sold per month
– Most packages sold per month
– Therapist who has the highest rebooking percentage
– Biggest increase in retail or rebooking percentage from previous month
– Outstanding customer service
– Best team player
Only you will know what is an appropriate goal to set for the individual incentives. As a general rule of thumb and guide if you have absolutely no idea, therapists should be hitting a 20% rebooking rate per month and a 30% retail target for sole massage therapists, 35-40% retail target for all other streams of therapist. These are extremely achievable for reach and maintain across all aspects of the beauty industry.
What do I incentivise my therapists with?
Great question, what do your therapists value? If you read our Part One on incentives, then you would know there are 5 main tiers that drive people to achieve something, so you should have a slight idea. If you haven’t read it, or you did and still don’t know – why not ask your therapists what they would like as a reward? For example, normally business owners assume therapists should be incentivised by money or a commission in their wage. Upon asking therapists, we find they want a day off, to finish an hour early, free product or to be sent to a training course. We cannot assume everyone is motivated by the same outcome.
Here are some things you might incentivise your team with:
– Money
– Gift vouchers
– Free product
– Free treatment
– Treatment at another salon/spa
– Treatment from your product rep
– Time off
– Late start / Early finish
– Education classes
– Coffee/breakfast with someone inspirational
– Coffee/breakfast with yourself
– Promotion into a higher role
– Therapist of the month/year
Once you have an idea of what you can incentivise your team with, put your measures into place and start motivating. Remember, consistency is the key to motivation. Without you as the business owner checking in on an hourly, if not, daily basis to see how your therapists are going, are they achieving the target, what are they going to do with their next client, how did they make it yesterday, what will they do differently tomorrow, the incentive game becomes stagnant and predictable.
Create a visual board and cross, tick, mark, stick, do whatever you have to do to show progress that you staff are making, on this board. Stick money on the board, gift vouchers up, pictures of what the team wants all around to keep them visualising their want and achieving it.
If you have incentives which have worked for you, share them below for others to see.
Tune into our webinar tomorrow night (Wednesday 16th) to further talk incentives with Tamara Shaw, Founder of Beaute Industrie.
