The festive season is fast approaching, meaning it’s time to look at your Christmas staff schedules. The last months of the year are often busy for spa and leisure businesses, with your team often taking the strain. However, with the right staff scheduling, this strain can be lifted. With that in mind, we share several things to keep in mind when approaching your festive staff rota.
Report on last year’s Christmas staff schedules
If your business was open last Christmas, why not take a look at how successful those staff schedules were? Systems such as Core by Premier Software® can run business reporting in your spa or leisure club, helping measure performance over last year’s festive period. Both Core and Salon by Premier Software® (for salons), can run reports such as staff hours analysis that helps measure staff performance during the scheduled hours from last year. This not only helps show what periods were the busiest, but will also show the percentage of time each team member worked and any white space in their booking diaries. Ultimately, you can use this data to schedule each member’s Christmas staff schedules according to what did and didn’t work before.
Train staff in key areas
Once you have your data, take a look at your current team and if they are equipped for the festive period. Some members may be relatively new, whereas others may not have knowledge of particular treatments. As outlined in our five key steps in preparing a staffing plan, it is important your team are trained in necessary areas to cover the needs of the business. That means now is the ideal time to train staff ahead of the busy Christmas period, such as for popular festive treatments.
Check team availability
One important consideration is to check when your staff are actually available over the festive period. Certain members of the team may have plans over Christmas, whereas others will have family commitments. Whether it is in the salon, spa or leisure club, communication to settle the rota is important. Make sure you talk with each of the team so you can create a Christmas staff schedule that is most suitable for everyone (within reason), before you finalise any plans.
Schedule staff over core working hours
When crafting your Christmas staff rota, make sure you always have an appropriate amount of staff to cover your peak hours. These ‘core’ hours should have more staff allocated over the festive period than normal, making sure all clients are adequately catered to. That may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many businesses don’t make sure the most amount of staff are working during their busiest hours. Naturally, you should also stagger their working times so that there is always a member of the team to cover all hours that you’re open. Just make sure you understand contracting working hours and why they’re important so that you don’t overschedule specific staff and can create a fair Christmas staff schedule.
Publish Christmas staff schedules early
When you have a staff schedule in place, it’s important to publish this as early as possible. This helps the team understand what is needed and if there are any complications ahead of time. You can then discuss these and help iron out these problems. Also, publishing these as early as September or October will enable your team to plan ahead, themselves.
Core and Salon helps create a staff rota that can be edited and customised for set periods, such as Christmas. In addition to business reporting, spa packages, retailing gift vouchers, promotion set up and more, Core and Salon helps your business run smoothly over the festive period. To find out how Premier Software’s systems can make a difference to your business, click the button below.
