Tenure and Endurance: Key Ingredients to a Successful Hotel Spa

There was a time when tenured employment was a standard practice. People would stay at one place for many years before moving on to a new employer or exploring different career opportunities. This was once a preferred way-of-life for many people and companies. This created strides in performance, opportunities for promotions and job stability. Since then, the workforce has transformed into cycles of prevalent turnover and disjointed employee loyalty. People are moving on from one company to another, choosing lateral moves not only vertical strides.

The Median employee tenure tends to be higher among seasoned workers than new ones. For example, the median tenure of workers ages 55 to 64 (10.1 years) was more than three times that of workers ages 25 to 34 years (2.8 years). Also, a larger proportion of older workers than younger workers had 10 years or more of tenure.   It’s notable that of workers ages 60 to 64, 55 percent were employed for at least 10 years with their current employer in January 2016, compared with only 13 percent of those ages 30 to 34. See age and tenure data in Figure 1 below:

Talent and labor cycles have shifted substantially. There is constant movement in the talent search, hiring and recruiting space. And it has become commonplace for people stay with an employer for one to three years, then moving on to explore new endeavors. In some cases, there are advantages in doing this. In many cases, the translations of value have yet to be instituted through company hiring and staffing initiatives; leaving vast gaps between employee loyalty and greener grass, in the landscape of new opportunities.

Self-Awareness

One of the biggest challenges in maintaining excellence and consistency is retaining quality staff and managing unpredictable workforce turnover. While spa and wellness can be a transient industry, there are multiple business advantages to having a strongly committed staff of tenured employees. Not only does this impact customers, but it has a profound sway on the quality of experience, products and services.

Many times, the environment in which we work becomes like a second family. People build deep friendships and long-standing co-working relationships. People get to know one another on a regular basis, while enduring a variety of life sequences such as marriage, divorce, children, and so on. These aspects naturally create a close-knit culture and facilitate personalized relationships that increase self-awareness and personal accountability. Having these relationships also in turn facilitates supportive cross department alliances and stronger company unity.

Personal-Touch

Spa treatments and associated services are typically viewed as high-touch therapies with an important emphasis on the unique interface between a client and the therapist or provider. This person-to-person relational component is a critical measure that often determines the overall experience of the elected treatment or service. This can frequently dictate client satisfaction, retention and the future worth of this relationship.

This emphasis on personalized services not only effects the technical skill of treatments and services, but often significantly affects the overall experience, level of trust and follow up care. Relationship building applies to everything we do. When it comes to highly personal services like massage, aesthetics and well-being, establishing an early foundation of trust is key. This aspect contributes to the quality of care and enables an effective relaxation and response to the selected services.

Freestanding Spas Vs. Hotel Spas

Day-spas have the advantage of building relationships with clients, traditionally with more frequency ongoing. These clients may be visiting the spa weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. In part due to the rate of visits, these customers may have strong and significant relationships with their selected therapists over time. It’s common for these types of guests to have an elevated sense of loyalty, trust and confidence with their providers, having nurtured this bond with more regularity and time.

Hotel spas can benefit from this example. Although hotel guests may vary with less predictability, this presents an opportunity for the hotel to increase its local capture. Having a team of people working in the spa to promote the local-value of spa and wellness experiences can support stronger public engagement. Furthermore, a tenured staff with longevity at the property and spa, can create a relationship driven, community experience and tap into greater year-round yields.

Company Values

Understanding the core values of a company is essential to developing a team of tenured people. I recently stayed at Hotel Plaza Athenee in Paris, France. This property is part a luxury 5-star experience. A part of the Dorchester Collection, it is a world-class, award-winning hotel. Not only based on its stellar history, architecture and decor but greatly on the personal investment that is made by their team. The average tenure here is nine to ten years with one impressive and unforgettable staff member having been there over 30 years. This was an authentic part of my experience and made an unforgettable connection between quality and care.

Not everyone is seeking a tenure of boundless duration, however creating ideal conditions for an employee to want to stay, is the premise of that reference. Taking a straightforward look at the keystone benefits and intentions of the company can introduce new ways to improve workplace satisfaction. Are there opportunities for career growth, learning new skills, and ongoing training? This understanding can also uncover new attitudes and encourage a greater level of personal investment that defines the mainstays of exceptional company service.

Employee Happiness

Workplace happiness and job satisfaction play an enormous role in facilitating a compassionate, and healthy team culture. These aspects relate to the degree of mindfulness, accountability, and job-security an employee feels. A company that supports the mental and physical wellness of its employees is effectively promoting the value of its brand, its product and its services. This can be cultivated in a number of ways. Through various employee activities, training, personal improvement, and emotional, health or fitness incentives.

When it comes to providing true benefits, Well Intelligence, recently shared that “wellness monetary stipends for “personal development”, are becoming a cover for not increasing salaries. Holistic practices to motivate and retain employees are good, particularly when they exude a wellness flavour, but nothing beats real money. The two must go together.”

Taking advantage of seasonal cycles and off-season lows to feature an emphasis on team-building and workplace culture development can have an outstanding impact. For example, organizing creative activities centered on employee-happiness, can generate new momentum and ignite a stronger sense of employee-value and investment. It’s crucial for the employees to know, understand and have experienced the spa and wellness amenities and various services throughout the hotel.

One analogy is going to a restaurant, inquiring about the menu, only to learn the server has never tried the food… For the customer, this can make the menu less engaging. For the server, this can be an embarrassing interface with the guest. During less busy times of the month and year, setting up samplings of key hotel services can stimulate honest buy-in to different programs and services. This is an excellent way to reinforce that what employees think, matters. This can also help promote personal value and positively reinforce fun and meaningful team-building.

Return on Investment

While personal-touch is an essential component of the spa industry, the energy of the industry has accelerated at a rate much faster than the growth of the workforce necessary to support it.

Keeping up with the pace of hospitality growth and allocating resources to hire, train and scout new talent, can be a costly investment of energy and time. Mixed with increases in spa, wellness and hospitality growth, mitigating employee turnover is not an easy process.

Protecting the ROI of employee engagement is another form of protecting company assets. Developing systems that support healthy relationships and experiences for everyone, internally and externally. Ultimately, this yields stronger returns on investment as well as long-term employee value. Detailing value propositions that support tenured labor can improve employee engagement and motivate performance.

There can also be challenges associated with long-term, tenured employees including a communal resistance to change, the lack of willingness to adapt or quality complacency. While the upsides of personal depth and commitment are significant, it’s critical to manage the potential challenges of stagnancy and long-standing entitlements with care. Companies must understand the essence and depth of their internal- culture to create the right mix of rewards and incentives to engaged employees, ongoing.

Final Thoughts

The opportunity to embrace and support longer terms of employee tenure, presents brand distinction and an amplified customer experience. Knowing you have a qualified team of invested people spearheading everyday guest interactions can behold priceless value to business performance. This not only moderates turnover cycles, but it also serves the highly informed, globally connected consumer who is looking for more than a basic commodity stay. Whereas, wellness and health are strongly linked to personal values and unique guest incentives, cultivating more consistency among employees can build stronger customer trust, open dialogue to promote services, maintain retention and explore new property experiences.

Published on Hotel Business Review- Hotel Executive on September 16,2018