“The goal is to have every chair or treatment room fully staffed for every hour that the business is open.”
There are so many ways to introduce split shifting schedules in your salon or spa. Most of your scheduling parameters will be driven by the days your business is open and your hours of operation. There are a number of things to consider before implementing a split shift schedule.
1) Chairs Must Be Full – It doesn’t make sense to move to a split shift schedule until every single chair in your salon has a stylist working behind it first.
2) Extending Hours Of Operation – The only way for continued growth, after you’ve maxed out your stations, is to expand your hours of operation and most likely open an additional day or two in order to accommodate two full time schedules within a seven day week.
3) Guest Care Coverage – More than likely, you will need to look at increasing your head count for guest care in order to provide adequate coverage for your new split shift schedule. Expect to add at least one additional full time guest care coordinator at minimum.
4) Schedule First, Team Members Second – Since the whole point of offering split shifts is to maximize sales and resources, it’s important that you create a salon/spa schedule template and then fill it with team members’ schedules versus the other way around. So often, I see management trying to accommodate service providers’ schedules first and then create a salon/spa schedule second based on the times when service providers are coming and going. It’s like herding cats! That’s no way to run a business. When management allows this, you end up with chairs (or rooms) that have 2 or 3 hours of time wide open without service provider utilization.
The goal is to have every chair or treatment room fully staffed for every hour that the business is open.
At our salons, we intentionally choose to be closed on Sundays. We do this so that we can host classes, schedule salon maintenance and cleaning visits on Sundays. One could argue that we are missing additional sales opportunities by closing on Sundays. This is certainly true. However, it’s what we’ve decided to do. It’s a personal choice. Yours might be the same, or you might decide to run your business seven days a week. It’s up to you.
Since we are open six days a week, the schedules below depict our split shifts on the days when we are open. The first schedule is for service providers, the second one is for our Guest Care department. Keep in mind, this is one of many ways to offer a split shift schedule. For us, we offer a Monday-Friday schedule (purple), and a Tuesday-Saturday schedule (green).
You’ll notice that when you add up the hours worked, on average our stylists work a 37 hour work week. We polled our staff before rolling out the schedule and they unanimously agreed that they were fine with a 37 hour work week. (Millennials 😏) This also helps us keep our overtime pay in check by allowing a 3 hour a week buffer in case we have team members that go over slightly on hours worked. (ie. special projects, teaching classes, etc.)
Again, our current schedule is just one way to offer split shift scheduling in your salon/spa. It works for us and it is easy to follow. I’m curious to know what others are doing with their split shift schedules. Share our thoughts below in the comments!
Service Provider Schedule Template
Guest Care Team Schedule Template
(We currently have 4 guest care team members working this schedule)
