Lauriann Greene, author of Save Your Hands! 3rd Edition, discusses the importance of including your treatment staff in your overall wellness efforts.
In recent years, the term "wellness” has become a touchstone of the spa world. All spas work to make wellness integral to the spa experience. We talk about creating an atmosphere or environment of wellness at the spa, a kind of energy that embodies wellbeing, good health, and peacefulness. Spas use many tactics to create that feeling of wellness: the overall design, the decor, the menu of treatments, and the building of solidarity among the staff.
But when we talk about spa wellness, we are concentrating on the wellness of your spa’s clients. To create a real wellness experience, your staff must feel well, too. They must feel they are esteemed by management, that their wellbeing is important and encouraged, that the spa management has made the effort to help those staff members feel appreciated and cared for.
There is one particularly critical segment of your staff, however, that is often ignored: your treatment staff, who are the most client-facing of your workers. They include primarily your massage therapists but also your estheticians. These practitioners do physically and emotionally demanding work over long periods of time. Your clients may spend up to several hours at a time with treatment staff. More than any other staff member, they are the most intimately involved in your clients’ experience of the spa.
The energy that is projected to your clients by the therapists must support the atmosphere of safe intimacy you want to create. They must not only do their job; they must exemplify wellness for your clients. The feeling of peace and calm that the practitioners must exude to the client makes the difference between a great or a mediocre experience, a feeling of wellness or of discomfort.
However, with their very high levels of injury and burnout, your treatment practitioners are likely unable to exemplify or exude wellness to your clients, nor provide the quality of touch and feeling of safe intimacy the client needs. And clients certainly feel the difference. Injury and burnout among treatment staff are also problematic for your spa’s return on investment (ROI) and profitability. They result in absenteeism, turnover and workers' compensation claims, all very costly to the spa. Recruiting a new practitioner can cost thousands of dollars, plus the loss of business until one is replaced. And one cannot place a price on the customer dissatisfaction that may occur when they have been treated by a therapist who is not well, let alone the reputation of the spa among future clients and therapists.
To support their wellness mission, spas need injury prevention and ergonomics interventions. Practitioners cannot practice injury prevention tactics in a space that is ill-designed to allow them to protect themselves. Create strategic protocols to keep injury and burnout from affecting the healthy functioning of the treatment staff and an environment of wellness for clients. Without these interventions, spas leave it to chance that their practitioners will be able, due to the physical demands of their work, to participate fully in the spa’s wellness goals. For these reasons, I urge you to include your treatment staff in your wellness efforts to effectively provide the highest level of service and care for your clients, and keep them coming back time after time.