lowed some spas to fill their books and maintain strong revenues without putting an unsustainable burden on their team members .
SCALING BACK Managing high demand with employee workloads has become a balancing act that nearly every spa leader has faced in recent months , and given the outsized impact of losing ( and , ultimately , having to replace ) any team member to burnout , it ’ s a balance that they must get right . That realization is a big part of what drove Shairstin Raymond , spa director at Sego Lily Day Spa ’ s location in Midvale , Utah , to shift their hours of operation on a trial basis in March of this year . Previously , the spa was open from 9 am to 9 pm , Monday through Saturday . The spa kept those hours in place
“… we decided it would be in the best interest of both parties to reduce the hours so they could sleep in and have some daylight left at the end of their days .” on Fridays and Saturdays , but it now opens at 10 am and closes at 7 pm Monday through Thursday .
“ We started to see a pattern that we were booking about a month and a half to two months out for a massage . We have 14 treatment rooms , and we could have filled them , but unfortunately , due to staffing issues , we had to have them wait . The demand was there , but the supply was not ,” says Raymond . Predictably , Raymond adds , that level of unceasing demand began to affect therapists .“ We noticed our therapists were working their full capacity , and then when we had a therapist who had to step away or for COVID-19 if they had to quarantine , our therapists were working overtime trying to pick up those extra shifts .”
Though the opportunity to earn more money led many therapists to pick up additional shifts or stay late and come in early if the need arose , the impact of that workload soon became obvious .“ We could physically see them feeling drained , and so we decided it would be in the best interest of both parties to reduce the hours so they could sleep in and have some daylight left at the end of their days ,” Raymond explains .
The relief was welcome among therapists , but there were some concerns about what losing three hours per day might do to their earnings , so the spa stepped in to ease those worries .“ We have six hour shifts normally , so we made it a
— SHAIRSTIN RAYMOND
JULY 2022 n PULSE 25