3 Business Decisions That Can Simplify The Way You Manage Your Salon

Simplify Staff Holiday Management

Managing staff holidays can appear complicated. This is not helped by the fact that, in the UK salon industry, holiday pay is based on the average of the past 52 weeks' pay. Below, I have listed the main reasons people struggle with holiday management. Further below, I provide recommendations to simplify the process.

Challenges in Holiday Management:

• Deciding whether to manage staff holidays in days or hours (either can work, depending on certain principles, which I'll cover shortly).
• Calculating pro-rata allowances for starters and leavers, as employees rarely join or leave at the start or end of the holiday cycle.
• Managing holiday requests, date clashes, and approvals.
• Keeping accurate records and tracking leave while keeping employees informed.
• Managing changes to holiday bookings after approval.
• Calculating holiday pay and variable pay commissions.
• Sharing an up-to-date holiday calendar.
• Maintaining a clear company holiday policy.

OK, that’s a list of the challenges I often see. If you have more suggestions, please send them my way!

How to Simplify Holiday Management:

• Manage holidays by the hour if:
  • You pay by the hour.
  • Staff work variable shifts, particularly longer or shorter shifts.
• Manage holidays in days if:
  • The majority of your workforce is scheduled to work the same number of hours each day, e.g., 8 hours per day.
  • Your staff are salaried.

Use technology to manage holidays - a good software or app will:

• Auto-calculate annual allowances, including pro-rata for starters and leavers.
• Share team allowances with managers and personal allowances with employees.
• Provide an up-to-date holiday calendar of requested and approved leave.
• Enable employees to self-serve their leave requests, view allowances, and see who is off.
• Track accrued allowances for overtime for salaried employees.
• Track accrued allowances for zero-hour contract workers based on hours worked.
• Alert managers and admins of holiday requests and changes.
• Set user permissions and rules for:
  • Blocked-out dates.
  • Manager permissions.
  • When leave can and cannot be cancelled.

You can manage all these points using Loop HR, and as salon-specific HR software, the system will also:

• For revenue-producing staff with targets:
  • Auto-calculate (reduce) staff targets relative to the time on leave.
  • Calculate holiday commission and variable pay rates.
• Automatically feed holiday pay information into payroll.
• Calculate holiday pay or clawback (relative to contract) for leavers.

If you have questions about managing staff holidays, contact me or to know more about how Loop HR can help you manage your staff holidays, schedule a call using this link.

Flexible Working in the Salon Industry

To clarify in the simplest of terms:

Flexible Work Is: In the UK, flexible work allows employees to adjust their working hours, days, or location to better balance work with personal needs, such as part-time hours, job sharing, compressed hours, or remote working if feasible.

Flexible Working Is Not: Flexible working is not an automatic right for employees to change their work arrangements without a formal request, nor does it mean an employer must approve every request; it requires a formal application and can be declined based on business needs.

The Salon Industry Version of Flexible Working: As you're likely aware, the employed salon workforce is often paid by the hour rather than a fixed monthly salary (in this context, we will ignore commissions as this discussion is about hours, not pay rate).

It is common practice to have hourly-paid employees without clients leave work early rather than be paid to sit around doing nothing. This is fine if outlined in the contract. Often, employees are contracted to do a certain number of hours (e.g., 38 hours per week). But if an employee leaves early or starts late due to a lack of clients on some days, they might actually work 35 hours instead. Repeating this for half the year (3 hours x 20 weeks = 60 hours) results in unpaid time.

Additionally, your contract will state the number of holiday days or hours based on the contracted hours. Even if the employee does not fulfil their contracted hours, you are still obliged to pay the full holiday entitlement. So, using the above analogy, the employee will have almost 6.5 hours of additional holiday entitlement based on 20 weeks where they did not meet their contracted hours.

How to simplify managing variable work hours

The solution, in this example, could be to guarantee 35 hours per week in the contract, stating that any overtime will be paid at plain time (standard rate) with the assurance that holiday will be accrued for all overtime worked (Loop HR will auto-calculate the allowances for you).

This is more reliable than stating 38 hours in the contract and allowing employees to leave early or be sent home by managers. This approach is questionable unless the employee is on a zero-hour contract.

Loop HR can manage staff schedules and payroll reporting, ensure payroll compliance checks, and automatically calculate holiday entitlement based on employees' standard hours and overtime worked. For transparency we will also report to you and the employee, how the additional holiday entitlement has been accrued.