Leading with Impact: Enhancing Employee Skills with Effective Training and Tech

Why (and how) self-care businesses should help their employees learn soft and hard skills

Sometimes, self-care business owners focus so much on taking care of their clients that they forget to give that same attention to themselves and their employees. It's a natural oversight; spas, medspas, salons, barbershops, and other self-care establishments are typically staffed by empathetic people prone to taking on their clientele’s emotional loads.

But as the old saying goes, you can’t draw from an empty well. To give clients the best experience possible, self-care leaders must step up and nurture their team's talents. One of the best ways to do that is by building up employees' soft skills — and by discovering how technology can aid in building team bonds.

Getting hands-on with soft skills

As important as soft skills are in the self-care industry, they're a bit tricky to define. Think of them as "personal skills," or the more human side of a workforce. Soft skills usually refer to an employee's ability to lead a team, collaborate with others, and even manage the conflicts that inevitably flare up when the workday gets a little bumpy. 

These kinds of skills may not contribute directly to giving your clients a superior self-care experience. Yet they’re no less essential, since they help create the kind of environment where those experiences are the norm. Communication, adaptation, problem-solving — each of these abilities enables you to build a better business and more effective team.

Here are some of the most rewarding soft skills to build up within your team.

Leadership

Teamwork comes into play at most jobs, including careers based around self-care. But solid teamwork isn't possible without good leadership, which is much more than just giving orders to the people working with you. A team leader needs to be confident, good at multitasking, and a thoughtful mentor. Their ability to set clear goals and organize a team to reach them is just as important.

One common limiting factor for employees who may otherwise step up is the belief that they're too disorganized or "scatterbrained." It’s true that some people seem to be more naturally organized than others, but modern tools mean you don’t have to be a whiz with color-coded folders to level up your organizational skills.

Time and team management apps like Slack, Zoom, and Toggl keep payroll, employee communications, and work responsibilities in one place. These simple-to-use apps build workers' confidence and keep team leaders shoulder-to-shoulder with their workers. Meanwhile, intuitively designed scheduling tools make it easy to see who is needed where and when.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence speaks to a person’s ability to understand their emotions and those of the people around them.

Emotional intelligence is valuable in almost every part of life, and it's a must-have soft skill in the wellness industry. For instance, clients aren't always the best at communicating what they want or what they may be feeling at the moment. An effective self-care worker can help clients express what they hope to get from each visit to your business so everyone feels more satisfied with the interaction.

The nonprofit mental health organization HelpGuide.org has an extensive write-up on the importance of emotional intelligence and instructions on how anyone can improve their own. Here’s a quick summary of four key skills team members can focus on to build their EQ:

1. Self-management, which means using your emotions to make constructive decisions.

2. Self-awareness, which means connecting to your emotions to understand how they influence your thoughts and actions.

3. Social awareness, which means recognizing and interpreting the (mostly nonverbal) cues people use to communicate with you.

4. Relationship management, which means using the previous skills to make your interactions with others more effective and fulfilling.

Effective networking

Networking lets people exchange ideas, solve problems together, and build friendships. Self-care professionals are in an excellent position to network because their jobs are all about building relationships. Once you’ve established a meaningful connection with a client, you have a much better chance of them returning to your business again and again.

Networking is vital for building up a healthy clientele, but it's equally important amongst colleagues. It strengthens workers' bonds and makes it easier to collaborate and discuss ideas from different angles. While face-to-face meet-ups may be easy to set up for everybody at a single location, live chat and video platforms such as Zoom and Discord can help add a personal touch to multi-location and hybrid meetups.

Get savvy with hard skills like production app literacy

Hard skills, or technical skills, are measurable abilities that are sometimes (but not always) specific to a job. They're typically learned through education and hands-on experience. Self-care workers may have numerous skills and certifications for the tools they use and services they offer: giving hair treatments, injecting filler, and painting nail art are examples of hard skills that may be essential at one self-care business but unused at another.

Here are some more general examples of tech-focused hard skills that could be useful at a range of self-care locations:

Google Workspace

Google's powerful suite of office tools is free to use for anyone with a Google account. It includes solutions for word processing, team organization, meet-ups, spreadsheets, slide shows, and more. If your team depends on Google Workspace, ensure every member knows how to use its basic functions. That will make collaboration much easier going forward.

Already hearing protests from the less tech-savvy members of your team? No worries. Google has a series of online tutorials that makes Workspace easy to pick up.

Adobe Creative Suite

Being in the self-care business means getting creative with self-promotion. It pays to have at least a basic understanding of Adobe Creative Suite, especially Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition (for sound files, such as your TikTok backing track), and Adobe Premiere (for the TikTok video itself). Adobe's training and tutorials help streamline and simplify the learning process for its apps.

Self-care for everyone working in self-care

This is just a sampling of the apps, tutorials, and programs you can use to enhance your teams’ skillset. Hard skills and soft skills are equally important, but strengthening each set requires different methods. Keep an open mind and listen to feedback from your workers and colleagues, and happier teams with stronger bonds will likely follow.