FREEDOM!

I hope you read the title in William Wallace’s voice. It’s that important. Let’s charge into this post! (Dumb joke.)

This one goes out (again) primarily to owners, but it’ll apply to all. Freedom is what people want, and it’s what you should provide. Yes, you should. If you don’t, your employees will eventually leave. Maybe not today or even in a few years, but ultimately, people’s lives change, and they need two things; freedom and opportunity. 

Creating opportunity is a separate topic and one I’ll address in a future post.

Lack of freedom stems from a lack of leadership. No one wants to be micromanaged, yet most owners are doing exactly that.

I’ve been around owners who deny time-off requests. “Who’s going to cover those shifts?!” they ask. Um, why does it need to be covered? 

Look, I own a business, and I’m not here to not make money but in the long run, worrying about a few shifts because someone wants to attend a wedding is small thinking. Now you have to hire someone to fill an entire schedule. Your staff quit because you kept denying time-off. That doesn’t even make sense to me.

Instead, offer freedom with responsibility. Your business needs rules, and those rules need to be adhered to, but within those rules should be freedom.

Here’s how things look at my salon:

-Employees choose their schedule. (As long as I have the chair available.)

-Employees have unlimited sick/personal days.

-Employees have unlimited vacation days. (I pay a week, but you take as much as you need.)

-Employees have the flexibility to come and go between clients. Have a day that fell apart? It happens. You don’t have to sit around.

-Employees choose their pricing.

-Employees choose the services they want to offer and are never forced to do services they don’t want to.

-Employees choose if they want to sell retail or not. 

-Employees choose what they want to wear. We have very few rules because I’m not too fond of dress codes.

-Employees choose if they want to create additional streams of revenue.

-Employees don’t sign anything which allows them to work somewhere else while still working with us. You know, because no one owns anyone.

You get the point. I could keep going. 

Most people think they can only achieve this level of freedom by going independent. False. In another post, I’ll break down the whole commission/independent debate and how it’s simply a pay structure thing. I digress.

The examples listed above are the type of things that people value. When you begin to take these things away, you become less desirable. No one wants to feel bad or nervous to ask for time off. And GTFO with the whole ‘the younger generation is just lazy!’ argument because it’s not true. They don’t see things as you do, nor do they value what you value.

So if you want to improve your culture and have the right employees stop micromanaging and become a leader, not a boss.

If you’re not sure what to do next, reach out.