Haircare Group: More Than Hair

tales from THE BREAK ROOM

How to make your break room a much-needed haven for your staff

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irty towels, discarded colour bowls and empty Uber Eats bags - the day to day running of your salon is dependent on your staff being able to utilise your back-room space for a range of activities.

Whether they’re mixing colour, trying to take two bites of lunch during a clients’ processing time or kicking back with a glass of wine after a long day, the back room of your salon needs to be a haven for your team.

You want a space that inspires creativity, creates community and collaboration. Harvard Business Review have revealed data that shows that chance encounters and interactions between teams improves performance.

Whilst there are hundreds of articles each with their own list of ways to make your back room work for you, we’ve collated a list below:

• Create an atmosphere for your team to disconnect and relax: 9am–9pm shifts.

Enough said. • Offer space for conversations: Creating a wider sense of community that continues off the salon floor. This not only offers wider support to your team; but helps to create that sense of family that we love about this industry. • Personalise the space: Whether you inspire with mood boards, print outs of content that your team has created or relatable memes, something that makes your space feel uniquely yours helps to make your team feel more at home. Also, who doesn’t love a good box dye meme next to a back wall chart?

Here, we speak to two salons about their back room spaces:-

Sarah Wallis

OWNER OF CHAPTER 2 How is the space used? We are very lucky to have a massive back room where we can relax in between clients and have our lunch breaks! We also use it for meetings as its nice and private from the salon!

What is it about the space that

makes it truly yours? We do dream boards regularly and these go up on the wall, so they are visible to us every day. Also on the walls are all our work-do pics and team articles in the local newspaper over the years, it’s so nice to reflect back on!

What makes having a dedicated back room space so vital for your

salon? We think it is so important that we have a back room for the staff so they have somewhere to go for breaks and time to take 5! We are such a social salon that we have a table in the middle of the room and chairs all around so everyone can chat and bounce ideas around if needed.

If we walked into your salon back room now, what would we find?

Most likely a mess on the table - coffee cups, water bottles and snacks - and us all having a laugh!

Liam Thompson

OWNER OF FULL SPECTRUM How is space used? Our back room is certainly a multi-use space, it is our kitchen, lunchroom, catch up room as well as having a computer based in there to check the schedule and to write down colour histories. Our back room has our team lockers with added storage for equipment as well.

What is it about the space that

makes it truly your salon? The food, the air fryer, the polaroids on the wall, and the UberEats order sheet on the fridge.

What makes having a back room space so vital to running a

business? It is a place for staff to share ideas, bounce formulas off each other, and have a space to be a team.

If we walked into your back room right now what would we find?

A stove full of fresh pasta and meatballs, pages of our fave Hueverse toners pinned up and staff tea and coffees in their FSHC mugs.