Roundtable: Spa & Wellness

HOTELIER: What are the challenges faced in hiring people with different training backgrounds, and how do you overcome this?

Sharon Barcock: The biggest challenge is getting people that are qualified, because in this region we are sourcing, typically, expats. It’s very rare that we get local people into spas and that’s been a challenge for a very long time, even though we are seeing a change in the ownership, particularly of private spas.

Paul Hawco: I guess for us more so around diversification. We are trying and we have tried to bring therapists mostly from other demographics — UK, Spain, Portugal, South Africa. We are aware that when we do that, there’s usually a short-term investment. If we get around 18-24 months out of that, then that’s a success. We want to diversify to meet the needs and demands of guests coming as well. But our challenges are that it’s not their first choice of place to be, so you have to make it quite a nice, incentivised package. They have to be paid slightly more and managed well.

Galina Antoniouk: I will totally agree. Another big challenge is staff retention, because you really invest a lot in their training, and very rarely do we get therapists who are qualified from other five-star hotels. And then you find out the standards are different so you have to train them. And when they leave, it’s the whole process of finding staff and training them again. I would say it’s an ongoing process and you have to always have a couple of CVs to make sure you are ready to replace people straight away. Sometimes you take a risk because if you interview them on Skype, you don’t do practical assessments.

HOTELIER: So training is an issue?

Paul: It starts with the base level coming into the region. They’re not as qualified as a lot of regions, and we hire different grades or levels of spa therapists and beauty therapists. Part of the issue is that we need to fill these positions and sometimes we compromise on the overall quality. But then we have to be the ones elevating the training. Working in other countries, the therapists are fully trained. You just have to brand train them and on their menu. And they run with it. They don’t come at that level here.

HOTELIER: Is all training done in-house, or are there places you can send your therapists?

Sharon: There is now, since we have had the start of all of the governments wanting to have certain legislations about the qualification. That started a chain reaction so there are a couple of locations that are doing training now. One of them being The Product House, and The Healing Zone that is doing theirs. But you’re talking about a very small expat population that is at a point where they may be leaving college and want to become a therapist, and then they pay to go through the training. Because accommodation is not available, people are not going to come here to do training. Maybe a therapist will come here and invest in themselves but companies are not, at this point, allocating funding to put them through training. For therapists coming here, it’s just a job for a lot of them. It’s a very different perspective to countries where people are investing in their future and see it as a long-term career.

Paul: I think an academy could be viable here. It could be used, not just for therapists, but for bringing in lifeguards, doormen. Everyone wants to come to Dubai to be something more, to develop a career, to learn, to be challenged, to be ambitious. It could definitely be a recipe for helping offset the challenges of overall recruitment. For us it’s more a talent gap than a recruitment gap. We have no issues with finding people, we have low attrition; it’s a strong business model and we’re busy and we have more people moving within. We have fixed term but we hire part-time as well during high season — for six month visas. That gets us through the high season. Another thing is that there are no part-time workers either — a lot of other markets have part-time.

Sharon: In the UK you would typically have on-call service. You can’t do that here. It is a very different structure.

Paul: So instead of having enough staff, we’re tight on service providers. In my opinion, if you call a spa and you can’t get an appointment it’s because there aren’t enough therapists. We did some math on that to justify recruiting, and in our model we said that a therapist does 2.5 treatments a week more than they are paid for. It’s worth having them.

HOTELIER: You mentioned being able to hire professionals part-time for six months — can you share more about that or even the potential of student internships in the wellness sector?

Paul: I think there’s an initiative that the government has placed that students can work part-time. It would be good to tap into — not for therapists — but other roles and for learning. We would definitely tap into that.

Sharon: Yes definitely — because of the bigger picture of hotels looking into how they can encourage people into the hospitality industry anyway.

Paul: It’s become more important to showcase that this is a great profession, because with the wellness growth, we’re competing with our own internal dimensions. There’s fitness, which is making good money and is a good career, there’s beauty, or workplace wellness. There’s lot of other spheres growing faster than us and it’s going to pull our own talent as well. We’re not the fastest growing dimension within the wellness industry — there’s a lot of other attractive, appealing careers going. We’ve done a wellness course at the Emirates Academy where we’ve put in a course for the students who will graduate to be hotel managers or some other profession. We’re in development to continue that and offer classes for therapists and other professionals, but now it’s for currently registered students at the Emirates Academy.

Galina: We have an internship programme with European colleges, and a lot are coming for their practical for three months or six months… but mainly other departments — not in the spa. In the spa if you get anyone, it will be receptionists. If you look at the European education, spa and wellness is not really covered, because normally it’s third-party who runs spas there.

Paul: It’s a good point that you mentioned. Most of the growth is in a hotel spa, that’s why the staff is increasing. So we need to to try and attract colleagues from your own hotel to the spa… it’s a nice environment, it’s got more opportunities, it’s good to tap into your own hotel group for talent. We moved a front office manager to an assistant manager in the spa at Madinat Jumeirah; she has no spa experience but she has all the other elements for us to groom her.

Sharon: It’s always been the case that people have looked to take people from the spa to other departments rather than other departments to the spa. So it’s interesting that we can flip it around. Sometimes you do find when you start to dig a bit deeper that there are candidates within the hotel teams that actually have got other skills; they just for some reason decided to step away from being a massage therapist. We’re finding that a lot now, and we can encourage them back. When we’ve got peak time, we can move them across for a bit of time — not change the path that they’re on but give them an additional route to look at. That could work quite well.

Galina: We have a programme in the hotel called Inter-Departmental Training, so when people complete six months they are free to train in any other department and our internal movements are quite high. It’s nice for people to have the chance to experience [the spa], and we get quite a few staff from other departments. I’m sure that in every hotel there are programmes like this.

HOTELIER: How do you think you can encourage people to remain within the spa department?

Sharon: It’s interesting, people always think that it’s money or incentives that keeps people rooted, but every year when we do our annual survey with the team members it all comes down to support, the relationship, and the investment we make into them in terms of education and development. We’ve got a range of different management training programmes and are now involving the whole wellness component into those training programmes, which never really happened before. We’re seeing a lot of traction both across the hotel teams, so they’re having more exposure to what wellness is about which gives them a more rounded approach to their jobs. Getting our wellness teams (particularly supervisory level upwards) involved in the hotel training programmes is also helping develop their skills and make them more rounded as leaders. We’ve always done it, but it’s something over the last year to two years where we’ve taken a much deeper focus.

Paul: Yeah I agree — the relationship between the leadership and the colleagues and the team culture is key. Spa should have more fun, it’s quite stressful these days sometimes. I don’t think money is the ultimate, but having a successful operation — whatever that means — being busy, having guests, being productive, making money, having them make some good money as well, having a well-run spa contributes to that also. It comes back to the people. We see that in the feedback as well, it’s no longer the expensive tables or the facilities... it’s the relationship between the therapist and what they do, their technique, meeting guest expectations, and the expertise. It’s moving from the big operations with all the shiny stuff to the consistency and quality to what the therapist is doing. The first time you’re attracted by the menu, the location or the reputation… but to come back again is the person.

Galina: Yes, it’s when you like the therapist, you like the ambience. It’s the human touch and the connection. It’s not always easy because we have multi-national teams but you have to create this kind of atmosphere.

HOTELIER: Finally, what are you working on now?

Galina: One thing we’re thinking about is [generating] business.

Sharon: How to make more and how do we achieve target this year. That really is the crux of it. It’s going to be a challenging year. This year more so, because it’s about looking at different ways of doing things, trying to arm the leaders with the tools to get to where they need to, and the thing I’m finding is, after Q1, the question I’m getting is — we need some help. It’s not like last year, it’s been a struggle. We need to think outside the box — from the marketing and sales perspective, how to drive revenue. On a long-term basis, it’s looking at the strategic approach that we’re taking on, how do we as a company move forward in the wellness area, how do we add more value to what we’re providing our owners with?

Paul: In relation to the topic, ways to increase the payroll. In the short-term, our commission is restructured. It’s tiered. For us we’re really focused on the business aspects of what we’re doing. Overall for Talise as a wellness model, we’ve hired someone specifically for workplace wellness, a nutritionist and a coach, tying in together all of our elements, and a specific corporate sales and marketing person for wellness.