Keeping the Flow: How to Improve Internal Communication in Your Salon, Clinic, or Spa

Communication is the foundation of every high-performing team, especially in detail-driven environments like salons, spas, and clinics. It’s what keeps the all-important flow intact—minimising misunderstandings, enhancing collaboration and ensuring every client experience is exceptional. When communication breaks down, everything from operations to team morale can hang in the balance. Effective internal communication, which can often look effortless, takes intention and consistency. However, making these efforts can completely transform your business. 

Let’s explore some of the timeless considerations for building an internal communication system, as well as some of the practices and tools you can use to keep your team in sync. 

The Principles of Internal Communication

1. Set Clear Expectations

Start with clarity. You can’t expect everyone on the team to have the same processes or standards without defining them. Whether it’s daily cleaning responsibilities or how to greet clients, take stock of the various systems in your business, outlining instructions and expectations for each. Keep a record easily accessible to the whole team on a digital wiki like Notion (what team Phorest uses), physically, in an employee handbook, or displayed around staff areas. 

Phorest Community Tip: 

With every new round of new hires, Lia Hakim of Hott Salons asked the team to review the “Honour Code” just to make sure that “everybody still agrees with all the rules that they live by in the salon and that code of honour is really set by them.”

2. Invest in Team Meetings

Weekly or bi-weekly meetings are essential to keep everyone up to speed on what’s happening beyond their immediate day-to-day role and build team cohesion. These sessions don’t have to be long but don’t neglect them. Besides being practically necessary, they are an important vehicle for your team culture. 

• Try kicking off or wrapping up a team meeting with a positive ritual like celebrating team milestones or accomplishments.
• Provide a safe space for feedback and conversations about ongoing challenges and what can be learned. 
• Keep your team in the loop about business objectives and key metrics
• Share logistics and news like upcoming promotions and schedule changes. 

Tip: When hosting meetings about performance or goals, equipping yourself with the data you need to support your conversation topics is vital. Phorest’s reporting suite offers in-depth reporting on all aspects of your professional hair or beauty business.

On PhorestFM: Pepper Pastor on the What, Why & How of Building High-Trust Cultures

3. Use Digital Tools

Modern salons, spas, and clinics need streamlined digital tools to communicate:

1. An internal messaging platform:

While emailing everyone in your salon team can be a useful tool for formal communication, there are times when more immediate, informal communication is needed.  Emails can get buried in inboxes and responses can often take longer than necessary. This is where an internal messaging platform, like Slack, WhatsApp, or even a private Facebook group can make a difference. 

Here’s Why the Phorest Team Uses Slack:

Organized Conversations
In Slack, you can create specific channels for different topics: one for general updates, one for client feedback, another for team scheduling, and so on. This ensures that important messages are always accessible and categorized, making it easy for everyone to find the information they need when they need it. 

Casual, Yet Productive
Messaging platforms like Slack offer a space for casual, non-urgent conversations that help build camaraderie while still providing a structured way to communicate efficiently when needed. Teams can share tips, celebrate birthdays, post photos of their pets or simply keep morale high with emojis and gifs. 

2. Salon management software

The right software should empower you to connect the dots, allowing you to organize team schedules, centralize appointments and client notes, and supply staff performance metrics and business-level reporting to have more productive one-to-ones and team meetings. Ideally, your salon management software would also include a user-friendly mobile app so everyone on the team can work together from real-time information at their fingertips. 

Phorest Community Tip: 

At Allure Beauty Bar, owner Bobbi Springer has created a dedicated Slack channel called “wins.” As soon as she sees a new positive online review from a client come in through Phorest’s Online Reputation feature, she shares it, highlighting the good work of the staff member involved. Bobbi says, “I think that’s human nature; everyone wants to be acknowledged for their contribution. I think [the reviews] are a constant reminder for everyone of ‘this is why I do what I do. This is why I show up.’”

Avoid Common Communication Pitfalls

1. Information Overload: Be careful not to become overzealous and share too many updates at once. Even if they are about different topics, your team can only absorb so much new information at a given time. 
2. Favouritism: Nothing rouses suspicion faster than when communication is reaching people unequally. Transparency is a core part of building long-term trust. When your team implicitly trusts you, they are more likely to be receptive to internal communication in general.
3. Relying on only one method: Combine in-person chats with digital tools to reach all team members effectively. Don’t worry about being repetitive. In a workplace buzzing with information flow, sometimes it takes a few times, in different formats, for an important message to be fully absorbed by everyone on the team. 

The Role of Leadership in Communication

As an owner or manager, you set the tone for how communication flows. Your team is more likely to communicate well with each other if they see you doing it first. Lead by example:

• Share your vision for the business openly to inspire your team
• Stay approachable and available (even more important to be intentional about this if you spend limited time on location)
• Handle conflicts fairly with an even temper
• Regularly share individual feedback with your team and ask for theirs. 

Small Steps for Big Payoff

So, what’s your first step? Start small—whether it’s implementing weekly meetings, adopting a communication tool, or simply asking your team for feedback. When you invest in improving internal communication, you invest in culture. Each small change builds momentum. Over time, these steps compound into a confident, unified team and a business that runs more smoothly than ever. 

Phorest Community Tip:

In his ebook, leadership coach, Jay Williams writes,
“Feedback is like a navigation system–it’s your GPS. It validates that you’re headed down the right path, and allows you to course-correct before you get to the wrong destination, saving you time, energy and frustration.” 

This article was originally published in July 2017 and has been updated