Action plan - how to be certain that we carry out its objectives?

Action plan - how to be certain that we carry out its objectives?

The creation of an activity plan is a crucial element in managing a beauty salon. However, a plan loses its relevance if it ends up in a filing cabinet immediately after its preparation and is forgotten about. How can you be sure that you are actually carrying out all your scheduled tasks and objectives?

For the business to develop correctly, appropriate activity planning is necessary, as this facilitates effective time management. The creation of a suitably structured and well-thought-out plan gives you the certainty that you will manage to accomplish all your objectives. However, the effort invested in preparations will be pointless if you fail to stick to your plan of action.

Moreover, the plan should be announced to the whole team, and the tasks should be divided between individual employees.

Preparing a good plan

A good plan helps to clearly define the course of the salon’s development, and to introduce order to its daily running. In this case, of key importance is the ability to correctly prepare such a plan, as for the plan to be effective, it needs to comply with certain conditions. What are they?

1. The first step is defining the timeframe. When considering the future, you need to know if your focus is on a week, a month or a year. The secret to success are small, but well-thought-out steps, therefore, try not to go overboard with designating excessively long planning phases.
2. Another critical issue is estimating the time needed to carry out a particular task. It should be remembered that not every activity can be completed within a few minutes. By asking yourself and your team to adopt a tempo of work that is difficult to sustain, you can end up with a result that is contrary to what you expected - instead of introducing order, you will introduce disorder.
3. While creating an activity list, it is important not to run free with your imagination and overdo the number of tasks scheduled for completion. Even if your head is bursting with excellent ideas, it is unlikely that you will implement them all at once. You should be rational in your planning so that your objectives have a real chance of being implemented.

Keeping track of progress

Once you have prepared a plan which you are happy with, and have assigned the tasks among individual employees, a key element is progress monitoring. It enables tasks that are yet to be completed to be identified. You should control what has been done already and what remains on the to-do list. Through the analysis of subsequent steps, you can learn from your own mistakes.

If there are many outstanding tasks on the list, you will know that your plan includes too many activities or that you might have incorrectly estimated the time needed for their performance. The conclusions drawn from the tasks completed so far will help you to be better organised in the future.

The assignments which you failed to complete within a specific amount of time can be moved to the following week or month. However, avoid postponing them endlessly, as the longer you do so, the smaller the chance that you will carry them out at all. In order to prevent the creation of unnecessary disorder, set yourself the limit of three instances of postponing of a given task. You can also create a separate “standby” list which will consist of tasks which you can revisit in a quieter season.

The creation of a well-thought-out plan and its careful implementation does not only contribute to the continuous development of a salon, but also helps in its efficient management. This in turn adds to the comfort and satisfaction of employees and, ultimately, the quality of customer service. How can this be achieved? When employees have dozens of tasks that need systemising, they tend to be stressed and disorganised, which is noticed by clients. That is why every plan requires careful consideration and the use of tools which will simplify its implementation.

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