Your staff are the heart of your business; they drive client satisfaction, revenue growth, and champion your unique culture that keeps people coming back. When they’re aligned, everything runs better. But on busy days, it’s easy for their focus to drift. The solution isn’t to work harder, but to make performance visible, shared, and easy to action – in other words, ‘work smarter’.
Research from Gallup showed that employee engagement (how involved and enthusiastic people feel about their work) globally fell to 20% in 2025, from 23% in 2022. When people don’t feel engaged, you won’t see the same initiative and positive energy, and ultimately, performance lags. And the business implications of this are real: including lost productivity, missed opportunities, and even a mediocre client experience, which can have knock-on effects on loyalty and retention.
The good news: Disengaged staff doesn’t mean you’re doomed. With the right structure, you can rebuild momentum and make it grow exponentially.
The momentum gap: Lack of visibility can hurt your team dynamic
Most teams don’t struggle because they don’t care – they struggle because they can’t clearly see or understand the bigger picture. As an owner or manager, you probably know if the team could be selling more retail, rebooking more consistently, or upselling more effectively. But turning that instinct into a shared focus is rarely straightforward.
When goals live in someone’s head (or on a whiteboard that gets erased at the end of each week), the journey to better results can feel ad hoc. Some staff might power ahead, while others are left unsure where or how to focus their efforts. Assigning targets can then start to feel like extra pressure on your team rather than something they can work on together. Visibility changes that dynamic.
Introducing Team Goals: shared targets, visible tracking, better alignment
Team Goals are designed to make performance feel simple and collective. You can set a team-wide goal for the metrics that matter most. Whether that’s service revenue, retail revenue, rebooking rate, or more, you can track progress with clarity.
On a busy week, this focuses the conversation from “How are we doing?” to “We’re 82% of the way to our target, here’s what we’ll do to get us over the line”. Because when progress becomes visible, consistency in delivery becomes a habit.
If you want to try it for yourself: on PhorestGo, go to Menu > Team Goals and tap Create a team goal. Choose your participants, pick what you’re tracking (like service or retail sales), set a target and timeframe, name the goal, and save; then progress updates automatically.
What this looks like for businesses like yours:
“The retail features in Phorest, combined with our Staff Goals tool, offer a powerful combination. This reward system is great for boosting team morale and bonding, as well as encouraging retail sales. It’s a win-win-win for the salon, the team and our suppliers!”
– Liam Kennedy, Owner, Black Amber
“We set a monthly goal for our team and they know what they need to achieve each day to stay on track… To have the performance app puts it in front of their face every single day.”
– Nicole & Katie, Blu a Color Salon
If you’d like to see what staff and team performance tracking looks like in practice, you can explore the suite of Phorest manager tools.
Keep your top performers motivated and support those who need it
Team Goals build momentum for bigger-picture strategies, but high-performing teams rely on coaching and transparency backed by data. To manage proactively, you need to spot trends early, recognise consistent top performers, and support staff who need an extra hand. For example: early rebooking dips, retail add-ons falling, or contrasting performance between shifts. It’s also important for staff retention: when people feel recognised, appreciated and supported, they are more likely to stay engaged, and ultimately stay with your business.
Easier coaching and performance visibility with the Staff Goals Report
The Staff Goals Report gives you a clear view of overall progress across your team, allowing you to easily coach based on data. You won’t need to dig through numbers or piece together information from memory. The Staff Goals Report shows you: who’s on track, who’s slipping, what goals are trending ahead or behind, and more. This means:
- fair recognition for people consistently showing up
- focused 1-on-1 support where it’s needed
- fewer surprises at the end of the goal period
Used alongside a clear goal setting approach, this helps ensure that fairness, trust, and transparency are at the core of your management.
Here’s how it has helped other businesses:
“It’s taken a lot of pressure off of us to constantly be delivering updates on numbers because it’s right there and they feel more in control – it’s very empowering on both ends.”
– Nicole & Katie, Blu a Color Salon
If you’re looking for inspiration on what team success could look like when you check in consistently, celebrate progress, and repeat, check out this 2025 case study on how leaders can build that kind of motivation into their team culture.
Protecting the flow of the front desk team
Even with the best systems, hiccups happen. When they do, your team needs a solution fast, because small issues that drag on disrupt the day more than they should.
When something isn’t quite right, pressure builds quickly: the queue starts forming, the phone is ringing off the hook, and your team is distracted trying to confirm a setting or iron out a small issue. So, when your team feels that pressure, your clients do too.
Live Chat Support: faster answers, fewer interruptions
With Live Chat Support (powered by Zendesk Chat), your team can get help quickly while staying in sync with the day-to-day rhythm. It’s designed for the moments when you need an instant answer, like:
- “Where do I find this setting?”
- “What does this report mean?”
- “How can I fix this on the spot?”
With Live Chat Support, first response times are 8x faster than emailing. Our AI-powered bot, KevAI, can help answer routine questions as the first port of call, but when it can’t, you get connected to a support agent automatically, with all information provided carried over so you don’t need to repeat yourself.
On average, you can speak directly with a live agent in less than 10 minutes, and rest assured that you’ll be connected with the same support team you know and trust (it’s not outsourced).
To access it, go to Support in the side menu and click Contact Us. From there, you can start typing your questions and get the answers you need, instantly. Live Chat Support will also be available on PhorestGo in the near future.
Lead with clarity, coach with confidence
When goals are shared, and progress is easy to track, top performance becomes a habit. Recognition, support, and trust all become integral elements of your management and ultimately become the powerhouse behind your revenue growth.
On the busiest days, having fast support and the right tools in place helps your front desk stay in flow and maintain a consistent client experience. And if you’re looking for even more “quick wins” that help teams stay focused without adding admin, check out our roundup of Phorest “Hidden Gems”, which is full of practical tools you can put to work straight away.
High-performing teams aren’t pushed into greatness – they’re built on clarity, coached with consistency, and sustained by trust.
