SUPPORTING EMPLOYEES THROUGH PERSONAL CRISES & STRESS

Written by Choert Maartens

The message came through on a Saturday morning, the busiest day in the salon. Thandiwe, a senior stylist at a busy hair and beauty salon, had just pinned her first client's colour when her phone lit up on the counter. Her sister had been hospitalised overnight following a domestic violence incident. Thandiwe set down her tint brush, looked at her salon owner Priya, and said nothing. She didn't need to. Priya had seen that look before, the stillness of someone holding themselves together by a thread.

What happened over the following two weeks would define not only Thandiwe's relationship with the salon, but the kind of employer Priya had chosen to become. This is a story playing out in salons and spas accross South Africa every single week.

Our industry is unique. It is an industry built almost entirely on people, the person behind the chair/bed and the person sitting/lying in/on it. The workforce is overwhelmingly female, often young, frequently the primary breadwinner in extended family structures, and deeply embedded in communities where personal hardship, gender-based violence, bereavement, financial distress, and health crises, are not background noise but lived daily reality.

According to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), one in six South Africans will experience a mental health disorder in their lifetime, yet fewer than 15% will ever receive treatment. In an industry where emotional labour is part of the job description, that statistic carries particular weight.

In an industry where stylists, technician, and therapists carry their clients' emotional weight all day, the risk of cumulative burnout compounds personal crisis significantly.

Priya didn't consult a policy manual that Saturday. She called in a part-time stylist she trusted, reassigned Thandiwe's remaining clients with a simple apology, and told Thandiwe to go. "I'll sort the salon," she said. "Go be with your sister." It took thirty seconds. It cost Priya a day of disrupted bookings. It meant everything.

The Cost of Looking Away

Employers in our industry operate on thin margins. Commission structures, product costs, electricity cost and shutdowns, impacts on equipment, and fierce competition from home-based operators or foreign businesses mean that an absent stylist is not an abstraction, it is real, immediate lost revenue.

It is tempting, under that pressure, to treat emotional crises as inconveniences to be managed rather than human realities to be met. But this short-term thinking carries a long-term price.

Our industry has one of the highest staff turnover rates of any service industry in South Africa. Skilled stylists, nail technicians, makeup artists, and beauty therapists who feel unseen or unsupported do not stay, unfortunately, they leave, taking their clientele, their expertise, and the years of training invested in them.

Research published by Price Waterhouse Coopers South Africa estimates mental health-related absenteeism and presenteeism costs the South African economy approximately R40 billion annually. In small hair and beauty businesses, even a fraction of that cost, one stylist who disengages, one therapist who resigns mid-season, can destabilise an entire team.

A stylist who survives a personal crisis with her employer's support doesn't just come back, she comes back loyal, steady, and quietly telling every client in her chair what kind of place this is.

The Labour Relations Act (LRA), the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA) and the Collective Agreement of the National Bargaining Council for Hairdressing, Cosmetology, Beauty, and Skincare Industry (HCSBC), provide the legal foundation; family responsibility leave for births, deaths, and child illness; sick leave; and protection against unfair dismissal. The HCSBC further governs sectoral conditions for registered employers. But legislation sets a floor, not a ceiling. The salons/spas that keep their best people are those who build far above it.

What "Support" Actually Looks Like on a Salon/Spa Environment

A week after her sister's hospitalisation, Thandiwe returned. Her column had been managed, not perfectly but held. Priya had sent a WhatsApp every few days: not to ask about bookings, but to check in. A senior colleague had quietly covered Thandiwe's regular Thursday clients, keeping the relationships warm. On Thandiwe's first day back, Priya pulled her aside before the salon opened: "Your clients are happy. Take it at your pace today."

"I've worked in salons since I was seventeen," Thandiwe said later. "That was the first time an employers ever treated me like my life outside this chair was real."

This is not a story about grand gestures. Salons/spas are small businesses - there are rarely HR departments, hotlines, or wellness coordinators. What there is, always, is an owner or manager who sets the tone. In our industry, that tone is everything.

Practical Steps for Employers & Managers

• Create a simple written Staff Care Policy, so staff know what support looks like before a crisis hit.

• Build a reliable on-call or freelance stylist/technician/therapist/support staff network so covering an absence doesn't fall entirely on remaining staff.

• Check in personally and humanly; a WhatsApp message that asks, "how are you?" not "when are you back?" makes the difference.

• Know your HCSBC obligations - family responsibility leave, sick leave entitlements, and how to document compassionate arrangements properly.

• Share SADAG's free helpline (0800 456 789) visibly in staff areas and normalise it as a resource, not a last resort.

• Destigmatise mental health conversations during regular team check-ins, not only in crisis moments.

• Consider peer buddy systems in small teams as colleagues often know first when someone is struggling.

The Particular Pressures of Hair & Beauty Work

There is something that sets the hair and beauty industry apart from almost every other sector when it comes to personal crisis: the emotional intimacy of the work itself. Employees and professionals spend hours in close physical proximity to clients, listening to their stories, absorbing their anxieties, managing their moods, all while standing on hard floors, breathing chemical fumes, and performing technically demanding work. This is emotionally and physically exhausting even on a good day.

When an employee is simultaneously managing their own grief, fear, or trauma, the gap between professional performance and personal collapse narrows dangerously. Burnout in the the hair and beauty industry is widely underreported, partly because the culture of the industry enhances toughness and masks distress behind the expectation of cheerful client service.

A 2022 study by Deloitte Africa found that 70% of employees across sectors identified their relationship with their immediate manager as the primary factor in their mental wellbeing at work. In salon/spa environments, where the "manager" is often also the owner, the business founder, and the most experienced professional in the workplace, that relationship is even more loaded, and more powerful.

"You can't outsource this to an HR policy in most salons/spas," says Dr. Nadia Isaacs, an occupational psychologist based in Cape Town who works with several hair and beauty industry employers. "What you can do is decide, consciously, what kind of leader you want to be when one of your people is falling apart. That decision, made in advance, is the policy."

Ubuntu in the South African Hairdressing, Cosmetology, Beauty, and Skincare Industry

South African culture has carried the spirit of Ubuntu — "I am because we are." Walk into almost any salon/spa and you will find it: the junior who brings tea to the senior in grief, the receptionist who quietly manages the diary when a colleague needs to leave early, the employer who closes early on the day of a staff member's funeral. These instincts are already there. The task for employers is to formalise them enough that they become reliable, not dependent on whoever happens to be kind that day.

Organisations like ICAS Southern Africa and the South African Board for People Practices (SABPP) have increasingly turned their attention to small and micro-enterprises, recognising that the informal compassion already present in many South African workplaces needs structural support, not replacement. For salon/spa owners, this means documenting informal practices, communicating them to staff, and creating the expectation that care is a standard, not a favour.

When Thandiwe's sister was eventually discharged and recovering, Priya did something small: she gave Thandiwe an afternoon off - unasked, unprompted - with a note that said simply, "Go take her somewhere nice. We'll be here Tomorrow." The cost was four cancelled appointments. The return was an employee who has not missed a shift in three years since, and who turned down a higher commission offer from a competitor salon down the road.

"I could earn more somewhere else," Thandiwe said, when asked why she stayed. "But I couldn't work somewhere better."

Supporting industry employees through personal crisis is not a welfare initiative. It is a business strategy and a human obligation in equal measure. In an industry that asks its workers to show up warm, present, and emotionally available for every client, on every shift, regardless of what is happening at home, the least an employer can do is offer that same presence in return. In a country where the weight of personal hardship falls hardest on the women who make up most of this workforce, that commitment is not a luxury. It is what separates the salons/spas that last from the ones that don't.

Thandiwe still works at that salon. She's now a master stylist and mentors two junior learners. Last year, when one of those juniors came to work visibly distressed after a family emergency, it was Thandiwe who walked her outside, sat with her on the steps, and said the words she had once needed to hear herself: "You don't have to hold it together right now. We've got the load."

That is how a culture of care is built - one act of grace at a time, in the hardest moments, by people who were once held themselves.