What’s your policy on floats for staff members? – DSP 62

Every float center wants their staff to be knowledgeable and experienced in the practice of floating. They need to be able to answer questions that customers may have, and sharing personal experiences in the tank can be an excellent tool, marketing wise. But how do you balance that with your need to run a business? Some float centers end up hiring their best customers to work the shop, does that help or hurt their bottom line? In this episode, Graham and Ashkahn talk about Float On’s liberal employee float policy and the philosophy behind it, as well as discuss some of the confusing legal quandaries that come with it.

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Graham: Our question is, “what is your policy on floats for staff members?”

Ashkahn: Floats for staff members. That’s a good question.

Graham: Yeah, and they asked about our policy, which is way easier to answer and the best answer.

Ashkahn: Oh, yeah. Perfect, perfect. So, there’s two parts to this.

Graham: And then there’s two parts to each of those parts.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and then it kind of just goes down from there. So there’s the legal part I feel like we should probably talk about.

Graham: Mm-hmm.

Ashkahn: And then there’s the part where you don’t care about the legal part, and you just want to do things your way.

Graham: Yup. I was gonna say the spiritual part, as well.

Ashkahn: The physical part. So, let’s forget about the legal part for a second.

Graham: Yeah. We’ll talk about everything else first.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah. So, our policy is not very specific other than just saying, “Yeah, just float kind of whenever you want,” is the crux of it.

Graham: Yeah, and I guess the things that people might be considering here with their float policies are A) do you give away free floats to staff members?

Ashkahn: Okay.

Graham: Which we do. B) how many free floats are they allowed to take in a week or a month, or something like that. Which for us is, as many as they want to.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Are there certain times of day that they’re restricted from floating? Like, do they need to float off-hours? Do they need to float during light hours? Is there kind of a prescribed range of time they should hop in the tanks?

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Which for us, we kind of urge people to float during our less busy times, but we don’t actually have a restriction on it. They can float anytime that they want to.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and I mean … Okay, so let’s go through those. Like charging people for floats. I mean, you’re gonna see that our philosophy is pretty much like we want our employees to float.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Right? I mean, at the end of the day, I would be more concerned were our employees not floating than I would were they floating too much. And I actually don’t know what floating too much is like. I mean, I guess they’d really just have to be bringing … Like, if all of our employees were taking off Friday evening every week, like that would be where the point. It’d be like, “Okay, guys.” Like, “Please don’t as a group book, like, every appointment we have on Friday nights.” And it’s just, things are just so far away from that that it’s almost odd to think about what could be going wrong.

But in essence, I want our employees to be floating, for a lot of reasons. It helps the quality of our shop. They’re in there frequently checking for temperatures and noise issues, and generally getting that kind of experience being in the tank, and looking at things. Light leaks, stuff like that. You know, it probably helps them. I like the idea that they’re floating. They’re probably more relaxed at work. And that’s a very frequent question you’ll get when you’re working a float center. Customers ask all the time, like, “How often do you float?” And how weird is it if the answer to that is like, “Oh, you know, like once every six months,” for someone who’s working at the center? It’s almost like a very powerful piece of marketing for people to respond, like, “Oh, I float about once a week,” to that question.

And so, all of those reasons … I see no reason to be discouraging our employees from floating.

Graham: Or even better is, “I float every day.”

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Right? Even though that’s taking up more floats on your schedule, how cool is that? When someone’s like, “Oh, how often do you float?” And the staff member is just like, “I float every single day at 9 A.M.,” or whatever it is. You know? That’s an awesome answer, and really speaks to the benefits in that conversation, which is good.

Ashkahn: And we’ve had people do that. Our employees will try to do 30 floats in 30 days, or these little kind of float challenges for themselves. I guess really, the nervousness people might have is they’re taking appointments that people would have been paying for. Maybe they’re taking good appointments, or things in the evening or weekends. But honestly, we haven’t really been telling our employees, “Please don’t float on weekends,” and stuff like that.

Graham: Yup.

Ashkahn: They work the shop. They know how it works. They book people in. They know our weekends are busy. They know our evenings are busy. And they try to not book at those times, naturally, just from their own inclination of wanting to kind of take care of the shop. Often, I’ll look at our schedule. If I see employees booked, they started putting notes on their own accounts saying, “Hey, if a customer really wants this time, feel free to just cancel my appointment and give it to them.” Again, we never asked for them to do anything like that, but that was just their own instincts. To be like, “Hey, you know, I’m gonna float here, but if someone really wants it, I’ll just float another time.” You know?

Graham: It became a trend. It’s on like two-thirds or more of our staff’s kind of important notifications on the profile. One staff member saw another staff member that had that on their profile and they’re like, “Oh, that’s a good idea,” and then just copied it on to theirs. Which I guess I wanted to pause for a moment to just point to one of the greater philosophies that we have, that’s kind of one of the guiding principles on our float availability philosophy as well which is, if you want people to take ownership of your shop and treat it like it’s their own, then you have to actually give them the ability to do things that they want to, and not try to control every minuscule behavior.

And free floats is a really great example of that. Sure, we could write out policies, and specifically say, “You need to give up your float if a paying customer wants to, and you’re floating during prime times,” or, “You only need to float during off times,” or-

Ashkahn: “One float a week,” right.

Graham: And it turns out, the more that we just treat our staff members like adults who understand that we’re a business that needs to stay open, the more they truly respect that. They’re not trying to fight against our policies. In fact, in many cases like this one, they end up being harder on themselves.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: They will choose way more difficult times for themselves to float, like 11 P.M. or 2 A.M., so they’re not interfering much more than they would, I think, if we were trying to be really hardcore about it.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s true. They’ll be like, “Oh, I really didn’t want to book on the Saturday afternoon, but it’s the only time I can.” I’m like, “Dude, book Saturday afternoon. Go for it. You know? It’s fine. Like, don’t worry about.” Yeah, it’s true. We often are, if anything, pushing in the other direction, getting them to take more selfish behavior.

Graham: Yep. Yep. Another one I guess that’s another policy we didn’t talk about in there is bringing in friends to float, or relatives, or something like that.

Ashkahn: Yeah. We pretty much have the exact same policy, which is we have no written rules, and it’s just kind of like, “Do what you think you should do.” You know? It’s like, “It’s up to you.” And part of this is like Graham is saying, a much broader philosophy. Our finances are open to our employees. You know, they see how much money we’re making and stuff like that, so they have kind of some of the same judgment we do. But it’s just that. Like, “Listen, your cousin’s in town? You want them to float? It’s up to you. Give them a free float,” or, “You think this person really deserves half off?” We don’t have any rules. We trust your judgment. And exactly the same thing. People often end up being way harder on themselves than we would be. I mean, I’ve had employees say, like, “Hey, you know, my brother’s coming to town. Is it cool if I give him like 50% off?” I’m like, “It’s your brother. Give him a free float. He can float all day if he wants to.”

Graham: Yeah, and another benefit of doing things like this … And again, I think it’s human instinct to not want to be that open.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: Right? Like our brains kind of go into lawyer mode when we’re thinking about worst-case scenarios here, right? And so we want to control, to make sure that worst-case scenario never pops up. I guess it’s nice to not assume the worst, but kind of assume the best, and then wait to control things. It’s like you’re not bound for this decision for the rest of your float life, right? If you have an open policy about letting people float whenever they want, letting them bring in friends, you get to kind of sit back and see if that’s abused. And in our case, it never is. I honestly can’t think of a single case of abuse. Versus siding too much on the controlling side, you actually don’t get to see what happens if you had no controls at all. So one of the benefits of that, again, is that people respond really well to it. Like, not only do you have the ability to change them if the policy isn’t working out, starting on the nice side also just makes your employees happier and probably reduces employee turnover. It makes sure that they’re able to talk to customers better. There’s so many benefits of that laxness when it comes to giving them free access to the tanks.

Ashkahn: All right. So, the legal side of this. This part gets weirder, and I’m not even so confident that we know everything about this, but-

Graham: I just want to say that we’re not lawyers, and you should definitely consult a lawyer-

Ashkahn: We’re not lawyers. We’re not lawyers.

Graham: … when you get into the legal side of anything.

Ashkahn: None of this may be true. We’ve heard some things about … Like, it seems like there’s some rules out there about what you can be giving to employees. You often see this 20% rule, that you can give employees 20% discounts on things, but past 20% it becomes like a benefit that you have to actually treat as income to the employees that they’re then taxed on. And if that is a rule that exists, which it seems like it is … It also seems like it’s absolutely widely ignored almost everywhere. Like, there’s so many businesses, even really big businesses, that seem to be just flagrantly ignoring that rule. So again, we don’t really know. That’s what we’ve heard, and I’ve been really confused about this kind of duality of seeing that rule on paper, and seeing it not in practice. That makes me kind of question it a little bit.

Graham: And the idea there, right, is that you’re basically wedging a benefit in there as a free service or something like that. So in our case, kind of giving away those floats should be treated as some kind of taxable income, because that employee is getting a benefit from it.

Ashkahn: And I think a lot of stuff like this is complaint-based. Do you know what I mean? Like, you’re gonna get in trouble most likely if you have an employee go and say, “Hey, this is what my employer is doing.” Stuff like that doesn’t tend to happen when you’re being cool to people.

Graham: Yeah. But it might, so you should definitely-

Ashkahn: But it might. So, yeah. Look into this. Look into this.

Graham: Consult with your attorneys.

Ashkahn: When we talked to our HR person, what we ended up coming out of it with … So another option is to say floating is required. You know, it’s part of your job, and that’s one way of getting around it. But what that ends up doing is you have to pay people to float. Because if it’s part of their job, now they have to be clocked in while they’re doing it. That was a little bit further than I think we were able to go ourselves, actually paying people to float. So we have it listed now as optional voluntary training, ongoing training. I think that’s it. Voluntary ongoing training, that’s what it is.

Graham: Mm-hmm.

Ashkahn: So it’s not mandatory. If it was mandatory training, then you’d have to pay people, so it’s voluntary training and it’s ongoing training. So things that you just kind of continue to do, to work on your job. So yeah, voluntary ongoing training is kind of the legalese term we ended up throwing in our employee manual, to …

Graham: Which might not actually mean anything, in the scheme of things.

Ashkahn: It might be completely wrong.

Graham: Yeah, so just keep that in mind.

Ashkahn: Yeah, but, you know, that’s the one step we’ve-

Graham: It sounds nice.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it sounds really official, right?

Graham: It almost seems like we know what we’re doing.

Ashkahn: Yeah. But don’t be fooled.

Graham: All right, was there a third side?

Ashkahn: That’s all the sides. That’s all the sides. All right, if you guys have any more questions for us you can always hop on to floattanksolutions.com/podcast. Send in your question, we may just answer it.

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