HR & Policies

Chapter one

What PALOMA expects of you

Picture two Experience Guides. Both know the menu, both are kind, and both are good at the job. Yet guests ask for one of them by name. Why her?

That is the whole of this chapter. PALOMA expects five things of everyone in the house. They are the standard, and they are not new: your colleagues were taught them in a room in April, in the founders' own words.

How you look

Your appearance is the first communication. Before you speak, a guest reads your grooming, your dress, and whether you look like you belong to this brand. You are the visual experience before the service begins.

How you speak

Language, tone and warmth, in equal measure. No rushing an explanation. No jargon a guest has to decode. No half-answer when she is genuinely trying to understand her options.

The energy you give off

Guests absorb your state before you say a word. Arrive regulated, grounded and present, and know that if you are scattered, they feel that too. Your internal state is part of the experience.

Emotional intelligence

Reading what a guest actually needs, not what you assume she needs, and adapting in the moment. The founders call this the one that separates a good guide from an extraordinary one.

Wellness expertise

You are not a host. You are a guide. Guests trust you to educate them, to recommend, to make things clearer than they were. That trust is why the knowledge matters.

Notice that only one of the five is about what you know. That is not an accident. PALOMA can teach you the menu in a fortnight. The rest is the part a guest actually feels, and it is the reason she asks for you by name. And unlike charm, it is learnable.

Three things a guest should never see, hear or feel

There is a second half to the standard, and it is about what stays out of sight. These are not small things. They are the difference between a guest feeling she is in a sanctuary and feeling she has walked into the back of a business.

Another guest's call

A phone conversation about one guest does not happen within earshot of another. If she can hear how you talk about someone else, she now knows how you talk about her.

The business running

Ticketing, shipments, back-of-house: invisible. Doors that should be closed stay closed. None of it is shameful. It simply is not part of what she came for.

Our personal lives

Lunch, schedules, who is covering what, anything personal. Not in a guest-facing space. Ever. This is the one people slip on most, because it is so ordinary.

Chapter two

Your first weeks

Nobody learns this in a day. You are not expected to finish this site today, or this week, or to remember all of it. A screen can teach you what PALOMA knows. It cannot teach you what PALOMA feels like, and it will not try. That half happens in the building, with people who have done this.

You receive PALOMA as a guest

Before you are asked to give any of this, you are given it. You come in and have an experience here, as a guest does. Most people say this is the part that makes the rest make sense.

You watch someone do it

You shadow someone good. Not to copy her, but to see what the standard looks like when it is running at full speed.

You practice, with someone beside you

Then you do it, with a trainer close enough to catch anything. Getting it wrong here is the entire point of here.

You step onto the floor

Real shifts, real guests, with someone who knows the answer within reach. Nobody is left to work it out alone.

And then you are ready

When it is yours, someone says so. There is a point where PALOMA confirms it rather than assumes it, and after that, the learning carries on anyway.

Your first weeks page lays this out day by day, shift by shift, so you always know what today is for.

Your path through this site

Everyone starts in the same place, and then the path depends on your role. An Experience Guide, an Experience Coordinator and a massage therapist each spend more time in some modules than others, and your trainer will tell you which come next for you.

Some of the day-to-day pieces, like opening the house or running the end of the day, you may walk through with your manager on the floor before you ever read about them here. That is by design. This site is somewhere to come back to, not something you have to finish first.

Your first day

Almost everyone's first day covers the first two modules, Brand Overview and HR & Policies. You will also need a few things ready before your first shift:

Then there is Reference, under Look it up. It is not a course; it is a shelf. Prices, durations, what is in which service, who each thing is not for. Nobody carries this in their head, and you will keep coming back to it long after training ends.

Chapter three

Showing up

Everything so far has been about how PALOMA cares for its guests. The policies are how PALOMA cares for its team. PALOMA holds its team to the same standard of care we hold for our guests. These policies are there to protect the team, the guest experience and the business.

Whether you are an Experience Guide, a healer or on the leadership team, your presence, reliability and integrity matter. Read these as agreements you are making with your teammates and our guests. They start with the simplest one: being here, on time, ready.

Arriving

Why the early start? Guests check in and out at the top and bottom of the hour. Arriving early lets you settle in and support the team, and it means you are regulated before the first guest is. When you arrive, find the manager on duty for anything that affects your day or the guest experience.

You are late if you clock in 5 or more minutes after your scheduled start. Repeated lateness is handled step by step:

Breaks

A break is part of staying regulated, which means it is part of the guest experience too.

Chapter four

Time away

Rest matters here as much as it does for any guest. There are two kinds of time off: planned time off (vacation, personal time, rest) and unplanned time off (illness, emergency, the unexpected). Both are fine. What makes them work is notice, so the team and the guests are never left short.

Planned time off

Calling off

The weekends we all hold

A few weekends are when guests need the house most, so everyone is on hand. These are blackout weekends (Friday, Saturday and Sunday):

Longer leave

When the house is closed

Chapter five

Pay, tips and perks

The practical part, kept simple. Your pay rate is in your offer letter, and everything else runs on a steady rhythm.

Your pay rate is confidential. Please don't discuss your salary with coworkers. This protects everyone's privacy and dignity.

And because the values we hold for guests are the values we hold for our team, you are cared for here too. Your PALOMA benefits and perks are set out in the Trade and Wellness Perk Policy. Ask your manager for the document and any questions about using your perks.

Chapter six

What to wear

Remember the first of the five expectations: you are the visual experience before the service begins. Experience Guides wear the PALOMA jumper, and wear it proudly. What follows is for service providers and Experience Coordinators, who dress from the house's own palette: whites, off-whites, tans, browns and black. The look is natural, bohemian and polished: holistic, warm and simple.

And the pieces that stay at home:

Chapter seven

Staying in touch

The last agreement is the one that keeps all the others alive: talking to each other. Safe + transparent communication is one of the six values, and these are the places it is built into the calendar.

Bring the real things. The questions you marked as unclear, the moments that did not sit right, the ideas you had on a slow afternoon. Remember the service that started with an Experience Guide being curious out loud. These conversations are where that happens on purpose.

PALOMA holds its team to the same standard of care we hold for our guests.