5 Ways to Reduce Turnover Among Your Gym Staff
We’ve mentioned before how important it is to reduce member turnover and retain members. But what about your gym staff? Are you considering the turnover rate of your class instructors, trainers and administrative staff? It’s important to be aware of this number and whether your gym has a staffing problem.
If you’re faced with high turnover, here are five ways to change that:
1. Provide Good Wages and Benefits
At any job, employees consider the pay and benefits as they decide whether to start the job and whether to stay. If they find a better situation elsewhere, they may leave, especially if they’re unhappy in their current position.
Help keep your staff satisfied at your gym through methods like:
- Offering them competitive wages that value their contribution to your gym
- Providing benefits that at least match local competitors
- Throwing in free membership and discounts on products and added services to help staff members connect to your gym
- Seeing if you can get your staff members discounts from other local businesses, perhaps in return for offering its employees gym discounts
- Promoting from within
- Offering courses and training to help them build skills
2. Celebrate a Job Well Done
Staff members want to know they’re doing a good job, and it feels good for anyone to receive praise and encouragement. Remember this by finding ways to recognize your employees. Ideas include:
- Offering verbal praise
- Creating an employee of the month
- Providing a prize to recognize service that goes above and beyond
- Sharing positive feedback from members
- Discovering each staff member’s motivations, such as commissions or helping clients, and finding ways to focus on them
3. Make Sure Your Gym Is Inclusive
Every staff member should feel welcome and valued within your gym. To create an inclusive environment for gym staff members, start by focusing on diversity when recruiting, hiring and promoting from within. Also, encourage gym values such as celebrating differences and all abilities, allowing staff members to be themselves and asking for feedback. Include a focus on inclusiveness in your gym’s policies and procedures, including consequences for treating others badly.
4. Asking for Feedback
Just as you want members to share their thoughts about the gym, encourage staff members to do the same. You can create methods for anonymous feedback, such as a comment box in the staff area. Take concerns and criticism seriously, and look for ways to improve.
Also, talk to staff members about their career goals and path. See if you can find ways to facilitate them and encourage your employees to grow during their time with you. Further, ask staff members to share ideas on how the gym could improve and activities you could add. This will help staff members feel valued and may help them expand their instructor or trainer horizons.
5. Remove Frustrations
Dissatisfaction with a job may not be solely about the job duties themselves. Your staff members may be frustrated by unnecessary procedures, technology that’s not user-friendly, disorganized sales systems and other processes that make their daily lives more difficult.
Seek to simplify gym systems and processes, which will help your staff members while also streamlining your gym business and benefiting employees. Gym software is the key to keeping all of your business processes in order, including marketing, sales, membership, scheduling and more.
Overall, efforts to retain your staff will naturally help them be more satisfied, which will spill over into creating a better gym environment and experience for your members. That means that focusing on staff retention could help member retention too – what a win-win!
