Looking for advice from Club Managers & Owners
I am trying to get my staff more engaged. I am looking for ideas on how to stress the importance of their position. We are a small club with limited staff hours so most of my employees work very little & I feel they are disconnected from the job. I found a great article on the importance of the front desk staff & had a hard time getting them to read that. I want them to feel like their job is the most important part of our club. Any suggestions would be great!
Hello Thea,
I have found that weekly staff meetings are a must. This makes your staff feel like they are part of a team and not just a warm body punching the time clock. Fill them in on club activities, events and promotions and offer some type of bonus for these events as well.
Have a staff appreciation day…bring in some gift cards, movie passes and food for one staff meeting per month. And finally.. greet your staff by their first name each and every day and thank them for their hard work.
I hope this helps!
Michael
Personally, I always hated meetings just for the sake of having a meeting. There is only so much happening in a week to discuss. E-mail updates in-between are important.
An article like the one you mentioned may be something for a meeting. But be careful there. I am also part-time (teaching classes at a club) and make an effort to attend ‘mandatory meetings’. At one of those, I all but flew off the handle when there was truly nothing of any relevance to me and I had been adjusting my schedule and wasted two hours.
I suggest a monthly staff profile (not necessarily ‘Employee of the Month’) with a picture and a paragraph how this person is important to the organisation and the member of the club. It should be for all (member and staff) to see.
Hi Thea. Hmm, I’m trying to think a little “outside the box” here to help you 🙂 I like the idea of “short” staff meetings, perhaps not every week, or every x weeks, but instead when there is enough “pertinent” information to hold one. This would help avoid some of what Karin complained about in her answer about some meetings. Then, in preparation for the meeting you can have a short agenda that your give out along with any handouts (such as this article) that you want people to read and comment on ahead of time (maybe included with their paycheck). Ask them to read the article and be prepared to talk about it. If you find that giving them this “heads-up” still doesn’t work, then perhaps offering something small but valuable to them (or just the one that you elect for offering the most meaningful contribution to the meeting discussion) for their active (and meaningful) participation in the discussion during the meeting. Not only may this raise their interest in participating in the meetings, but it will also bring some fun competition to an otherwise boring meeting (hopefully 🙂
I was formally the Director of Wellness at a College. I had a staff of about 30, many of them part-time student employees. If anyone had the reason to be apathetic about their part time front desk jobs you would think it’d be these students. But they weren’t! They took ownership of their jobs because my managers showed them that they were appreciated. Their advice was sought before some (not all) management decisions were made. We had pizza at our staff meetings. Whenever a client had a good front desk experience, we made sure that ALL other front desk staff heard about it. And, we empowered them by allowing them to give their own suggestions on how they thought we could better run the front desk. Very empowering for them!
I hope that this helps.
LaRue, CSCS
www.lecfitness.com
[email protected]
One thing that has helped engage my staff (I work at a University and have both student and contract professional staff) is to have them involved in active learning and then teaching back to one another. They have sought out topics that they think could help improve the facility (i.e., find areas that may need a little work) and do the research and put together a program based on it. We’ve done the same thing with the “show and tell” idea, sharing what we’ve learned at conferences or in our own continuing education / research. It helps them own something and feel like their opinion and experience is valued.
Hope that helps!