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!
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
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