How to Manage an Effective Health Club Staff

"I'm Ivan Madar. I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. So how do we get the right staff and what we do we do with them? How do we make them effective? How do we make it easy for you as a manager to run the club that is successful in which everybody is happy. First of all is the hiring process. The hiring process and I'm not going to get into the methods of hiring because everybody has different methods of hiring, but the procedures how we hire people at the clubs which I consider to be successful are established on using not just your experiences and your personal staff, but also using the other employees in a spa or in a fitness club. For instance, when we hire a massage therapist, that person needs to do three massages on our most experienced staff. We get a summary of their impressions and if any of those three people who are really experienced who've been with us for a long time, don't agree with the new person coming, then we don't hire the person. This way we guarantee that the person who we are hiring is going to fit into our culture, is going to serve the way we serve and is going to have the qualification and the quality of service that we provide. And that could be used everywhere throughout the club. We can use it with personal trainers, we can do this with tennis instructors, we can do this in almost every area obviously it?s much more difficult to do it in jobs that don't require that much skill, more of a labor job. There I have to use my judgment as an experienced manager and make those selections. But the selection of people first is important because you create yourself lots of headaches if you hire the wrong people and you spend a lot of time training them and then things don't work out. Training is the next area in which obviously everyone agrees that is essential. If you don't train people, they cannot perform the job and it?s the obvious one."