photo: Lindsey Simpson

The 2023 Workforce State of Mind Survey provides some clues as to why so many health club operators are struggling to find enough qualified staff. The survey suggests working conditions vary greatly in the sector.

Broadly speaking, the closer to the front line you go, the harder it is for people in terms of how their work is organised and the level of support (including communication) they get in order to do their jobs well. The further from the boardroom you go, the more mental distress is reported and the lower the rating of belonging.

Pay and conditions are also an issue, particularly for group exercise and freelance workers, many of whom report they haven’t had a pay rise in 10 years. These factors create a landscape which can be less appealing to workers who are comparing what’s on offer in other sectors.

A stronger focus on mental health support could help this, but it needs to be a strategic approach focused on prevention and protection, not just supporting people when things have gone wrong. Employers should aim to provide ‘good work’ which is well-organised, fair, safe and allows for a good work-life balance.

As employers have a legal duty of care to employees’ mental health in the same way they do their physical health, this includes embedding psychosocial risk-management in their systems. Doing so brings commercial and human benefits, as well as helping to make sure employers are legally compliant.

We make three recommendations in the The 2023 Workforce State of Mind report. Firstly, taking a strategic approach to understanding and managing workplace mental health and safety, emphasising prevention and protection.

One of the characteristics we see in our data is that people are mistaking providing support such as Employee Assistance Programmes and counselling, believing these will tackle workplace mental health, when they’re only part of the picture.

Solely providing Mental Health First Aiders – a relatively popular route – is also inadequate as a response, and doesn’t shield employers from their legal duty of care to their workforce.

Secondly, until senior leaders understand the situation and take action, the required change won’t happen. The Good Work Pledge, which we launched in response to our inaugural findings, is a great place for employers to start.

Finally, we also need to consider the many freelancers, such as some PTs, who have no employer. In the last year, we’ve been encouraged to see EMD UK engage with its members on this topic to understand what matters to this group and how better to support them.

• Join the Good Work Pledge at www.workplacementalwealth.com

photo: David Lloyd Clubs

The fallout from the pandemic and Brexit have made recruitment in many UK business sectors challenging in recent years, meaning the health and fitness industry has not been alone in experiencing a squeeze.

Many workers re-valuated their future during lockdown, using furlough time to develop their skills or retrain for a new career, while a chunk of the skilled workforce also left the UK following Brexit. These factors combined led to a shortage of qualified applicants in the workforce.

In the last six months there have been signs of improvement in the volume of applicants, but it remains a challenging marketplace, as recruiting for specific areas has become harder.

Broadly DLL is still attracting a large volume of applications for all roles. However, some areas continue to be more challenging. Recruiting for the F&B team, particularly chefs, can be a challenge. David Lloyd is well-known as a health and wellness business, but less so as an F&B operator, despite running more than 100 restaurants in the UK and offering an attractive working environment for chefs, with perks including limited or no split shifts.

Kids club and poolside roles can also be a challenge, particularly as we offer a very busy ‘Summer at the Club’ product, requiring volumes of qualified team members for shorter seasonal periods.

With a shortage of skills in the market, we’re recruiting more for behaviours and transferable skills these days and then investing in people to secure them the necessary qualifications.

Apprenticeships are one of the best ways to ensure we have a pipeline of skilled people trained in our company values. We run these across a range of disciplines, such as PT, F&B, sports coaching, nursery nursing, operations and customer service. We also run management development courses, including our successful Step up to GM programme, which clearly defines a career pathway, so new recruits can see the development opportunities available.

Offering a competitive package – salary and a range of lifestyle and financial benefits including free access to our facilities – is only one part of attracting talent. Our greatest advocates are our existing team, so keeping them engaged is our number one priority. High levels of team engagement, developed through having a positive company culture, not only reduces team and member turnover, but it also boosts our reputation as being an employer of choice in our close-knit industry.

Finding staff is challenging, as unemployment is low in the Nordics. With the uncertainty over lockdown and the clubs being closed on and off for two to three years, we saw many PTs move into other industries. Although we were afraid key people in our business would leave, fortunately we didn’t see that.

We expect all of our staff to be passionate about fitness and to excel at motivating our members and from the gym floor to the digital development team, this can make it harder to recruit, but we are still seeing interest.

Although it was difficult to find PTs right after lockdown and this impacted our profitability in limited areas, the situation is easing now. As we employ our PTs, rather than expecting them to be self employed this helps. Many PTs are at an age where they’re looking to establish themselves, so need financial security.

In our recruitment campaigns, we focus on our brand strength: emphasising the purpose of the company, what we do for society, our approach to sustainability and our values in relation to diversity. We’re also carefully targeting where we recruit – for example, advertising on TikTok.

Young people are now generally more interested in what we can do for them as an employer than what they can do for us, but that’s okay! Fortunately our industry is appealing to young people because it does good, not just because it makes profits.

Another staffing trend for us is the move away from working from home. We’re encouraging people to work in the office as much as possible. Our staff have to be in the office three days a week, with flexibility on the other two, but increasingly we’re seeing them choose to work from the office full-time.

Undoubtedly businesses in the consumer-facing space have and continue to face difficulties in many aspects of people and culture.

The gym industry isn’t an easy one when it comes to this – median sector pay reflects that while there are really attractive senior roles available, the majority are more junior entry-level posts.

This can also be an industry which overpromises when it comes to the employee value proposition and – while I love the sector, the reality is that many frontline roles can be less rewarding and less exciting than imagined. Being honest about this is important in any recruitment effort and redoubling efforts to add employee value in other areas even more so. It’s all about what you promise your team members, which isn’t a list of employee benefits and discounts, it’s much richer than that.

An employee promise is about the way in which organisational culture feels to the team member and that’s very much about the immediate team dynamic – the level of trust and commitment to each other. Beyond that it’s about feeling seen, heard and invested in. And even beyond that it’s about feeling connected to a bigger picture through shared values and behaviour and an understanding of the contribution you make to a future in which you can be confident.

People will leave jobs, but they’re less likely to leave a team and a big picture to which they feel deeply connected.

Growing and retaining a great pool of engaged team members by making and committing to a promise like this is hard work and time consuming (taking years).

I’m not sure it’s a choice available to leaders across many industries any more, but it’s exceptionally rewarding for all involved and is the highest ROI strategy you can develop.

At Total Fitness we don’t have the best or most shiny, exciting product. We don’t do things the easy way and we don’t get it right all of the time. What we do promise is that more is possible with us, whatever that looks like for each team member. We have world class levels of employee engagement and most importantly, we have fun.

In 2022, five of our six annual cohort of ‘Elevators’ were given GM positions, which had an immediate impact on team engagement. Our career pathway was also recently recognised at the UK Company Culture awards, where we won the Next Generation award for our development of department heads to GMs. We’re now finalists in the British Training Awards and await recognition in the European Employer Brand Management awards.