Staff retention: keeping the best of the best

three gym people leaning on spin bike

Staff retention: keeping the best of the best

Staff come and go, and regular departures can be a prickly topic if you’re experiencing a high turnover trend. Hiring new employees and training them in your facility procedures and leisure centre software costs you time, money and a whole lot of effort. So what does it take to keep the excellent, qualified team players you have put so much effort into recruiting and training?

Help them find their purpose and passion

Give your staff a clear career path. Show them that they have a future with your business, and that you can offer them stability if they’re willing to work for it. Help them understand the opportunities that could be available to them and duties, responsibilities, or skills they’d need to learn to achieve the next stage within your business.

Drive and motivation can do wonders for your team’s performance. Even if you have staff that aren’t focussed on working their way up the ladder, this doesn’t mean they don’t need purpose in their work. Encourage them to find their “why” and they’ll be sure to stick around.

Be fair, focussed and consistent

Put yourself in your employees’ shoes for a moment. If you give permission for one employee to take time off, for instance, but refuse the same request from a different employee – is this really fair or consistent? Not so much. Such actions can drive a wedge between yourself and your team, and trust can be fractured.

As an owner or manager, you need to look at your actions and how they affect your staff. Be conscious of your decisions and what they mean for your team, and make it a priority to treat all of your team members with the same level of respect and fairness. Consistency is key in the long run!

Understand why employees leave or stay

If you want to learn why staff choose to leave, you firstly need to understand why others choose to stay. Surveying your team and evaluating their overall happiness in the workplace is just one step towards learning the characters that will stay the distance.

Likewise, conduct exit interviews with employees so you can glean their reasons for leaving and create strategies to help prevent other great staff following suit. These strategies could be simple as conducting team building activities, hosting a weekly team meeting to actively communicate with one another, or revaluating how your staff are rewarded.

Centaman’s leisure centre software can help

Centaman is here to help you bridge knowledge gaps in using leisure centre software solutions if you are experiencing high staff turnover and struggling to train your new starters in your software system, among their many other duties.

Each month Centaman hosts a completely free, interactive webinar that you can choose to attend online in real time, or catch-up on later. These free webinars give you an in-depth refresh or further training on your Centaman system and are particularly useful for any new users who need to take the time to learn the ins and outs of the software – time you don’t have. Let Centaman’s webinars take some of this training pressure off your shoulders!

If you’d like to watch any of Centaman’s past webinars, simply check-out their Youtube channel here, and stay tuned – past webinars will soon be available on the Centaman website!

Likewise, Canvas is great tool to help the new starters find their feet with your software. Canvas is a new online learning portal coming soon to Centaman. It makes training new employees easy with step by step guides, videos and units they can complete. It enables your team to self-learn the ins and outs of Centaman’s powerful system, and you can rest easy knowing they won’t be trained with hand-me-down knowledge from other staff.

To learn more about Centaman’s software training tools, get in touch.