Front of mind for your staff, whether on the ground or in senior management, is the safety of your clients. Especially with gyms being full of equipment that, even though designed to be beneficial to health and fitness, can pose health and safety risks if used incorrectly or they develop faults. It is paramount to know that your equipment, services and personnel are all in prime condition, informed and optimised; to keep everyone safe so that they can improve their health and reach their goals without issue.

Unlocking Potential: the Virtual PA for Gyms

A glance over a room and semi-regular emailed briefings won’t cut it when it comes to safety and security. No longer is a tatty bit of signed paper or a laminated checklist that gets wiped clean every day enough to log and track all your health, hygiene and safety checks. 

So what are your alternatives? Especially at scale, with tens if not hundreds of venues, spreadsheets are clunky for these types of logs and they aren’t shared easily, there’s a lack of accountability and prompts aren’t clear. Changes made to offline versions aren’t reflected nationally, oversight from regional managers is difficult. It’s as if you need a fully online system with digital records that are shared instantly, tailored but standardised so that you know your whole business is on track… That’s where Inform People’s compliance and performance management software can be the reliable hub for auditing, risk assessments, knowledge sharing, training and more.

Act fast and focus on your role.

Whether it’s an opening up routine check, a close down security audit or a monthly visit by your Area Managers – every check can be digitised, deployed through the Virtual PA to all staff whose role it is to complete these checks, and then stored against the location so that remote colleagues can check the status of each of your gyms and you can review performance over time.

By tailoring your system to your people and their roles and responsibilities – we provide everyone with their own account and they each get prompted to only complete the tasks they are trained and expected to do, on a suitable schedule. 

This makes finding their tasks:

 

• • simple, the interface is designed to be easy to use so completion is quick

• • fast, once they are done they are free to get back to their other responsibilities

• • hassle free, no need to make copies or email head office teams and no chance to lose their check results in a pile of paperwork. 

In addition, due to the whole setup being online they can use a phone or tablet on a walkthrough rather than being tied to a computer.

Read more about Audits here: https://informpeople.com/features/auditing/

Maintain brand cohesion while honouring location quirks.

We know that some gyms run 24 hours a day so their routines won’t match those who operate a more scheduled open and close. Plus, there’s also locations that, due to their unique set-up, are available unstaffed at times. 

The Inform People platform is set up specifically for companies with hundreds of locations that need to maintain standards across all of them, but with the flexibility to reflect unique situations and requirements. The Organisational Structure of your company will be accurately reflected with any location attributes marked up and used in the rules and functionality of the platform to tailor the end user and reporting experiences. 

For example – If the majority of your locations are run from early morning until late at night with a close down routine and you also have a selection of 24 hour gyms – we would set an attribute against each of the 24 hour locations so that any differences in the audits completed or information required for training people is directed to the right accounts. 

Our system is specifically built to handle 10,000s of locations and manage both company consistency and individual location variations. You can provide audits, safety information and updates based on each person’s role, location and known skills.

Target different requirements such as :

 

• • 24 hour locations

• • Staffed/unstaffed

• • Certain machines/qualifications

Your workforce and their qualifications

Gyms, with their variety of team members, will more often than not have roles that often needing qualifications that need logging and monitoring,  related to their responsibilities and to maintain a record of their achievements. In the ever changing fitness world – with trends to follow and new best practices revealed – there is a desire to offer constant opportunities for enrichment so that your teams are in the know. You might even want to offer structured development training programmes and opportunities for personal and professional growth. 

So, how do you keep up to date with what your people know, where their skills lie, what their qualifications are and if there are relevant certificates with expiry dates, where do you store these, track them and keep on top of them?

The Virtual PA of course!

Within gyms, staying fully qualified on certain training and keeping track of certifications is crucial – managers using the Profile Page of each colleague to log their achievement and certificates will create a digital catalogue of each gym’s employees and their qualifications. When they also  upload expiry dates, this makes it possible to plan and organise refresher training before certification lapses, making sure your teams are fully qualified with no gaps. Tracking qualifications in this way also allows management, through built in live reporting, to see exactly the numbers of specific qualifications at every gym across the nation. 

Types of Learning: Compliance and Development

Not only will your team use their accounts for daily location checks, and their managers to log their certificates, but their same login will be their portal to all the information they need for getting started, regular updates, detailed development and reference.

You need your people to be role models of health and safety from day 1 and the best way to facilitate this is a hybrid learning approach – from hands-on demonstrations to online training and onboarding policy approval. You need to make sure all types of training are recorded. Some of the most valuable learning takes place in person. Not everything can or should be completed online, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a log of it so you know who knows what. 

Location specific training might also be related to the specific machines available to the public – or venues that offer classes compared to those that don’t. By knowing the quirks of your venues, the system can guarantee a streamlining of information so that it is focused and specific – uncluttered Virtual PAs with tasks relevant to their own roles but also immediate access to any new information. 

For example, not all gyms have a specific brand of rowing machine – but as they are rolled out through each location – they can be marked up with this identifier which then adds the relevant tasks to the Virtual PA of  all the personnel at each gym so that they know all up-to-date information to share with clientele or the safety aspects to check during daily checklists and audits.

Behind the scenes

At Inform People, we listen to you and use technology to reflect your decisions, personality, diversity and rules – without guesswork. We don’t use AI to guess – we use a robust set of rules that give exact results.

With this in mind, knowing that you could use the Virtual PA for:

Your places

 

• • daily safety checks

• • Legionella audits

• • weekly brand standards

• • area manager inspections 

• • fire risk assessments

Your people

 

• • learning and compliance pathways

• • day 1 compliance training

• • skills growth

• • offline events

• • certificates with expiry dates

• • personnel risk assessments

• • growth plans

Which pressure point do you want to tackle first?

By making each location and person have a tailored experience via the VPA, they get exactly what they need, focused and direct, so that they can be prepared and ready for their main role on the floor and protecting themselves and the public through regular quantifiable checks. 

Having oversight from a distance for senior managers is undeniable – leaving them free to plan their in person visits more effectively – see where gaps need to be addressed, and trust that the health and safety of their employees and customers is front of mind.

Let us know what you are thinking: informpeople.com/contact-us