How do you create a consistent workplace culture with multiple sites & hard-to-reach employees? With Ruth Jackson

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Leaders Podcast from Make a Difference Media, the events and content curation company for ambitious professionals passionate about workplace culture, health and well being. Here leaders get real about the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. It's honest, strategic, practical and um, packed with insight to help you lead with impact. And if you want to join our Leaders club for exclusive events, content and a like minded community, email editorakeadifference uh, media and what do you know, it's free. Now let's dive into this week's challenge and how to solve it. So imagine uh, the scene. You're responsible for the health and wellbeing of your employees and your organization is multi site, spread out geographically and you have many employees who are frontline, customer facing and so not necessarily spending much time on a computer. How do you then ensure that you are creating a consistent workplace culture and you are reaching all your employees? Now today with us, to help us work through this challenge, we have Ruth Jackson, Chief people officer at the gym group. Welcome to the podcast Ruth.

Speaker B: Thank you very much. Nice to be here.

Speaker A: So that's quite a big problem challenge let's say. And you were just telling me you have 260 gyms spread, spread all around the UK. Um, and how many employees is that?

Speaker B: So we're around 2,000 employees across the whole of the gym group.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And 75 of those employees are in those gyms, multi site gyms all around the UK and only 255ish are in a gym support sort of head office type location. So yeah, 85 are in our gyms from frontline customer facing employees.

Speaker A: Yeah. So that means that those 85% are doing things like being personal trainers actually

Speaker B: in the gyms or managers, personal trainers, instructors in the gyms, then the management teams in the gyms and even some of our gym support employees aren't necessarily in an office, they are out and about doing the field based type roles as operations management, facilities management, that type of thing. So I think any multi site operation will recognize the challenge of frontline teams, not necessarily on a computer for their job. How do you give them access to company information, what's going on, et cetera is something that you have to face into as a challenge all the time.

Speaker A: So tell us how you faced into that then. What have you done? Where have you started?

Speaker B: Well, like any multi site organization, I've worked across hospitality as well as in the fitness industry and um, been in this place before. You know, you do have company communications, portals, platforms, whatever you want to call them and Obviously you can work hard to put information out there, but if you haven't got a population that are going to access that portal, you've got to then think, well, how do I actually distill those messages and get more information to the people that I want it to go to?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: So I think lots of people would recognize that challenge. When we do do information that we want to share, we try and uh, think about the different ways we could use that information. So actually if we can create some sort of webinar or podcast type thing like this, we could then hopefully make sure it's available then to people to then listen to on the bus on the way home from work. Right. Or however they might do that. But we really think about how do you tap into that culture within the gym? Each gym is its own sort of entity. Yeah.

Speaker A: I was going to say because you've got that many gyms, is it like you have many cultures then? Um, within your group.

Speaker B: Yeah. And whilst a gym is a gym, lots of gyms will have different demographics that they're operating in, etc. Etc. So we try and think about, well, how do we make sure that we're getting the information through to people in a consistent way? We anchor that back into our business purpose and our business purpose is all about breaking down barriers, breaking down barriers to fitness. So make it accessible to all.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: When it comes to communication, we are lucky in that we have a manager in every gym and that manager, whilst they are also on the front line, does then have access to the company portals and a computer.

Speaker A: So that person becomes key then in your comm strategy.

Speaker B: So that person. Yeah, those managers are really important. We have the layers within the organization, if you like, where we've got people that can take that information and pass it on and we ask them to bring that to life in their gyms when they're visiting the gyms, when they're in the gyms to talk about some of the things that we do. And we try and apply that sort of consistent approach to it in that we link it back to the purpose of breaking down barriers.

Speaker A: Yeah. So talk to me in relation to female health, because I know you've used female health as a really good example of addressing stigma and breaking down barriers to fitness. Tell me how you've used that specific demographic.

Speaker B: So if I take the example of, uh, female health and the approach that we touch, try and create that consistent culture. Uh, the way we did that was we started when we piloted this, we started by asking team members in Frontline positions in our gyms who were interested in female specific fitness to put themselves forward to be trained in this particular subject. And what we saw from the pilot was that we got loads of interest from these champions, ambassadors, female health specialists, whatever you want to call them to be, who became such ambassadors and so passionate about the subject that they were telling other teams about that, uh, teams in their own gyms, teams in their neighboring gyms, et cetera. And, um, then from the pilot there grew the demand because more people then saying, I want to, I'm putting their hands up saying, I want to learn more about this. So the beauty of the FHF Female Health first program became this network that grew organically because we had more and, um, more and m more of our fitness trainers.

Speaker A: So it's almost like grassroots rather than from corporate. You must do this. It was much more creating the smaller pilot and building from there. So it, as you said, grew organically rather than some seeming corporate strategy. Is that right?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that was what made the difference with this particular example of people that had a genuine interest who then got something from it, benefited from the training and the knowledge and education they got in the space of female health and fitness. Uh, then we're telling other people about it was benefiting them in their role at work and for themselves personally, whether it was you as a female or as a mate. We had plenty of men do this program as well, who then saw how it benefited women in their life, family members, partners, etc. As well as the members that in the gyms that they were working with. And because they were almost the ambassadors for it and so positive about it, they were telling other people. And therefore we had more people asked to go on the program. We provided more training programs.

Speaker A: Almost like your communications channel was actually word of mouth there, uh, rather than sending out lots of comms from head office.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So therefore people wanted to do it. Since we launched it three years ago, we've had over 300 of our frontline team members go through the program and learn about it, who now can then talk about it elsewhere. And again, I think very organically, it's not driven by me or somebody else in my team. They've created their own networks. WhatsApp groups, you know, WhatsApp groups are great for teams to connect because everyone's on their phones, people are on phones, but they've got their own WhatsApp groups and channels where they can talk to each other and share ideas or.

Speaker A: So is that between gyms or is it within gyms because I'm just thinking about your different sites. Have you managed to create any cohesion between the different gyms around it or are you talking within a gym culture?

Speaker B: Within a gym culture, they would do that. We have got a channel that we've provided centrally, but M, that is on a Microsoft Teams platform that not necessarily everybody will engage with in the same way. So I think it's the learning that we're trying to grow with this is that we're trying different things and providing different options so that depending on what works for you, hopefully there's still a way you can go and get that information. So whether that's in your own gym and talking to somebody who's hopefully been on that program. 140 of our gyms are accredited as female health gyms. So they've got somebody in that gym that has been through that program. So 140 out, 260. We're starting to grow. The critical mass that we're looking for, we're not there yet. So we're trying different things. So if it's a teams channel that people can go and get information from, we have got our internal comms platform. People can access that, they can go and get information. But I do think at grassroots level it is about that word of mouth and team members that are passionate finding something that is useful to them, that they are interested in and actually benefits them in their role and personally creates the interest in it so that it starts to permeate across the organization.

Speaker A: So m, you're tapping into purpose there. You're also tapping into a, uh, sort of relatable, uh, life stage, like you say. We've talked about menopause in the past, for example. And um, most women will get to a stage where they go through menopause, which makes it universal experience. I suppose tapping into universal experiences then can create some kind of consistency around your message. Are there any other life stages, life cycle approaches you can talk to me about? Obviously, before we hit record, we're talking about Keep Britain Working. You're a vanguard. And obviously that life cycle approach is one that sir, uh, Charlie Mayfield really advocates as a really good way to get consistency. Can you tell me a bit more about your thinking around the life cycle?

Speaker B: Yeah, that was born out of where we started three years ago. Women will hit perimenopause and menopause eventually. People have different experience of that. And then it got to me and my team thinking about, well, what are the issues or the barriers? Culture and what we're trying to create as a Good employer for younger people who are working in our gyms. Is it something that is affecting them because they're becoming a parent for the first time, Just whatever life stage it might be. And actually if you take the fhf, the female element of menopause and take that beyond that to other conditions that women, and it is women I'm talking about here that might be impacted by, We've now started to really explore what we can do from a menstruation friendly employer perspective. And again, issues that women might face that might affect them at work. What can we do as a good employer to support their wellbeing when it comes to that? So just by taking the life cycle approach, it helps us and my team to hone in on, okay, let's take this issue for this particular life stage and think about how do we break down barriers to support people in that issue so that they can be well at work and do well at work and be supportive? Uh, we've taken that approach from menstruation and conditions around menstruation. We've taken that approach with carers. So providing a carers network and carers leave and things like that to support those that have those demands on them outside of work. We've taken that approach with disability and um, what can we do in the workplace to support people with disability? What can we do? And then all the way through to one of our employee network groups is really focused this year on how do you support people who are at the other stage of their working career and thinking about retirement and transitioning out of that working phase and what support would they want from us as they go

Speaker A: into that m. So that's great. So that's kind of using the purpose again and using the life stage to create consistency within the culture. What about the challenges of. You mentioned employee networks there? What about the challenges of running ergs when you've got such a multi site organization?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think what's worked pretty well with our employee network groups is that we try and make sure we don't force anybody obviously to do these things, but we try and ensure that we've got somebody who is in uh, two or three people who are in a gym who are part of the network group. So they are representing that course we have somebody then who is a field based person, an operator who understands that dichotomy of work, of being in gyms sometimes, sometimes not in gyms, in the head office or gym support as we call it. And then people that are in gym support who are more Office based so that each group has a representation across the different types of employees that we've got. And then what we've all started utilizing, especially since COVID which is platforms like this and Zoom and Teams. So because we don't have to wait till we can get people together and we can have people from all over the country in one place on a technological platform like Zoom to be able to talk to each other and take the work forward in terms of the

Speaker A: ideas, I mean it's great we've got this technology but there is also no replacement for the face to face as well. And I saw you do a conference which looks like quite a big affair. And what about that importance of bringing the different gems together and creating that face to face cohesion?

Speaker B: Yeah. And again, like any multi site organization, I've never known any that don't do it this way. Obviously they're in regions, they're in clusters, geographically. You can then bring teams together and every region has a geographically based regional manager who can then afford to bring those teams together on a fairly regular basis. But I think the beauty of the technology now bind the two. So they will do that face to face piece but they'll also be able to have a national managers forum online where every manager can hear the same messages from the operational leadership at the same time. But then it is, you know, it's very much down to people. Right. People being able to communicate and willing to take those messages and share them back. So that regional manager, so one of the most important roles that we've got where they can go back out and share those messages with their ah, teams in a more of a face to face geographical um, situation. And you're right, we do once a year we bring everyone, we bring all our management team together along with the gym support teams in our annual conference because nothing quite beats that opportunity to catch up with colleagues from around the country, network, talk about what's going on, share ideas, um, and have that opportunity to talk.

Speaker A: Yeah. And um, just thinking back to, we've moved on a bit from, from the life cycle but I just wanted to briefly come back to that thing as you are uh, a vanguard and there might be some people reading Keep Britain Working. They have never even thought about the life cycle and how you approach that. Given what you've learned so far. Is there any advice you'd have to a complete newcomer to this about thinking in this way that might be different for them?

Speaker B: Uh, I think again, if I may bring it down to breaking down barriers. When I joined this Organisation. I loved the purpose of breaking down barriers because I think you can apply it in a different, you know, to whatever circumstance you might find yourself in. And one of the things that we've got here is our, uh, Accelerate PT program, which is about breaking down barriers to individuals that maybe would like a career of fitness. And a lot of the roles in fitness at that sort of customer facing level do require you to have a qualification which you might not be able to necessarily afford to do for yourself. But our Accelerate PT program, working with DWP and the Job Centre plus meant that we could provide a route into working in our gyms via Job Centre plus, where they could talk to the Job Centre about their interest in fitness. They would match them up with the gym group potentially, if it was the right fit, support them in providing that qualification and that training which our managers would then Support people, mentoring, etc. To support them in getting their qualification and then provide them an opportunity of a job interview and a potential role at the end of it. So that was that, uh, sort of breaking down barriers. How do you use the partnerships that are out there and available to any employer, uh, big or small, could work with jobcentre plus to understand how they could introduce people to their organisation, their industry as a place to work and then understand what would need to happen to support people. And we work with the DWP and JobCenter plus to create this program so that we could provide those qualifications and enable somebody. And we've had individuals that have joined that who young and sort of early in their careers or people that have been in work a little bit, a little while but have decided they wanted a career change. So recently I was talking to one of our personal trainers who was in the Navy, decided the Navy wasn't for him, found out about our Accelerate PT program, has gone through that program, is now working as a personal trainer in one of our gyms and really enjoying the new role that he's got.

Speaker A: M so it feels like to me what you're saying is really important in culture is having those values but actually tangibly bringing them to life. Am I right in saying that? Because a lot of organizations say they have these values and they might be on the wall, but how do you actually bring them to life? What have you learned about that?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a big challenge, isn't it, for people? But I think, I mean, again, it sounds cliched, but if you actually live the values and actually believe in the values that you've got and if, and it's More our purpose than. As well as our values, but our purpose of breaking down barriers. If you think, well how do I break down a barrier to something that it makes you think about a problem in a slightly different way as opposed

Speaker A: to

Speaker B: it's not a problem.

Speaker A: Well, I suppose what you're saying there is you're taking the purpose and you're using that as a lens for the culture. Again. So any organization can do that and that actually shows that you can't just copy and paste a strategy for, you know, do this and you will create a good culture. Actually a good culture comes down to understanding your company's purpose and then using that as a lens for whatever you may do, whether that be a piece of communication or whether it be looking at a life stage and you know, deciding how to approach that, I do

Speaker B: think, yeah, using the construct of breaking down barriers is a different lens. You can put on something to try and answer a challenge or a problem that you might be facing or to think about how are you being consistent with it. And then you can drive that into your messaging around. This is how we want to break down barriers and we're providing this or we're doing this or we're creating this opportunity to m. Break down barriers and it gives you that. I suppose that red thread that ah, runs through things. That is a common theme of this is what we're trying to achieve. One of our values is friendliness, which might sound a bit soft maybe, but fundamentally I think that links really nicely to breaking down barriers by being friendly, by being supportive, by creating that environment that is welcoming and friendly. You are breaking down barriers to those that might feel nervous or intimidated or scared about something that actually we. I know I'm walking into something that is supportive because we exhibit that breaking down barriers through that friendliness value. Yeah, I think that that uh, sort of does give you again that sort of lens to look at it and that thread of continuity that says this is what we're about in this organization.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you mentioned there that you know, these things can sound soft. And the other thing that's difficult is how on earth do you measure this? How do you measure if what you're wanting to happen is actually happening? In terms of the culture that's been created on the ground, particularly if it's multi site and you've got lots of different locations to try and measure culture, how on earth do you do it?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good point. I mean we have the typical measures like engagement surveys. Right. And we ask the question about how it feels to work here. We ask how the values resonate, all of those things and those scores are pretty good. I think the harder measures are, uh, the retention of your team. So again, I think in my experience personally of multi site organisations, turnover can be high, retention can be low, people come and go and I think a real sign of the measure of success over the last few years for me being here at the gym group has been that we've seen retention improve and improve and improve and it's the best it's ever been in terms of those frontline customer facing roles, as we call, you know, as we could call them generically. But those fitness trainers, personal trainers in our gyms, the retention of those people is getting stronger and I have to believe that that's because we create a good environment, we break down barriers to enable them to do the job and to enjoy being at work. And they're staying with us because.

Speaker A: Do you ever sort of do in depth interviews or anything?

Speaker B: Is it honestly in depth? Not, maybe, not maybe we should. But I think lots of us do spend a lot of time in our gyms. I personally love fitness, so I go to train in the gyms anyway.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So when I'm in the gyms I talk to the people, right. And when I ask them how it's going, how are you? They tell me they're enjoying their job, that they enjoy the gym, they enjoy the people that they're working with and have a good, you know, that sense of community we were talking about earlier, they get on with the people they work with, they enjoy it. You know, of course it's not perfect everywhere, but we make sure that we certainly sense that people are feeling like they enjoy being there. But we have got other mechanisms outside of the survey that we will invite people to take part in and it's really up to them, but it's. If we want to know more about how they might feel about something, we are looking at our values at the moment as an example to understand if they resonate in more detail. And we will bring together a group, a listening group and we will invite personal trainers, managers, people in the office environments to come and talk to us and answer some questions. So they're a bit of a deeper dive there. Uh, and the other example probably is we do quite a lot of mentoring schemes. So we've got our traditional mentoring schemes. In fact, I've done two sessions today, two individuals in the gym support teams that have been assigned to me as a mentor. But we also do reverse mentoring. Oh yeah. We've run a couple of cohorts of that now where, uh, we match somebody up with a senior leader in the organization, with somebody that is from a very different background or different life stage, different age, whatever it might be. So. So that they can hear from a different perspective. So my most recent reverse mentoring experience, my mentor was a fitness manager in one of our gyms who is in his early 20s, so considerably younger than me, male, working in one of our gyms on that front line all the time. And we had some great conversations.

Speaker A: Yeah, what was that like?

Speaker B: Uh, it'd be fascinating and lovely chap and very chatty. And we talked about all sorts of things. But, you know, fundamentally it's really helpful for me to understand his perception of how do I grow my career, how do I manage people, because, you know, we talked quite a bit about the fact that some of the team members that he manages are older than him. And, um, what does that mean for him? We talked about how does he progress, like, how does he learn more, what he wants out of it, how work is important to his life and how he can manage that balance of work and life, which is the utopian question, I guess. But yeah, it was great to hear just that different perspective.

Speaker A: Yeah. We did a podcast on reverse mentoring. We had the director of well being of a law firm, M and his mentee, who was a much younger woman who is Italian, living in a different site. And, uh, they got very emotional at the end, actually. There was almost like tears in their eyes talking about the whole experience. So I think it can get quite deep. But yeah, so you were going to say you're doing some work around values and listening groups, M. And potentially. So where do you see this going, this culture work in the future? What kind of thing are you looking to work on?

Speaker B: Well, there's a couple of things, actually. I want to explore the values, the business. The values have been in the organization for a few years. They work, they're good. I do think they are lived, but I would say that. But I think you've got to constantly challenge yourself to think, is it working? Is it right? Are they still resonating with people? And I think it's just a good habit to get into challenge your own things and not just let them carry on as they were. The business has grown quite a lot since the values were first introduced. It's double the size it was when those values were first introduced. So do they still work and they still fit for purpose and going out and doing the listening groups to ask our Teams m what they think of those values has been really insightful. We're at the very early stage of that sort of thinking.

Speaker A: So you do have a big project coming up that you can't tell me the details of, but you can sort of give me m a clue. Can you tell me about that?

Speaker B: Well, I think yeah, it's that constant challenge of as the organisation, we're lucky that we're a growing organisation. The number of gyms that we've got is growing, the team sizes that we've got is growing. And I take it upon myself to think, well, okay, are we still creating the environment that we want to create? Are we looking after that culture as we grow as a business, let's understand the value still working, the ways in which we get to our teams. Does that still work? Could we think about doing that slightly differently to create more opportunity for that face to face, deeper understanding of what's happening? Um, yeah, it's hard to say too much because it's early stages, but yeah, just I think challenging myself to think about are we really making the most of every opportunity to hear what our teams think, to respond to that and to respond to the challenges or the barriers they might be facing so that we can try and break those down, find ways to make life better in

Speaker A: line with your whole purpose, breaking down barriers. Very nice ending. Cool. Well, the last question that I always ask on this podcast is, uh, called the Alien Question. So I ask interviewees to imagine that a spaceship has just landed in your car park and an alien steps out and they have got the power to release unlimited intergalactic budget into workplace health and well being. But only if you just, you, Ruth, can convince them that, that it's worth investing in. What would you say to this, this little alien or big alien? I don't know. However you imagine this alien, um, what would you say to this alien about why it's so worth investing in workplace health and well being?

Speaker B: I would say to my big alien that I think that you cannot underestimate the power of fitness at, uh, whatever level and that doesn't need to be running a marathon, but just fitness as a whole at the endorphins and the feel good factor that it will give you that will support your overall well being. So if you can find a way to spread that love and to think about how you can get into fitness no matter what, what's going on for you, even just five, ten minutes a day could make a difference to how you feel about your life and work and everything else. That you've got going on around you.

Speaker A: So you would basically get the alien to the gym.

Speaker B: Yes, yes. Cool.

Speaker A: You can't argue with that. Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Speaker B: You're welcome.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Make a Difference Leaders Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please rate, review and subscribe. It really helps us get the message out there about the value of health and well being to the world. Perhaps there's a colleague or C Suite exec who would really benefit from listening to this episode. Why not share it with them? And remember, you can join our exclusive members club by emailing editorakeadiference. Uh, Media. Bye for uh now.