Pros
-free membership -fun environment, not sitting behind a desk all day -good team of employees to work with
Cons
-extremely long hours, especially during closeout. All DHs and Membership Team are required to work 36 hours the last 3 days of the month. Absolutely ridiculous, especially when you work in a department that has nothing to do with a month-end close out. Divide the hours you work by what you actually make and you can make more money somewhere else. Also, salary department heads do not have holiday pay. Some GMs let DHs take holidays off...but in my instance...we have to use PTO days for HOLIDAYS! New employees only get 7 days for the first two years...so basically my first two years all my PTO was spent on Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas so I could spend time with my family. -GMs that over promise and under deliver. My GM will tell you what you want to hear and then act like the conversation never happened. I know not all the GMs are like this (I've worked with several and a few of them do legitimately care about you) but in my case my GM could care less about you regardless of what he tells you to his face. -GMs are not competent in ALL areas of the club and show absolutely no interest in becoming knowledgeable. All they care about is revenue being high and payroll being low -Keeping payroll budgets low are clearly more important than the safety of staffing to ratio in the child center, family swim, camps... etc. As much as corporate preaches how important safety is and focuses everything on safety (the way it should be) the GMs toss that out of the window when it comes to saving payroll money. They act like safety comes first... but then finish the conversation with "I don't care what you do but you need to be at 90% of your payroll budget this month". What is the point of having a payroll budget/goal if we are supposed to be at 85-90% each month. -The certification processes for becoming a department head are very extensive and I believe they should be. But they don't necessarily teach you how to do your job, all it does is make you memorize a ton of information and regurgitate it on a paper test. You get thrown back into the club and you are completely overwhelmed - don't go to your GM though, because he'll have no idea. -The GMs do not act fast on hiring department heads when one leaves. Turnover is very high so this is the case a lot. They act fast on the departments that drive in more revenue. For example the Kids Activities Dept Head position has been open at my club for months!!! The poor employees that work in that department are swimming and going nuts with the lack of leadership and un-organization. Our aquatics department head position was also open from April - July and our swim lesson program went completely downhill and there was SO many unhappy and unsatisfied members. But of course since these departments don't drive as much revenue as Sales or PT.... the GM could care less. -Low pay for front line team members and base pay of department heads. There is also no consistency between clubs and departments. All the department heads a few months ago for my department got together and started talking about salaries and where we all were at and found out that we were completely all over the board. The bigger clubs were making less than the smaller clubs... new people were making more than the employees who have been with the company for years. Talking about this and the lack of structure made me sick. -The only department head that your GM will truly care about is the Sales DH I could go on and on......
