Building a Strong Team Environment

Effectively managing your team (staff) is critical for your long-term success, yet it is a component that is often overlooked by the small business owner. Building and maintaining a positive business culture leads to healthy employee relationships.

Any organization, big or small, can be more successful when they enable team members to achieve and grow. Committed and engaged employees with positive attitudes are critical for success. As a gym owner, you have the ability to facilitate positive employee relationships.

Here are a few good tips to keep in mind:

  • Get to know your employees and understand what is important to them. This will help you motivate them and it allows your employees to trust and confide in.
  • Combine a positive company culture with a strong business platform. If you are committed to quality service and you show it day-after-day, your employees will pick up on it and they will become just as proud to work there as you do.
  • Let your employees know how their actions impact your business and your customers. When a student comments on a positive experience they had training, pass it along to your instructor and celebrate the success.
  • Let your employees know how important they are to your success. As a gym owner, you can’t teach every class, sell every new membership, collect every payment, come up with every new member acquisition strategy and idea, and keep every corner of your facility’s wall mats looking clean and professional. You need your employees… they are important so let them know that, OFTEN!
  • Find a way to formalize your employee/instructor evaluations (if you don’t do employee evaluations, that’s another problem). Use things like New Students, Retention of Existing Students, Timely Membership Payments, Student Attendance, and Communication to Students and Parents as regular measurements that you can track at the employee level.

Every employee needs, and wants, a scorecard, especially the competitive, athletic type of person that gravitates to working in Martial Arts and MMA. That is how your employees know if they are successful and making progress towards bigger and better things. It’s not just your students that need to feel like they are making progress towards their goals!

When you enable your employees to gauge the results of their actions with measurements that show levels of success, you are providing them with a critical job satisfaction tool and building a true, thriving team environment.