Strategic Plan of Bounce Fitness
Strategic human resource planning is a process that identifies the current and future resource requirements of an organisation. This is mostly important for the organisation to achieve its strategic goals. At Bounce Fitness, which is a customer oriented fitness gym, the owners have planned the working of it in such a way that the members get special attention from personal trainers and the gym area is less crowded for making the customer feel comfortable and different from other gyms. For this strategy to work in the best way possible the owners should have a customer centric and diversified staff that can go that extra mile to support the fitness of their members. In this report, discussion about the management of human resource department to achieve their strategic goals will be done along with best practices or trends that will assist Bounce Fitness to manage its staff in the best possible way.
As bounce fitness is a large multinational organisation, they have implicated the strategy in their current policy to promote staff diversity. They understand how diversity can bring a change in their organisation and expressed this policy as their vision for recruiting and training the staff. The owners understand and cherish the value for a diversified staff. Bounce Fitness also wants to ensure that the staff is treated equally and encourages their staff to perform better and support them to bring in ideas to achieve their goals. The owners ensure that the organisation recognise their staff regardless of their race, age, religion or sex.
The fitness market in Australia has seen significant marketing trends like fitness enthusiast increasing day to day while working out and exercising has become part of daily lives over the last decade. The fitness organisations have incorporated memberships as a part of their fitness package for their employees to ensure that their staff keep fit and healthy all the time when they are around the customers training them.
The strategy of Bounce Fitness is to hire staff with diversified cultures, Australia as a developed nation is never short of these people and Bounce Fitness has the best available talent in the growing international market. The HR department of the organisation should hire trainers working in shifts and depending on the requirement of customer base, as this might tend to keep the gyms less crowded which will bring in more focus on customer’s fitness training.
The organisation should adopt technology to keep records and to improve customer service; this has been implemented by other fitness organisations around Australia. This will assist the gym to interact with customer frequently. “Gym Master” is a software used for good record keeping and customer logs, hence can be used by Bounce Fitness.
In 2015, the overtime regulation proposed by Australian Department of Labour had new salary thresholds for white-collar workers. This proposal raised the threshold of salary from $455/ to $970. The employer must abide by this rule and provide the required salary to their staff. Employee pay has also increased with minimum pay in effect providing paid sick time and equal pay. This law requires the employer to pay men and women holding the same position to be paid equally. This law also requires employers with up to ten workers to give five days paid sick leave a year to all employees. Worker’s compensation is also being discussed and Bounce Fitness should keep an eye on how this debate in the legislation emerges regarding insurance costs for workers.
Emerging Practices or Trends that may impact Bounce Fitness staff
The Fitness gym HR department has to inform the Centre managers about the strategies that need to be implemented for hiring diversified, fit and talented staff in giving best customer service and that abide by organisations ethics and policies. This can be done by setting up a meeting with managers, discussing clearly the requirement in hiring, then follow-up on the actions points through minutes of meeting and memos to internal staff and getting updates from them through e-mails.
The managers should be kept informed about the need for equal employment opportunity and diversified staff. The change in the market trends based on case studies of similar policy implementation by other organisation must be discussed with centre managers to get new technology and staffing requirement to be incorporated in the gyms.
The plan to hire a diversified staff is to achieve the strategy to emerge as the best employer in the fitness market and to provide equal job opportunity as per the laws of the government. Bounce Fitness should get this implemented by their internal Human Resource department. This choice for the work to be done by internal HR department is appropriate because the centre managers will listen to an internal department and abide by the policies drafted by it rather than taking instructions from a consultant or a third party. If the consultant or contractor performs the hiring elsewhere, then they will not be able to incorporate the staff into different fitness training requirements as centre managers will want to choose the best lot to keep their regular customers happy. Internal HR department will be aware of the requirement of a centre and will hire and send staff to that location based on the requirements of centre managers and customers and add value to the brand. Merging of trainers’ department and cleaning can change the look and environment of the gym as trainers can guide the cleaning staff to change the gym environment as per customer’s requirements.
As discussed earlier the HR department will have to hire based on the diversified strategic plan of Bounce Fitness. Human resource department will be aware of the practical nature of centre managers and will plan on what kind of staff they need to hire for getting better results from those managers. HR will also propose to merge the trainers’ and cleaning department to bring changes to the gym atmosphere as trainers can articulate the personal feedback of customers in a better way. The next strategy will be to install new “Gym Master” software for record keeping and customer service. These all-important aspects will be discussed with senior management with a proposed plan based on case studies, hence for getting their support in implementation.
Managing of diversity at the workplace is more than acknowledging differences in people. Risk will be combating discrimination, devaluing of cultural differences and hardships in inclusiveness for new employees. The manager should understand that certain talented staff has to be included to create a healthy competitive workforce. A contingency plan to mitigate those risks will be to make managers aware of discrimination and its consequences, managers made to understand their prejudices and cultural biases. If Bounce Fitness as an organisation learns to manage diversity at the workplace, then it will be easy to achieve success in the fitness centre market.
After the approval from the senior management, centre managers will be informed about hiring the new staff with diversified cultures to rationalise the requirement of customer centricity with niche skillset staff. They will be asked to refer talented people they know so that the HR can advantage from the manager’s PR and gain their confidence to implement this plan.
The plan for managing diversity at workplace will be monitored with the help of managers and staff at the centres. The monthly and quarterly meeting will be scheduled separately with manager and staff to get details of the difficulties faced by staff if any. Then a meeting with the complete staff will be set up to bring out the action points for mitigating the issues and communicating the importance of diversity for the centre and Bounce Fitness. Regular checks for the closure of action points through e-mails will be monitored.
To review the performance of the plan, below steps will be followed,
- Involve the employees to give feedback on relationship with centre staff
- Identify any issues from the feedback
- Agree on training and support for the staff
- Set dates to speak to the staff on equal work opportunity and diversity
- Set the organisations objectives clear
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