Used to be a great company but it's been going downhill for a while now. - Manager Virgin Active Employee Review

3.0
Mar 23, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Overall good facilities (varies from club to club, but nowhere near premium companies like Equinox or Third Space). -Free membership for you and a friend. -Can still be a potentially good place for you to start your career and gain some experience so you can move onto better things.

Cons

-More than ever now, it's all about money, margins and financial performance. -Their Training Academy is basically non-existent. -Unprepared staff everywhere (from pts to management who don't have a clue of what they're doing or how to support their front of line staff. I'm not even going to talk about Head Office. Marketing, payroll..... -Awful pay (budgets keep getting higher, they give you more and more responsabilities and your salary stays same through the years. -Blaming culture. -Extremely disorganised. -No uniform for months and was still waiting for the "new uniform" to be released. -No proper induction for staff. For management roles they pretty much cover only the very basic/core tasks of your role and you learn most of things by yourself or from another more experience manager in the same role as you in another club (if you're lucky enough to have regional meetings). For pts, lazy induction at head office and high expectations of performance from week 1 which creates an stressful and toxic relationship between the head coach and the new starter, leading to a high staff turnover, which therefore leads to team disengagement (again, all of this doesn't matter if you hit your budget/margin at the end of the month). -Keep promising changes that never happen (pt model, looking at you).

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Virgin Active Response
7y
Hi there, Thank you for taking the time to write a review, and provide your feedback below, we’re glad to hear you made use of the benefits and gained experience during your time with us. We really do appreciate your feedback and can see how passionately you felt about your role in your time with the company. We understand that PT is a hard business, and the need to make a viable PT model for both our staff and for us a business, which has involved trials of our new model which are constantly reviewed and evolving. I can assure you that your comments & feedback will be passed on, and once again, we’d like to thank you for your time. If you'd like to discuss this further, please do contact the People Team on peoplehub@virginactive.co.uk All the best, Jessica

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