The past year has been perhaps the most challenging ever for the health club industry and for gym managers in particular. Thanks to the pandemic, it’s likely that many of your procedures and training policies have been overhauled, and you may not be sure how effective the changes have been or how thoroughly they’ve been adopted. Maybe you’re already realizing you can’t get these answers from the old-school, paper-based checklists and audit procedures.
That means it’s past time to implement a tool that can make your operations run more smoothly and could help bolster the success of all your facilities at a time when there are no guarantees. We’re talking about digital field audit solution. Here’s how it works.
Why Now?
Let’s start with the changes caused by COVID-19. In order for your business to remain open, it’s critical for every single one of your employees, contractors and guests to understand and follow the latest public health and sanitation guidelines, such as:
- Documenting daily health checks for everyone on site
- Making sanitation products available for guest use throughout each facility
- Increasing the frequency and scope of sanitation procedures by employees
- Establishing consistent enforcement of recommended procedures for mask usage and social distancing
- Ensuring proper use and storage of EPA-approved disinfectants
Using a digital, mobile gym checklist app makes it quick and easy for your employees, management team, and on-site auditors to find the current evaluation and inspection forms, to complete them as often as needed, and to access all audit findings and actions online anytime.
There are other advantages, as well. These days you’re probably doing facility drop-ins and field assessments more often in an effort to ensure that safety protocols are being followed, which paves the way for any gym’s success. The faster and more efficiently you and your management team can complete these audits, the more time is freed up for important responsibilities like mentoring employees, working with franchisees, and overseeing any employee onboarding or retraining.
We just referred to all audit data being housed in the app online and available on any mobile device in real time. This means you can analyze each location’s compliance and performance while on site. Being able to easily identify any trends can tell you how each facility is doing in relation to others, or even how it’s faring from shift to shift; then you can immediately start addressing any shortcomings. The field app also houses your action plan templates, so clear plans can be quickly created and assigned to employees for completion while you’re still in the building.
Why Not Paper?
You may have noticed it’s impossible to get these benefits from handwritten audits and basic spreadsheets. These outdated methods are inefficient to the point of being counterproductive, both for your field staff and for those who maintain operational oversight throughout your organization. The inefficiencies boil down to accuracy and time.
Having to transcribe or copy information from written forms to electronic spreadsheets invites human error, even assuming the spreadsheet formulas themselves are accurately formatted. This transcription process can take hours, if not days. Further, you might have different auditors conducting their assessments in different facilities, and all maintaining different versions of the same spreadsheets, each with its own scoring, notes and action plans. All these disparate data points then have to be compiled into one location in order to show the full scope of operational procedures, which means your data undergoes a second time-consuming transcription process that can introduce errors. In the interim, some of the data becomes outdated, and you have no way to know which data that is.
In other words, it’s hard enough to identify core operational issues across your gyms without introducing time delays, errors and incomplete data into your reporting. In this era of razor-thin profit margins, you need detailed data that reflects your organization’s achievement of core values in order to maintain the consistency across locations that your customers expect.
Why a Digital Field Audit Solution?
Here’s how mobile, digital field audit software allows all assessments to be quickly completed on site while also increasing the data’s accuracy and validity. Performing an audit becomes as simple as opening up the app on your phone, swiping and tapping, even dictating or snapping a quick photo or shooting a video. There’s no need to transcribe from handwritten notes or file any paperwork separately. When you’re done, the audit is instantly submitted digitally and the system updates in real time.
This real-time, automated scoring provides an in-depth picture of all your audit data, not just for one gym, but for all facilities, all audits, and all operational components in order to determine which locations are consistently succeeding or falling short. You can see trends as they develop and respond with remedial and preventive actions that help your organization achieve operational excellence as well as full compliance with brand standards.
This ability to save time, reduce costs, and increase operational efficiency has made field software indispensable for chains that want to stay competitive.
All the Reasons You Need
MeazureUp’s digital field auditing app is a one-stop solution where all reports from all facilities are compiled in real time into a single dashboard on a cloud-based platform. MeazureUp’s clients appreciate how its built-in data analysis reports make it easy to spot trends and core operational issues. It presents error-free, actionable data to help ensure not just the success of one facility, but your entire organization. And not only does it streamline auditing procedures; it also allows you to update policies and procedures just once and instantly push out the latest versions to every employee and contractor so that everyone is consistently kept on the same page.
More time to spend on non-administrative responsibilities, more effective actions taken in the field, less chance for human error, and all data available anytime, from anywhere, so you can make better decisions in the exact moment when you can create the most effective change. So the question really is, are you ready to give us a try? If you can see how going digital will improve your field audit processes and results, test out MeazureUp for free today.
