Life Time Fitness Reviews

Pros

Nice facility to exercise in.

Cons

Horrible compensation.
Work/life balance is non-existent.
Virtually no opportunities for advancement.

Advice to Senior Management

You should not expect to keep professional sales people if your compensation structure is designed to pay individuals at $10.00 - $12.00 hourly. Please stop with the insane motivational or "JACKED" emails. Those are designed purely to keep people going in spite of the low pay, long hours, etc and not because of the great opportunities for development. Sales advisors should have a free membership for their entire family. When you're working 60-80 hours per week and your family does not get to see you at home, it is a slap in the face to have the advisor pay for a family membership so that their family can see them.

Pros

Complimentary membership for their employees

Cons

They tend to hire younger applicants who are willing to work for minimum wage

Pros

Nice faculty great equipment, the members are awesome and some of the other employees are easy to work with, also the fact that they are flexible when secluding

Cons

To many to mention, upper management dose not repeat there employees when we have ideas on how to make the club operate better they don't lesson to you. Also the fact the people look at other people as a competition and a threat to there job.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in your employees.

Pros

Great learning environment, probably best pay for a corporate situation for personal training, but you can make SO much more if you decide to stop giving the big box over half your sales.

Cons

management lacks communication and is very disrespectful and demanding of unrealistic expectations, poor promotion decisions, don't promote based on performance or experience, good old "boys" club, manager was up for promotion and was top 10 in the WHOLE COMPANY in sales in prior years, and they went with a guy who was buddy-buddy with the GM, didn't hit sales goal, but was a real suck up ... needless to say it didn't end well.

Advice to Senior Management

take more care in the front line employees of your business, they are what you clients see as your "brand"

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......

Advice to Senior Management

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea behind LTF and where they want to go in the future....but what happens behind the scenes is not what you portray this company to be like.

Listen to your employees. Stop sending all the "motivational" emails - it does nothing, because regardless of how many emails you send - you still do not listen to your employees. NPS surveys do not give you the information you need back from employees to change...that gives you a big overview. Deep dive into specific clubs to see what is really going on. It's not the same at all clubs.

Start hiring general managers that are willing and required to be knowledgeable of all the departments and able to assist their department head in running their business successfully.

You preach "The Healthy Way of Life"....so start letting your employees live a healthy way of life. Being required to work 60 hours a week is not a healthy way of life. I know not all clubs are like this... but investigate and figure out the clubs that are not operating right or you will loose a lot of valuable employees.

Pros

Free Membership
Continuing Education
Knowledgeable Staff

Cons

Slow Growth Opportunities for increased pay

Pros

There are good health benefits and they do feed you clients regularly. Also it is a fun environment to work in because you are around people all day

Cons

They really focus on selling people a lot of stuff that they don't necessarily need. They give commisions for sales as well

Pros

Good people to work with.
Good work environment.

Cons

Pay
Very long hours
Management
Corporate doesn't give you the flexibility to do your own thing

Advice to Senior Management

You see a different face every week. The turnover rate is very high within this organization.

Pros

It was very easy to watch kids and play games that are also entertaining to me. Rockclimbing, swimming and field trips all for free was a pretty nice perk.

Cons

However, top management made me feel unwelcome and unneeded. It was almost as if every other employee did not want us there.

Pros

Highly positive, flexiblity, fitness education and knowledge.

Cons

None at this time - however I would like to see management allowing for employee's to be paid additional to wear several hats in the same shift.

Advice to Senior Management

Profit Sharing.