YMCA Reviews

Pros

Great location by central park and columbus circle area. Wonderful perks for employees with children, free gym membership, discounted children's program and services.

Cons

It usually takes about 6 months before an employee knows if the company's right for you. It took only 2 months for me to realize this organization needs to mature for another 10 years before it can solidify a good standing as a possible employer of choice. Lack of growth, communications, inconsistent executive leadership, and more importantly, extremely silo mentality within the organization.

Advice to Senior Management

Would recommend bringing in a consulting firm to conduct a complete evaluation on employee satisfaction with the organization and its leadership. Seek improvement and promote your high potentials, build a strong retention program and cut your losses with the under-performing employees.

Pros

We are a great sales team and everyone gets along.

Cons

There are so many issues with the top management. Example, when there is an issue called out by the director, everyone in the company has to watch our backs to make sure we won't get in trouble.
I would say the relationship between the top level and employees is very disconnected. They also play favorites.

Advice to Senior Management

Try to communicate with your employees more effectively. It is not necessarily to have a meeting with everyone every 2 weeks, but a 10-minute of open and honest talk about the on going work and expectation is all it takes!

Pros

No other organization will take the time to help balance you work and private life. Lots of training, free membership, and occasional outings to restaurants. Due to the non-profit status of the YMCA, there is not stress to oversell members and people are generally happy to be there.

Cons

While the YMCA does tend to promote internally, the move has been lately over the last decade or so to only hire managers with bachelors or even masters degrees. As a lifeguard for many years, and a recent college graduate, I found myself wanting to move into a management role, but unable to by rising national requirements for jobs that in my opinion do not even require a college degree. The YMCA manages to retain a surprising amount of employees in all its departments for a very long time, so its a shame that they are not able to let those employees 'graduate' into management and are being passed over for more 'qualified' employees with masters degree's who do not know the branch at all.

Advice to Senior Management

Your employees love the YMCA. Many want to make it a lifelong career, so don't let a slip of paper stop you from promoting people who obviously know enough about their job to do well in the next level.

Pros

Fun, eventful, and you can always arch a break with the bosses when it comes to work days off.

Cons

Not a lot of breaks and the indoor pools I worked at had poor ventilation. You felt as if you had pound of air on you.

Advice to Senior Management

Appreciate how hard your workers work for you. Give a pay raise at least once a year only to be fair.

Pros

Flexible schedule when you can make it work

Cons

Poor leadership, poor work environment, lack of communication, no growth opportunities

Advice to Senior Management

Leadership needs to be more proactive and interpersonal, people hate working for the management and the management could care less

Pros

salary, vacation, sick leave, holidays

Cons

drama, abruptness, interfering with others doing their job,

Advice to Senior Management

grow up and quit being so sensitive

Pros

Free gym membership and admission to exercise classes.

Cons

Very negative work environment and the direction of my position has changed repeatedly and not offered a sense of job security and stability:

1. I was told that I would be working some weekends and evenings. I worked 3 evenings per week and was scheduled to work every Saturday.
2. I was given a raise because I was taking on more responsibility then my position initially entailed. I was still paid my previous wage for six weeks until the raise was applied to my paycheck. No apologies or explanation was given.
3. Leadership meetings were not run in a professional manner. Leadership threatened to fire a number of staff members because they were not greeting members at the front desk. Not only did this seem a little extreme for the situation, but also it was very upsetting and actually led to two employees resigning immediately. After the threat of such a sweeping elimination of the current staff was purposed, I felt my job security was in jeopardy and I began to explore other options.

Advice to Senior Management

Leadership training

Pros

The schedule is flexible, making it a decent place for college students.

Co-workers of the exact same "rank" are cool.

Cons

Management:

is disconnected from the "grunts", progressively more so the higher management gets,

is incompetent and unimaginative

makes impractical decisions

is unresponsive to service requests

are poor communicators.

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Because management is so incompetent, everyone gets irritated with them. Because everyone is irritated with them, people in management tend to become more agitated the longer they've been in their positions. This has created a vicious circle of animosity that has lead to literally EVERYONE in the aquatics department hating their jobs.

Advice to Senior Management

There are so many common sense things to suggest that I don't even know where to start. Just hire competent people to direct the department. Be more connected to the regular employees. Maybe offer an anonymous comment box? Something has to change; because not only are poor decisions being made daily, but those in positions of power have an unspoken but very obvious closed door policy. I know this is true at my branch; but I've heard (only heard) that this is also the case at every other branch in the county, as well.

Pros

Free membership, work with fun people, ability to get to know regular members, lots of available hours, ability to cross-train and work in other areas of the facility.

Cons

Disorganized and overworked management, rude members, low pay, little to no management response to complaints about staff or member problems.

Advice to Senior Management

Give the employees a raise! Don't let staff no call/no show. Clean up the place, provide incentive for better performance.

Pros

Coworkers are fun and easy to work with
Develop relationships with members
Free membership for yourself and discount for family
Good start in fitness industry

Cons

Lots of downtime. The majority of shifts are spent talking to older members, who only come to socialize. Other than talking, you clean, and when that's done there is not much else to do.