More and more, we are seeing links between member retention and staff retention. The more familiar members become with staff (the same faces greeting members at the front desk, in the fitness center, in the playroom, locker room, etc.), the less likely they will be to leave the facility. Jaimie Hayes, owner of several fitness clubs in Australia, calls this “switching costs” — the more you increase the emotional connection that customers have to your facility and staff, the more “expensive” it becomes for them to switch.

One way managers are finding to hang on to valued employees is through training programs. Faye Geater, vice president of human resources at Tennis Corporation of America (TCA), Chicago, Ill., has found that investing in a multi-tiered approach to training and staff development has led not only to increased longevity of existing staff, but an increase in the number of highly qualified job candidates who are approaching TCA. Geater attributes a great deal of TCA’s success in attracting management contracts (it operates more than 40 facilities) to the well-trained staff it has developed. Training (for new employees) and ongoing continuing education (for existing employees) is the key to continued success with staff, both in terms of performance and retention.

Obviously, the depth of your training program will depend upon the level of service you wish to offer your members and the resources available to you (time, energy, finances, staff willingness to help, etc.).

Job descriptions & interviews

Experts agree that training begins with clear job descriptions. What are the daily responsibilities of the position? How much time do you expect staff to put in (minimum and maximum hours per week/pay period)? Remember to address the intangibles, like volunteering to help co-workers and smiling at members. With this made clear in the interview process, you can screen out candidates who are not the best match for your facility. “The key to training an employee right is getting the right employee,” says Richard Seibert, special projects manager for the American Council on Exercise, San Diego, Calif., and president of Seibert Training Services.

Seibert suggests looking at several factors when interviewing a potential employee. Does the person have a “willing to learn” attitude, or do they appear set in their ways? Questions you can ask during the interview include, “Have you had successful training experiences?” “What worked best in the training process?” “What could have been done differently?” The answers to these questions will help you decide if the person is right for your club and your training program.

Orienting employees

Once hired, training begins with an orientation. Formal orientations are scheduled on a regular basis and typically express the business philosophy, mission statement, general expectations and benefits for all employees. Many clubs also emphasize customer service at this time. Every new employee should go through the same general orientation. Orientations are a great method of having new employees meet other staff and, with a little creativity, you can even make it a fun experience. Informal orientations involve one or more supervisors meeting with the new staff person at a mutually convenient time to fill them in on the mission of the business.

An employee manual detailing vacation, sick days, pay periods, expectations, uniform policies, and corporate and employee policies (reviewed by an attorney, of course) will help to guard against misunderstandings and/or misinformation.

During the orientation period, most employees are also undergoing what many people refer to as a probation period. However, according to Christine Rosland, human resource director for the Elite Clubs in Wisconsin, calling any period of integration a “probation period” could be problematic. A better term would be “orientation time,” she says. The term orientation time has a more positive connotation and indicates that the company is continually orienting the new person in their job, helping the employee to learn the position. It’s a time for both the employee and the employer to determine whether the position fits with the individual. An orientation leaves an option for the employee to say, “I don’t want to/can’t do this,” and, likewise, allows a manager to say, “this person is having difficulty fitting in, completing the tasks required, etc., and may not be a good fit for our organization/this position.” This way, the manager does not have to become involved in the legalities of documenting cause for release.

Thirty to 90 days are typical ranges for orientation periods. After this time, a person becomes a permanent employee, entitled to all benefits of others in the same position and required to be fully capable to perform his or her job.

During the orientation period, an employee learns task-specific training, as opposed to the policies and rules learned during general orientation. The way in which clubs conduct the training process varies. Smaller clubs often rely on checklists of duties and shadowing of experienced employees as a method of training. When you need to get a new employee up to speed quickly, as is often the case, this is a good way to have the person work while learning. Employees at a small club are often responsible for multiple tasks and must learn how to do almost every job.

Many larger facilities have found that a complete training manual for each position is an effective resource for employees. Manuals can be referred to when there is no one else to immediately call upon, and can ensure consistency in customer service from shift to shift, employee to employee, facility to facility. “We have expectations in our head and get angry at our staff for not doing what we want,” says Sabrina Sternheim, training and staff development manager for the Columbia Association in Maryland. “But we have to write down what we want and orient them so [our employees] know what our expectations are — specifically.”

If you don’t have the resources to create your own training manual, consider some other options. Pre-written training manuals can be purchased from catalogs, associations or industry publishers, or you can contact other clubs that you may have networked with at conferences, meetings or trade shows, and ask for their manual (maybe in exchange for something you have to offer). Then, adapt their manual to your own facility, perhaps using video or audiotape to augment the final product.

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The information regarding American inactivity that continues to flow from the Centers for Disease Control (www.cdc.gov) and the U. S. Surgeon General’s office is alarming enough. However, combine that information with the stress and depression that millions of Americans are experiencing as a result of the terrorist attacks, and it becomes obvious that, as an industry, we are compelled to reach out and make a difference for as many people as we can.

Our staff members have also been also affected negatively by the attacks. Even with a healthy lifestyle, the anxiety associated with such incomprehensible disregard for human life is unavoidable. To help shake the negative effects of this disaster, team leaders need to challenge their executive-level staff to shift their focus to excellence in staff performance. Everyone will benefit from this type of initiative, but it will require an absolute commitment to excellence in everything that your staff does. Remember, motivation and enthusiasm are contagious. As a team leader, it starts with you.

Making the challenge work
1. The first step in the excellence-in-performance challenge is to create a plan. The plan must be clear and concise. It needs to zero in on motivating staff to a level of peak performance that will make a positive impact on everyone with whom they interact. We are in a national crisis, and each club can make a difference in their communities. Your staff members serve as one of the front-line forces that can and should positively change people’s lives every day.

2. The next step in the challenge is an executive-level staff meeting. The meeting needs to exude motivation, as well as a clear vision of what your challenge intends to accomplish: maximal staff performance. If you are unable to effectively inspire the executive-level staff at the initial meeting, consider hiring a professional. Professional motivation is a powerful way to create the atmosphere needed to launch this important campaign. However, professional motivation has a limited effectiveness cycle, so you need to be capable of sustaining the impact. If you have a passion for being the best, you can sustain the motivation.

3. Challenge your executive-level staff to create a written business plan for their department, detailing exactly how they intend to direct, lead and maintain awareness of their department’s performance during the challenge. Be sure that their plan is in compliance with your goals. Have them include specific goals about how they intend to accomplish the program’s intentions. Remember, hazy goals produce hazy results, and clear goals produce clear results. Also, have your executive-level staff include the factors that they feel may hinder their department in executing their plan. Do not take these factors as excuses, take them as a challenge to help! Move immediately to minimize or eliminate the perceived obstacles.

4. Create a specific time frame for the challenge. Make the commitment to excellence permanent, but cycle the challenge for 60 days. This will allow your staff to divert their thought process from external occurrences to performance-specific initiatives.

5. Create a theme for the challenge. Make a specific logo for it that includes the theme.

6. Plan an all-staff meeting to review the challenge. Make the meeting positive. Have a planned agenda, and have each department head present briefly.

Limit each segment to a specific time frame. Remember, meetings that ramble are a direct source of motivation short-circuiting.

This type of program will positively affect the bottom line for your business, but more importantly, it will positively affect your community. During this time of national crisis, if you are in this business for the right reasons, you have an absolute responsibility to make a difference in people’s lives.

Prior to the purchase of land and subsequent construction of the new facility, many members pushed to stay in the 12,000-square-foot rental that originally housed the club. But there were a number of problems with it, says Glaser. “The 12- to 14-year-old building was in a strip mall shopping center that lost its major attraction (a supermarket). The only good thing about the location was the parking for several hundred cars due to the almost-empty mall. As adjoining stores moved out, Our Club took over the space and knocked out walls. As a result, it was necessary to walk through the aerobics room to reach the weight and cardio areas. There was one thermostat in the entryway that managed to freeze everyone in the locker rooms in the winter. There was no humidity control, and at times, there would be enough fog in the natatorium that the far side of the pool (30 feet away) was not visible.” But the absolute deciding factor was money, Glaser says, as the landlord was on the verge of doubling the rent to $25,000 per month.

Perhaps the best part about Our Club’s new home is that “it really didn’t cost that much more to ‘do it right’ the first time, once the real needs were established,” says Glaser. “The most expensive single feature was the climate control system for the natatorium, [with] a total of 100 tons of air conditioning available from five units.” The air conditioning’s heat recovery is then put to work to heat the pool, which saves about $300 per month. At that rate, says Glaser, “It does not take long to get a payback,” which is probably just how Our Club’s members feel about their investment in the club.

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By Heather Peavey, Assistant Editor & Shana McGough, Writer & Online Editor

Our Club Health & Fitness Inc. in Indian Harbour Beach, Fla., has a unique approach to earning profits: It doesn’t. This approach to growing a fitness business may prompt questions such as, how does a two-floor, 20,000-square-foot facility with 2,500 members manage to operate successfully, much less stay in the black, without a profit? Chief engineer Ted Glaser has an easy answer: The facility is actually ‘owned’ by the membership. “Our Club is operated by approximately 60 volunteers,” he explains. “There is a finance desk in the entryway for the $25 monthly dues collection, [and] a Е’check-in’ desk where members’ bar-coded membership cards are computer verified against the paid-up list. The $62,500-per-month revenue is sufficient to pay the bills, buy Е’toys,’ replace equipment periodically, retire the mortgage, hide something for a rainy day, and pay the salaries of the club’s manager and various part-time employees.” Add to that the small commission collected from vending machines, a $10 daily fee (up to $60 a month) for nonmembers, and the $1-per-hour, per-child fee for using the volunteer-staffed nursery on weekday mornings. The bottom line is definitely black, and members are responsible for more than just using the facility; they are also responsible for running it. “

A 12-member board of directors, elected by the members, provides guidance to the club’s paid manager,” explains Glaser. “There are two members each from the aerobics, pool and weight/cardio areas. They are elected for two-year, overlapping terms.” Though members are usually willing to rise to the challenge, Glaser admits that, “as with any volunteer organization, it is sometimes difficult to obtain candidates. Usually, some issue will arise that prods members to action.”

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When Frank Heart needed someone to direct hardware design and implementation for the IMPs, he called on fellow Lincoln Lab alumnus, Severo Ornstein. After he left BBN in 1976, Ornstein went to Xerox PARC, where he worked on the high-speed PC prototype, Dorado, and on the first laser printers. In 1984, he retired from PARC and with his wife, former PARC scientist Laura Gould, co-founded Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, dedicated to fighting nuclear war and arms proliferation. Like many computer professionals, Ornstein also has a keen interest in music. His father, Leo Ornstein, was a well-known modernist composer of the early 20th century. Himself a pianist, Ornstein lives in Northern California, organizes chamber music concerts, and republishes his father’s works.

Dave Walden, 57

Another Lincoln Lab alumnus, Dave Walden was a member of Frank Heart’s IMP guys team, and co-wrote the operating code for the IMPs. During his 26 years with BBN, Walden was involved in developing TCP/IP and telnet, a program that lets users log on to remote hosts. He is currently editor in chief of the Center for Quality of Management Journal and holds a faculty appointment at MIT.

Vint Cerf, 56

As a grad student in 1969, Cerf assisted in the installation of ARPA’s first IMP at UCLA, and was present the day that the first messages were sent from host to host. While at ARPA in the 1970s, Cerf co-developed the transmission-control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) with Bob Kahn. TCP/IP are the primary protocols used for transmission of data on today’s Internet. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1995. In 1994, he rejoined MCI (which he had left in 1986, after four years there), where he oversaw the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. Today, Cerf is senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology and at MCI WorldCom. In his spare time, he works on his pet project, the Interplanetary Network (IPN), which will connect deep-space probes with researchers on Earth via an Internet-style network (see “Cerf’s New Turf,” Aug. ’99, p149).

Jon Postel (1943-1998)

As a grad student at UCLA, Jon Postel helped install the first IMP in 1969. Later, with Craig Partridge and Paul Mockapetris, Postel co-invented the domain name system, which identifies computers and gave us the familiar suffixes .com, .org, and .net. He became a major player in the Internet community and headed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which controlled the domain name system. Postel died in October 1998. He was 55.

Arpanet: A civilian network

Paul Baran, 73

If the myth that the Arpanet was a top-secret military command-and-control network designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack was anyone’s fault, it was unwittingly Paul Baran’s. While working for Rand Corporation in the early ’60s, Baran wrote papers on what we now know as packet switching and distributed networks. In them, he described such an impervious network; Arpanet, however, was never intended as a military network, but as a method by which researchers could share computing power at a distance, and Baran was never directly involved with the Arpanet project. As an entrepreneur, Baran is today involved in a number of companies working in wired and wireless networking in the Silicon Valley. In 1986, Baran founded mobile data provider, Metricom, and in 1992, founded Milpitas, Calif.-based cable-modem-maker, Com21, where he currently serves as chair.

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While a graduate classmate of Larry Roberts at MIT in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Len Kleinrock wrote the first papers on the underlying principles of what later came to be known as packet switching-the idea that data could be chopped up, sent over wires by various routes, and be reassembled at their destination-a central technology of today’s Internet. The parceled data was sometimes called “data blocks,” a term later dropped in favor of “packets,” coined by British networking pioneer, Donald Davies. Having joined the faculty of UCLA in 1963, Kleinrock was on the team that laid out the original specification for the Arpanet four years later. He also helped develop the interface between the Sigma-7 host computer and the first IMP, unpacked at UCLA on Labor Day weekend 1969, and oversaw transmission of the first host-to-host message, on Oct. 29. Kleinrock established and ran the Network Measurement Center, which ran experiments to test the behavior and outer limits of the network. He is still on the faculty at UCLA and is leading research and development at nomadic computing technology provider, Nomadix.

Bob Kahn, 60

At Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN, now GTE Internetworking), the Cambridge, Mass., contractor that built much of the Arpanet’s equipment, Bob Kahn helped design and construct the IMPs. He organized the first public demonstration of the Arpanet in Washington, D.C., in October 1972. That same year, he was made director of IPTO. Kahn is co-inventor (with Vint Cerf) of TCP/IP, the lingua franca of today’s Web. Kahn also pioneered development of radio and satellite packet data networks to link computers wirelessly. After 13 years with ARPA, Kahn founded the nonprofit Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va., to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure. He is CNRI’s CEO and he served on the Presidents Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure.

Douglas Engelbart, 74

What didn’t Douglas Engelbart invent? Engelbart pioneered the mouse, hyperlinks, windows, and a score of other essentials. When Bob Taylor announced plans to build the Arpanet in 1967, Engelbart was thrilled. He volunteered to start the online Network Information Center (NIC), which would track all the network’s resources. As a result, his SDS-940 computer in the Augmentation Research Center at SRI was chosen to be the second host in the Arpanet. Engelbart developed NLS (for online systems) for storing and retrieving electronic documents. Later, in 1977, Cupertino, Calif.-based Tymshare bought the rights to NLS and renamed it Augment. Engelbart followed his progeny. In 1984, Tymshare was in turn bought by McDonnell Douglas. After retiring from the aerospace company in 1989, Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute, dedicated to improving the performance of organizations. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and continues as head of the Fremont, Calif.-based Institute.

Frank Heart, 70

A computer systems engineer, Frank Heart managed the team, which came to be known as “the IMP guys,” that designed and built the IMP subnetwork computers at BBN. Also on the IMP guys team were Ben Barker, Bernie Cosell, Will Crowther, Jim Geisman, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, Hawley Rising, Truett Thach, Marty Thrope, and Dave Walden. Heart remained with BBN until his retirement, working largely in biomedical, network technology, physical sciences, and logistics computing. When he retired in 1994, he was president of BBN’s systems and technology division. The secret to Arpanet’s success, Heart says, was that “Despite the fact that it was supported by the Department of Defense, it was entirely unclassified. People could just get on and try it.”

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In his long career, Bob Taylor has had a hand in the creation of just about every major technology that today’s Net surfer takes for granted, including the personal computer, local area networks (LANs), asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networking, desktop publishing, and search engines. Between 1966 and 1969, Taylor was director of IPTO, where he initiated and secured funding for Arpanet experiments and hired a reluctant Larry Roberts away from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to get it under way. Like Licklider, Taylor came to computers while studying psychoacoustics in the ’50s. Taylor was a polymath, who majored in psychology, with minors in mathematics, English, philosophy, and religion. Taylor left ARPA in October 1969, just before the network went live. A year later, he founded and managed the computer science lab at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Later, he oversaw the building of Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, the lab that created the AltaVista search engine. He retired in 1996 and today lives on the San Francisco peninsula. “From my point of view,” he says, “technology advances proceed at a rather stately pace.”

Larry Roberts, 61

Without Larry Roberts, there would doubtless be some kind of email today, but it would probably be an unmanageable mess. Roberts wrote the first electronic-mail manager for the Net’s first (and still most) killer app. That alone would elevate Roberts to the pantheon, but it was only his last act at ARPA, and a mere bagatelle. Roberts joined ARPA in 1966. He designed and wrote the Arpanet’s original specification and oversaw the project until he left ARPA in 1973. Later, he founded Telenet, the world’s first commercial packet data communications company, bought by GTE in 1979 and later spun out to Sprint. Between 1983 and 1993, Roberts served as CEO of a packetized facsimile and ATM equipment company called NetExpress. From 1993 to 1998, he was president of ATM Systems, a division of Connectware. Today, Roberts is president and CEO of a Palo Alto, Calif.-based ATM and IP switching company called Packetcom. When asked if he knew where the Arpanet experiment would lead, Roberts says, “I really believed it would take over the telephone network and communications. But I really didn’t envision the kind of ecommerce we have today.”

Wes Clark, 72

During a 1967 ARPA workshop in Ann Arbor, Mich., Bob Taylor presented his scheme for a network of research computers to his fellows. One of the problems such a network faced was how to get the different machines to communicate seamlessly despite their technical differences. According to Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s history, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Taylor was outlining his plan when a note was passed up from someone in the crowd. “You’ve got the network inside out,” it read. It was from Wes Clark, a former Lincoln Laboratory engineer who in the 1950s had worked on the TX-0 and TX-2 computers, then considered state of the art. After the presentation, Clark proposed a sub-network of identical computers that would handle routing and other functions. That way, each computer-whether a TX-2 or Sigma-7-had only to be configured to deal with one other type of computer. Thus the idea for the interface message processors (IMPs) was born. “I would give Wes Clark more credit that any other single person on the technical side,” says Taylor. Clark has been a consultant since 1972. He is currently a principal and co-founder of Clark Rockoff & Associates in Brooklyn, New York.

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What happened was something that today happens hundreds of millions of times every hour on hundreds of millions of desktops all over the world. On Oct. 29, 1969, computers in two research laboratories-a Sigma-7 at the University of California Los Angeles and an SDS 940 at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park, Calif.-exchanged data over a packet-switched network for the first time. Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a network: UCLA and SRI were the only hosts. And it was a short session: Charley Kline, a UCLA student (now in the product marketing department at Cisco Systems), just managed to get the first two letters of the word “login” through the pipe to SRI before the system crashed.

That “lo,” was the first electronic message over the Arpanet computer network, and humanity’s first tremulous steps into that unexplored region that sci-fi writer William Gibson would later dub “cyberspace.” It wasn’t the Internet, yet. And the World Wide Web was still 20 years off. But they would be built on the foundations laid by the Arpanet’s fathers.

“There wasn’t any ‘hurrah, hurrah’ or anything,” recalls Douglas Engelbart, who directed the Augmentation Research Center at SRI at the time. “I think during our weekly staff report someone said, ‘Well, we finally got packets through.’” It wasn’t that Engelbart and others didn’t know they were onto something big. They knew. “We were busy getting ready to support it all,” says Engelbart. “It was only a piece of the whole activity, even though today it appears much more important,” notes Larry Roberts, who oversaw the Arpanet project from 1966 to 1973.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency was born in a panic. In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. In response, the U.S. government accelerated tech research and development programs and created agencies such as ARPA to administer them. While the glory went to NASA rocket scientists and astronauts engaged in the race to the moon, ARPA investigators toiled quietly away at research institutes and universities across the country. The Arpanet-a network designed so that researchers across the country could share computing resources-was one of the results.

Some of the names are familiar, having ascended into high tech’s pantheon, often for achievements made after their roles in Arpanet ended. Others are less familiar. But all were part of that quiet moment in 1969 that altered the course of history.

J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider (1915-1990)

It was Licklider who first conceptualized the idea that would become the Internet. In Licklider’s day, however, people tended to stumble upon computers while exploring other fields. In Licklider’s case, that field was a little-known discipline called psychoacoustics, the study of the perception of sound. Licklider became fascinated with computers in the 1950s, when Wes Clark, who would later make one important contribution to Arpanet, introduced him to the then-state-of-the-art TX-2. In 1960, Licklider authored a paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” that is now considered one of the seminal works on computer networking. In 1962, he joined ARPA where he headed up the agency’s computer research efforts at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). During his two years there, Licklider steered IPTO’s focus away from military research toward advanced research in computers. After leaving ARPA in 1964, Licklider worked briefly at IBM and in 1968 began working on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Project MAC, researching computer time-sharing. He returned to ARPA briefly in 1974 to direct IPTO. Later, Licklider was made professor emeritus at MIT. He died in Arlington, Mass., at age 75.

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