Meet Jacinta Scotts…
Jacinta is the Bounce Fitness Sydney Centre Manager and oversees the daily operations of the centre. Jacinta’s role includes:
- managing staff, providing them with the tools and environment needed to do their best,
- managing the centre, keeping it safe, clean and inviting
- providing an environment that supports clients getting the most out of their fitness experience.
Established in 2001 Bounce Fitness has its head office is in Cairns with centres in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. It has plans to open another centre in Perth in the next two years. It was created for the sole purpose of providing training services but now offers life coaching, remedial massage, and other health services.
In this module, you will learn the skills and knowledge that enable Jacinta to perform her role, particularly as it relates to communication in the workplace. This includes:
- managing staff, providing them with the tools and environment needed to do their best,
- managing the centre, keeping it safe, clean and inviting
- providing an environment that supports clients getting the most out of their fitness experience.
Before we get started, let's have a chat with Jacinta about her role.
Jacinta responds:
As a Centre Manager I am responsible for disseminating all corporate information to the team, as well as managing all day-to-day communication across the centre. This can include:
- Organisational updates and corporate programs
- Policy and procedural information
- Updates on staffing and schedules
- Local notices about any works being done around the centre
Some of this information comes to us complete as part of a wider communication strategy from Bounce Fitness head office, however we are often asked to develop and deliver a message to our centre with the directive to tailor it to our people.
Jacinta responds:
Before I communicate anything, I run through a planning process covering the following steps
- Identify the communication activity – what are we communicating and why?
- Identify the information/documentation needed – what information do I need to know about the topic?
- Identify the stakeholders to the message – who owns the information and who needs to be involved in the communication process?
- Identify the audience – who is the message for and what diversity elements do I need to consider?
- Identify the communication method – how would this best be communicated (presentation and delivery)?
- Identify any legislation, regulations, policies and procedures relevant to the communication – what legal or organisational considerations do I need to consider in my message?
I would complete all this planning to make sure I have everything I need and I would then look to fill any gaps before I started to draft my key messages. I would do this by emailing stakeholders to get key information, also providing me the opportunity to start to build a relationship with them.
Jacinta responds:
Before any communication, I would ask a stakeholder or team member to review my communication to ensure that it is clear, to the point, meets the brief and suits the audience.
I would ask for feedback during this process and consider this before finalising and circulating the message.
This process often highlights a new perspective, a point I may have missed or even picks up on the odd grammatical error that may otherwise undermine the message.
It is often at this stage that potential problems are highlighted. These may be to do with missing or incorrect information, communication method limitations or specific and special audience requirements not being met.
Having identified any problems at this stage, I then have the opportunity to work through solutions prior to implementation.
Jacinta responds:
Communication occurs because people need to know something. Once I have implemented my communication strategy and delivered the message, I need to make sure that it has met that need.
To do this I complete the following steps:
- Collect evidence – ask people, check that they are performing in line with the information and where compliance metrics are available (proof of application such as capturing data on the number of people being booked into a new class for example), I would capture it.
- Compare to objective – I compare the outcome of the communication against the original objective to see that it has been achieved.
- Report – pull the information together into a report. This may include updating an issues log to identify that an action has occurred/issue has been resolved, report on specific metrics or make an observational report.
In some cases the results of this evaluation would be circulated to key stakeholders to confirm the communication achieved its objective.
If the communication delivered did not achieve its objective, this process may be used to consider additional communication requirements to be undertaken. In some cases this could be follow up or clarification communication to address a small gap in knowledge, or it may be additional training and support where the gap is larger.
