Maintenance Days – Keeping the Club Looking Good!
We take great pride in keeping the Club not only looking its best for our members but also ensuring that downtime of any equipment / facilities is kept to an absolute minimum.
One of the things we do to aid our preventative maintenance programme is to close the Club for two days a year until 5.30pm. These days are very important to the way that we try to operate the business, enabling us to maintain the high quality of the facilities, reducing our need to close areas or take equipment out of service, and generally keeping the Club at the leading edge of the industry from a quality point of view.
Our next maintenance day is taking place on 17th August, and we often get asked about the type of work that gets done so we thought it would be worth giving a quick outline.
Typically, the days comprise a mix of three different types of activity:
- Planned maintenance and ad-hoc repairs.
- Cleaning.
- Staff training.
Taking each area in turn:
Planned Maintenance & Ad-hoc Repairs
We have a huge amount of expensive plant in the building which needs regular maintenance and our long opening hours can make this difficult to schedule. Ad-hoc repairs can also be tricky – for example in the ladies’ locker room for our male maintenance team!
On the up-coming maintenance day, we have lots of external contractors coming in to do work. Examples of work planned for our next day are:
- Servicing all the air handling units.
- Cleaning of the balance tanks on the pool and spa.
- Various areas of the Club that have got a bit grubby will be repainted.
- The kitchen ducting will be cleaned.
- All the kitchen equipment will be serviced.
- Service all air con units in the high traffic areas of the Club.
- Sink traps will all be removed and cleaned.
- Emergency lighting servicing and testing.
- Inspection and draining of the hot water tanks.
- New ceiling vents in the showers.
- Filters in the shower mixers to be cleaned and some replaced.
- Various pieces of electrical work around the club.
- Fire curtain and sauna suppression systems serviced.
Cleaning
Whilst we invest a huge amount in cleaning the Club on a weekly basis, employing our own cleaners and using contractors at night, it is very helpful to have some dedicated time to ensure that cleaning is being done effectively, and to deep clean areas which are hard to do during opening hours.
On the upcoming day, for example, some of the tasks will be as follows:
- Thorough cleaning of the changing room lockers, including the tops of the lockers.
- Deep cleaning of the showers, drains, etc.
- Thorough clean of all gym and studio equipment, including spin bikes and mats.
- Deep cleaning tasks in the kitchen / bar area such as extraction filters, fryers, steam cleaning the ovens, deep cleaning the coffee machine, etc.
- Deep clean all Club Lounge furniture to identify and remove stains.
- Carpet cleaning
…… and many more……
Training
We take the training of our staff teams very seriously, but it is very difficult to get them all together because of the shift-based nature of the work, and our long opening hours. This applies especially to our Reception, Gym and Club Lounge teams. Hence, we use these scheduled maintenance days to try to get a couple of hours training in for each of the main staff teams at the Club. This helps us to maintain service standards, and deal with longer term issues that may have arisen and need resolving as a team.
As you can see, the maintenance days are certainly not a day off for our staff team! We hope you notice a difference when you come back into the Club.
Steve Davies
General Manager
