No Hugs, No Handshakes, No Smiles

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION):

Hey there. Blair here with MXM and this morning, I finished my workout and decided to retrace some steps. I’m at our Wenatchee location and just thinking about, uh, in regular operations what the member feels like walking in these doors that are right over here behind the camera and reading a lot of the customer feedback that’s coming in and some of the really positive stuff that we are sending out to our teams on a regular basis.

The word smile comes in so much. You know, often times, it’s in that area where people say what’s most important to you when you get back, for coming back into the gym, you know we do see the stuff about not being too crowded, the hand sanitizer, the ability to clean easily. What’s most important to me is to see the smiling faces of all of your team especially your front desk team, your trainers and so on. You get a lot of that feedback.

Now think about this. The things that elicit that type of human emotion, hugs, handshakes, smiles, and now think if your team needs to wear masks. There will be no hugs, no handshakes, and there will be no smiles. Yet that’s one of the things that people are looking forward to the most. So that portion of the journey map became very evident to me this morning and I’m thinking about ways to overcome it and I don’t know how long it will be there, I don’t know if it will be required in your state. We think it might be required in ours. We think it might be the prudent thing to do and also send a strong signal if our teams are wearing masks. But it had me think that on the news a few weeks ago, in one of the hospitals in New York, I mean they are fully covered, and what they did was take photos of each person smiling, with a big smile on their face and they pinned it to their shirt. And I think that’s a brilliant idea and I think we may well do that. And so, I would pass that on to all of my friends and colleagues in the fitness industry. Stay distant, stay active, stay safe. Do your very best as this opens, we don’t want any reoccurrences coming out of our industry. Take care.