We are very proud to announce that Function Health Club has won the 2022 Business Resiliency Award from Impact Magazine!
This award was granted to us for our commitment to helping our community and our team navigate through the COVID19 pandemic. In both our downtown Vancouver and Port Coquitlam locations, we offered personal training, group fitness classes, health coaching and more, and we worked very hard to stay focused on helping everyone we could.
A snippet from our original award submission is below!
Our Dec 2019 year-end objective was to unify all the offerings at both our locations and open a new location in Vancouver by Aug 2022. Little did we know that we were about to head into a pandemic for most of 2020 and 2021. In March 2020 when fitness businesses were required to shut down onsite services, I stated “We will come out of this better off. I don’t know how yet, but we will.” We moved both locations completely online within 48hrs due to the potential lockdown looming.
Our services comprised of:
- Live Virtual workouts to replace classes
- Equipment loans for members to use at home.
- Bodyweight programming for our downtown members delivered through our app.
- Virtual “coffee time” for members to connect each week.
- Check in chats, for members to talk to Morgan, Janina or I about how they were doing.
- Daily check in videos though our private Facebook group
- Free Sunday Virtual Workouts for the community so members could invite friends and family to join and destress.
Our approach was to work hard in the background doing everything we could to support our members during this time of chaos and instability. Our leadership team, Morgan Hodge, Janina Schmidt and myself each took on many different roles. This allowed us to ensure the job security of our team of 15 coaches and for our members to access our services that met their needs throughout the pandemic. Member retention was our focus. Our members needed guidance, they were scared and disconnected in many areas of their lives and we became the one connection they could count on to be there. Coach support was our leadership team’s other area of focus. Supporting them in becoming better coaches is part of our company program but during the pandemic, it was about ensuring they were able to pay their bills, were not feeling isolated and that they could offer their services in a way that worked for themselves and members. We provided regular updates from government sources. We ensured that each coach knew what subsidies they had access to. We allowed for flexibility in their work environment so they could coach clients virtually or outside. We had weekly meetings to check in with each coach. We had no idea that this was just the beginning.
The longevity of the government restrictions were exceptionally hard on businesses and the patrons of those businesses. Members were bored with zoom, they needed to get back into the gym. Luckily we were able to resume onsite services in a limited capacity for the latter half of 2020 and all of 2021. We revised our gym layout, setup covid protocols for each location that included online screening tools, entry and exit pathways, limited people per time slot, mask rules, cleaning protocols and more. Each time the government changed, so did we. Additionally, high intensity fitness was one of our main offerings but was not allowed for the majority of the pandemic to date. To navigate this and give our members a sense of purpose with their training, we provided individualized programming for our entire membership base.
In addition to the ongoing challenges presented by COVID, we ended up moving our downtown location to a new, larger facility in August of 2021. We had intended to move in 2022 or 2023, but instead took an earlier opportunity to unify the format of our two gyms, provide a consistent set of services (including Functional Fitness classes, Personal Training, Olympic Weightlifting, Youth Fitness, and more!), and really begin to deliver on the vision we have for health and wellness.
A year later – and after the addition shut down in the wake of the Omicron spike – our Vancouver location is about to celebrate our 1 year anniversary!
