Poor pay - we were paid the personal trainer rate, which made no sense given that the PT team made extra money from their sessions. Only about $35k a year for full time, long hours & weekend work
High demand from employees - I had a surgery in my first couple of weeks & was told I would need to work the day after because it was so early on in my contract. I was so drugged up I eventually had to be sent home. There was also nobody who would cover my shift when my dog died so I spent the day on reception crying.
Difficult hours - 5:30am - 1:30pm, 11:00am - 7:00pm or 1:30pm - 9:30pm & weekends
Poor management - one of the managers really disliked me & when she moved into a higher position, performance managed me out, nit-picking & making it near impossible to perform well. I did do some things wrong that I learnt from, though it was awfully managed
Toxic culture - a lot of the trainers were blindly mean. One of the receptionists once bluntly stated the clique there had no bothered being friendly to me in the first 6 months because they were so used to people coming & going they didn't bother making new friendships until you'd been there 'long enough'
Impossible standards - the VA group had 5 values they asked everyone to stick by & unless you were EXACTLY this person, they didn't pay attention to you or encourage development
Awful member conditions - VA originally had a policy that if you wanted to suspend / freeze your membership, it had to be for 2 fortnightly debit cycles totalling 4 weeks. When members would question why they couldn't freeze for only 2 weeks, VA Head Office never provided a reasonable justification other than it was 'admin heavy'. There was zero justifiable reason to do it this way & resulted in a lot of frustrated members. Eventually they changed it to being able to suspend for only 2 weeks & it made the admin so much easier because people wouldn't have to cancel their suspensions when, for example, they returned from holidays & wanted to use the gym.