(1) Disorganized management, sloppy communications. This has been improving lately, which is why I'm leading off with it. Still some distance to go, though. I shouldn't spend 20 minutes slogging through a dense email with inconsistent information (or critical, but absent information). Waste of everyone's time.
(2) Numerous wage/hour/payroll issues. Employees work hours for which they are not compensated regularly, for a variety of reasons:
- Employees routinely stay later than they are scheduled for out of necessity, but are not compensated.
- Employees are expected to complete training on their own time (illegal, at least in CA).
- CorePower's disastrous, nonfunctional payroll system is remarkably error-prone, resulting in unpaid shifts. Additionally, employees are not compensated for the time they spend attempting to log in and use CorePower's nonfunctional "Cloud" system, which can routinely eat up 30 minutes or more of otherwise productive time.
- Employees are expected to be responsible for the content of long, dense emails and other job-related materials, again, on their own time (most likely a wage law violation)
(3) The "sales" focus lately is really harming both the student experience and the instructor experience. No one has ever signed up for Teacher Training because of a "personal share." In a recent staff meeting (at which 43 instructors were gathered), a manager asked, "How many people here enrolled in TT because of something you heard in a personal share?" 2.5 hands went up. That should be the end of the conversation. Go back to making "announcements" at the end of classes (WAY less gross), and encourage teachers to approach students 1-on-1 about TT. Also, provide teachers with a better incentive, or pay them more. I'm have 7 years of experience in high-end sales. I'm happy to teach yoga for $15/hr, but if you want my sales expertise, a $50 referral bonus isn't enough to convince me to harm my students by injecting a sales pitch into each class. Actually...probably no amount of money is. I'm in this to help my students (who are not stupid, btw -- they notice the change and are getting mighty sick of having savasana interrupted with advertisement).
(4) Lack of transparency. Decisions are made (whether it's about scheduling, personnel, programming, etc.) and there is little to no communication about what's happening or why. Again, students are not served by this, and neither are instructors.
(5) Inadequate pay. Enough said. CorePower is the only studio around that expects its instructors to man the desk, sign in their own students, do retail transactions, and be the company's sales force for pricey training programs. That model isn't sustainable at current comp levels, because it leads to:
(6) Attrition of experienced instructors. Because CorePower's business model requires it to churn out a new batch of instructors every 4 months, charge them $3K for TT, and pay them near-minimum wage, the end result is that experienced instructors are fleeing. Most classes now are taught by people with less than 2 years experience teaching, and in many cases, less than 5 years even practicing. Again, it causes a poor user experience for students.
(7) Instructors have less and less control over their classes. CPY has set-sequence classes, which is great--but not every class is designed to be cookie-cutter like that. Additionally, there are times when the "script" (generally sales-driven) just isn't appropriate for the type of experience the instructor wants to create for students on a given day. The heavy-handed attempt to use the "feedback" process as a method for enforcing uniformity of instruction has lead to increasingly bland, lifeless classes. See above and below RE: user experience.
