Every leisure operator knows they have a workforce challenge. I've heard it raised more times than I can count.
Lately I've started wondering whether we've been trying to solve the wrong one.
Recruitment remains difficult. Retention is harder. Teams are stretched between rising expectations, growing operational complexity, and pressure to do more with less. None of that is new, and none of it should be underestimated.
But spend time with the people actually running our facilities and a different problem comes into view. One that rarely gets mentioned in workforce strategies or on conference stages, yet shapes almost every working day.
Some of our most capable people aren't spending their time leading. They're spending it looking for information.
Not through any fault of their own. That's simply what the job has become.
Before a Monday morning meeting, a manager might pull membership numbers from one system, attendance from another, staffing from a third, finance from somewhere else entirely. Half an hour later they're still trying to answer a question that should take seconds: what needs my attention today?
The information exists. It's just hard to access, hard to trust, and harder still to connect. And every extra minute spent searching for it, delays a decision.
We've got remarkably good at treating this as normal. This might include rebuilding reports because someone's queried a figure, cross-checking numbers across three or four systems, reconciling different versions of the truth before anyone feels confident enough to act. None of these tasks looks big on its own. Add them up across a week and they eat up serious hours, usually from the people whose time matters most.
I don't think we've properly reckoned with what that costs us as a sector just yet. It doesn't show up as a line in a budget. It quietly drains something more valuable than money: leadership time.
The best centre managers weren't hired to build spreadsheets. They were hired to build teams, coach colleagues, support frontline staff, notice when something feels off, create genuinely good member experiences, and make better calls for the people they serve. That's work only a person can do, and every hour lost to searching for answers is an hour taken away from it.
Maybe that explains why so many leaders feel permanently behind. It's tempting to put that down to workload or capacity. I think a good deal of it comes from the friction built into the work itself.
We talk a lot about needing more resource. We rarely ask whether we're making proper use of the people we've already got.
Throwing more people at an environment where information is scattered across five systems doesn't fix the friction. It just hands more people the same broken process.
That's why I think the workforce conversation needs to shift. Not necessarily away from member acquisition and retention, but towards how much of people's time actually gets spent on work that moves things forward, rather than work that just gets completed.
Leadership time is becoming one of the sector's scarcest resources. When managers have clarity, they make better decisions, spend more time with their teams, and catch issues earlier. Member experience improves. Culture improves. The effect runs well beyond operational efficiency.
The leisure sector isn't short of passionate, capable people. But it is short of time at almost every level of the operation.
Remove the friction that quietly eats hours out of every week, and you don't just build a more efficient organisation. You give leaders back the capacity to actually lead.
That might be the workforce conversation this sector is finally ready to have, because what sets operators apart from here won't be who holds the most data. It'll be who can turn understanding into action the fastest.
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