Studio Society has been working with CoverMe since October 2022 to make the process of finding group exercise cover quicker and easier.

The fully immersive group exercise-based club, in London’s trendy West Hampstead, offers more than 250 classes a week including Body Pump, HIIT, boxing, yoga and Spinning. Finding class cover is an ongoing exercise for general manager Tony Zimmerling.

“We have 40 permanent instructors. Before using the CoverMe app, finding cover instructors would take hours of my time and was always in the back of my mind,” he says.

In the past, Studio Society’s instructors would post messages on their Facebook groups when they needed cover. Zimmerling would then receive an email from potential cover instructors, who he would research on social media before inviting them into the club to meet them and discuss how the classes work etc. The process was even more challenging for last minute cover.

“If one of our instructors phoned in sick, it would be left to me to find cover. I’d have to scour Facebook groups and message all my different WhatsApp contacts to try and find someone. Everything else would have to be put on hold until I’d arranged cover. It was really stressful,” he explains.

The CoverMe app has entirely transformed the process, allowing Zimmerling to source cover in minutes. “It’s so much easier now. Instructors just log into the app, post the dates they need covering with details of the class and rates of pay and the message goes out to all instructors within the chosen radius of the club. I see the job post, get notified when potential cover instructors respond and can accept or reject them,” he says.

“I love how easy it is. I posted for cover for a yoga class this morning and had responses from two qualified instructors within 15 seconds. And looking at the app now I can see I have 26 confirmed covers and three posts awaiting a response for cover needed over the next four weeks.”

The app’s automatic invoicing function saves considerable time at month end too. Instructors scan a QR code to access the club when they come in to teach, which generates an invoice that is sent to management.

“Instead of working through loads of documents on my PC, I just download a report from CoverMe, which details how many classes each instructor has taught and how much they are owed so I can process the payment. Payroll used to take a massive amount of time out of my day, but last month it only took two hours to process payments for 70 instructors, 30 of which were covers.”

An additional benefit of the CoverMe app is that it has acted as a source of new group exercise talent, says Zimmerling. “We have found some amazing new instructors through the app, which we wouldn’t have discovered without using the app.

“CoverMe is brilliant for us. Our permanent instructors love using it because it saves so much time. Many of them work in other clubs and still have to use the old way of finding cover. They love the fact they don’t have to do that here – it makes life so much easier for them and for management too.”

Choosing CoverMe to solve the problem of finding cover for group exercise instructors was an absolute "no brainer”, according to Serco Leisure’s National Commercial Programming Manager, Stephanie Wiltshire, a former a group exercise instructor who went on to manage group exercise for Serco’s leisure centres in Kent.

Serco Leisure, which manages 39 facilities with health and fitness operations across the country, recently went live with CoverMe at its Kent sites; Lockmeadow Leisure Centre in Maidstone, Maidstone Leisure Centre and Swallows Leisure Centre in Sittingbourne. Around 150 classes run each week across the three venues, and CoverMe is efficiently and effectively sourcing instructors around three to four times per week, when the regular team is on holiday or off sick.

Wiltshire, who has been working in the industry for 16 years, explains: “After spending years as either an instructor or managing group exercise, it was a no brainer to jump onboard an app where everything is in one place and cover can literally be arranged at the click of a button.

“A year ago, when I was Kent Health and Fitness Manager for Serco Leisure, finding cover for classes fell entirely on my lap for all our sites. It takes a lot of time out of a health and fitness manager’s day. It can also get very messy and diluted when you’re using different forms of communication – some instructors want to be contacted via group chats, others don’t, some prefer email and some like a phone call. It’s easy to make a mistake when the messages aren’t in one place.”

With CoverMe, operators are connected with inspirational, qualified and vetted instructors, filtered through the app’s algorithms and analytics, which identify the most suitable freelance instructors, factoring in skills, proximity and availability – all in real time – so managers can source and book class cover in just three steps.

“Having been responsible for finding the cover instructors myself, I would say CoverMe is saving our health and fitness managers around five hours plus per week. CoverMe significantly improves their work life balance; they are no longer the victim of multiple group chats, being contacted on every social media platform possible, every hour of every day,” continues Wiltshire.

The ability to have more than one admin on the app means staff can truly have time off and, when at work, can focus on other activities when they need to, knowing another member of the team can handle the cover request.

“For example, Caroline, our health and fitness manager at Swallows Leisure Centre, was on the gym floor delivering inductions the other day when a notification for cover came through on the app. She quickly approved the cover request, finished her appointment and then checked the app again to see that the cover had been arranged. Historically, the stress of trying to find time to send and manage all those messages, emails and calls would have been immense. As a result, we’ve definitely seen fewer class cancellations.”

Wiltshire has been impressed with CoverMe’s instructor portal, which requires all necessary certification and insurance documents to be uploaded and vetted by CoverMe’s staff before they are approved on the app. She says: “We require a £10 million public liability insurance from our instructors, and it’s really important to us that the CoverMe app can take that into when vetting suitable instructors. If an instructor is not compliant they cannot teach for us; it’s just another headache we no longer have to worry about. The same with insurance. CoverMe takes ownership, making sure these things are correct and up to date, with the parameters set by the club. CoverMe flags up when someone’s certification or insurance is due to expire and freezes their account if it’s out of date, so we always remain compliant. Before now this has been hard to keep tabs on.”

Wiltshire concludes: “The onboarding process was also super smooth and easy. CoverMe did 99.9% of the work for us, making it a stress-free and easy to manage process. It’s been a great tool for Kent so far and I will be overseeing the process as and when it launches across our other sites too.”