Methods evolve but our vision stays the same

Culture & Training: Riverhills Health Club and Day Spa

The health club and day spa business is one that remains largely untouched by AI development, in that you still need a human to deliver a massage and to create a friendly, sociable gym environment. The challenge is in how we ensure our team is equipped to deliver that friendly service.

With an average employee age that is comfortably under thirty, we have staff who have grown up in the mobile phone culture and whose formative years were blighted by the isolation of the COVID lockdown. All of which means we have to work really hard at developing a team that is far more used to virtual communication than face-to-face.

Adapting to a modern world

Our business, Mosaic, which owns Riverhills, has been around for nearly 40 years, and its vision of focusing on serving customers and making a difference to the quality of people’s lives hasn’t changed.

Nor should it.

This vision is underpinned by a strong set of values: Irresistibility, Education, Outcome, People Matter and Excellence. These guide every aspect of decision-making, team culture and customer experience.

However, what has changed is the way in which we convey this culture to our team. Day-long staff training sessions simply do not cut the mustard anymore, especially when we are largely talking to a Gen Z community with an average attention span of eight seconds! Instead, to succeed in their world of TikTok and Instagram messaging, we are breaking all our training down into short, online sessions of around 20 minutes. We are also using creative video messaging more than ever, as it is a medium that they can relate to. And all of this content is easily and readily available, so team members can access it whenever they want.

And it is clearly working.

Riverhills won Spa Team of the Year at the Professional Beauty Awards 2026, having impressed the judges with how the team supports each other, and how the company ethos shines through in both their training and the guest experience.

Growth from strong roots

Of course, in a world of fake news and misinformation, it is also vital that those of us in leadership roles work hard at living out our vision and values. We need to evidence how we deliver on both of those – authenticity is more important than it has ever been.

Today, as we approach our fifth decade of being in business, we believe the secret to ensuring we stay relevant and successful is to be diligent in ensuring that spirit – our dedication to serving our members and guests – never changes, even if the way we develop our teams does.