Global engineering organisation Fort Vale Engineering has introduced a new on-site gym at its UK headquarters, available exclusively to the 400 employees based in Burnley, Lancashire.
The organisation opened the facility in March 2018, as part of an ongoing corporate wellbeing strategy, which includes placing a strong focus on physical and mental wellbeing.
The gym is home to a range of equipment from the Life Fitness brand, and is part of a sports centre built expressly for the purpose of catering to Fort Vale's UK-based employees. The centre also includes a multi-sport sports hall, group exercise studio and lounge area. There are also plans to install an indoor climbing wall in the future.
To introduce the gym to employees, Life Fitness Academy, the global training and education arm of the fitness equipment organisation, hosted two training days for staff. These aimed to build employees' knowledge and understanding, and to help them get the best results from their use of the gym, and included one day of product training in March 2018, and one day of maintenance training in April 2018.
Ian Wilson, co-owner of Fort Vale Engineering, said: “At Fort Vale we pride ourselves on looking after our employees, and we felt it [was] important to be able to offer a sport and fitness facility for our workforce that underpins this. The benefits are extensive, and we hope to see this reflected company-wide with staff’s overall health and fitness, morale and consequently productivity and employee retention positively impacted.”
Tom Kerby, account manager at Life Fitness, added: “Health and fitness plays a key part in corporate wellbeing and we are working more and more in partnership with organisations to help deliver their strategies. Our wide brand portfolio and extensive equipment offering means we’re able to provide flexible solutions for organisations regardless of size, budget or available space – a challenge commonly faced with in-house corporate gyms – and Fort Vale is fantastic example of the positive effect that fitness provision can have on employees’ health and wellbeing.”