Operations Design & Excellence Lead

About Cult - Curefit Healthcare Pvt Ltd, founded in 2016, is India’s largest fitness company and wellness platform. Cult, from the house of Curefit, was established with a mission to make fitness easy, fun and accessible to everyone, and has emerged as a community celebrating the joy of fitness. The brand today offers a range of fitness services ranging from group workouts, gyms and personalized fitness solutions, as well as an expansive selection of quality fitness products for the everyday athlete. The company’s vision is to empower everyone towards an active and healthier lifestyle through innovative fitness solutions, enabled by technology.

Role Overview -

The Operations Design team is responsible for strengthening operational excellence across a large, distributed service network through first-principles thinking and systematic problem-solving. The team focuses on designing scalable processes, people systems, and operational products that consistently deliver high quality, cost efficiency, and reliability in day-to-day operations.

This is a leadership role within the team, responsible for improving operational outcomes across approximately 600 locations, a workforce of over 7,000 personnel, and multiple cities. The role directly influences how frontline and managerial teams perform by ensuring that operations are supported by clear standards, robust processes, and effective tools.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Own workforce quality as a charter

• Build and execute the national strategy for Staff capability, quality, and readiness.
• Define “What a Great Center Staff Looks Like” → competency framework, behavioral standards, leadership expectations.
• Build a pipeline of future staff across all regions.

2. Build towards Recruitment & Selection Excellence

• Design and govern a pan-India hiring system for staff with the help of the hiring team
• Partner with the hiring team to ensure 100% quality hiring and zero bad hires.
• Implement structured assessments (role simulations, situational judgment tests, culture fit evaluation).

3. Build towards Training & Capability Excellence

• Own the full learning lifecycle (Induction → Skill Building → Mastery).
• Build a capability academy for staff covering:
• Sales management
• People leadership
• P&L basics
• Operational excellence
• Member experience
• Crisis & escalation handling
• Design certification and re-certification programs.

4. Standardize Performance Quality at scale

• Create clear quality KPIs for staff (business, service, compliance, culture).
• Work with Operations to ensure uniform performance standards across all centers.
• Identify low-performing clusters and build targeted capability improvement plans.

5. Set up Governance for consistent delivery

• Establish periodic competency audits, center audits, mystery audits, and capability scorecards.
• Develop a “Staff Quality Index” used to evaluate and compare managers across zones.
• Govern corrective actions, improvement plans, and compliance escalations.

6. Coach Leaders & Support On-Ground staff

• Lead a team of regional capability leads / trainers / coaches.
• Drive on-ground interventions, shadowing, mentoring and center turnaround programs.
• Build “High-Performance Manager Communities” across India.

7. Drive Technology, Data & Insights

• Use data dashboards to track staff performance, training effectiveness, hiring quality, and pipeline health.
• Introduce digital learning tools, LMS modules, micro-learning, and gamified capability programs.

8. Partner Cross-Functionally

• Work closely with Operations, HR, L&D, Sales, CX and Product teams.
• Ensure staff capability outcomes directly translate into higher revenue, NPS, retention, and service consistency .
• The role would cover staff across all centers Pan India.

Key metrics for the role:

• NPS and member experience scores
• Staff Quality Index improvement YoY
• Reduction in performance variability across centers
• % of “job-ready” staff pipeline availability
• Sales conversion and retention

Experience & Qualifications:

• 6+ years of experience in Operations Excellence / People Capability / Training Leadership roles.
• Preferably from Retail, Hospitality, BFSI, Fitness, QSR, or Large Multi-Site Consumer Businesses.
• Strong understanding of sales, service, and multi-center operations.
• Strong analytics, people leadership, and program management skills.
• Good to have - Experience handling large field teams (500+ members).