Abstract
Student gymnasiums places students wants and interests at the forefront of its priorities, in addition to keeping within the overall strategy of the university it belongs to. However, when a university’s teaching strategy involves reverting to online teaching during a pandemic like COVID-19 to continue teaching and learning under pandemic conditions, it leaves the sustainability of a student gymnasium uncertain. Due to the fact that student gymnasiums are owned by universities, they are different from privately and commercially owned gymnasiums. The importance of this study lies within the research gap identified in this problem statement of the research study. There is not enough research done on student gymnasiums and how the management structure manages their systems in times of crises and how they use their processes to adapt in such a situation. Therefore, this study aims to gain in-depth understanding of the inputs made, at a university student gymnasium in the systems (process and outputs), before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study wishes to recommend strategies to student-gymnasium managers post-pandemic.
The study made use of a case study research design that was divided in two phases. The first phase of data collection focussed on a document analysis of the UJ student-gymnasiums; staff planning/human resource, membership base, clientele, financial management, operations, equipment and assets documents. The second phase focussed on three semi-structured interviews that commenced with the UJ student-gymnasium manager, each semi-structured interview focussed on one year (2019, 2020 or 2021). In addition, three focus group discussions commenced with the UJ student-gymnasium operational managers (one operational manager from each of the four campus student-gymnasiums were present in the focus group discussions), the sample was adjusted with three new participants that joined the discussion during the 2021 focus group due to retrenchments that had occurred in 2020 and redeployments in the staffing compliment during 2021. From the results, the following systems were identified as being part of the UJ student-gymnasiums; staff planning, membership base, marketing, financial management, equipment, facilities, technology, health and safety. It was evident from the results presented that system changes occurred at the student-gymnasiums before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The inputs were transformed to lead to outputs that aided the UJ student-gymnasiums to remain sustainable. From the presented outputs the UJ student-gymnasiums adopted new practices as part of their daily operations.
Keywords: Student-gymnasiums, systems, sustainable, UJ (University of Johannesburg), university, COVID-19 pandemic