Everybody—even top executives—works the front desk.Every single employee, including top executives like Whelan and chief financial officer Sunder Reddy, begins their job training by working at the front desk at a SoulCycle studio—a daunting, frenzied job post in which, on any given busy morning, some 60 sweaty riders spill out of the cycling studios, and another 60 or so stream in, all with requests for shoes, water, and pleas to get off the waitlist. “Everyone sprays shoes,” Patrick Ryan Southern, SoulCycle’s director of operations and training, tells me of the front desk staff’s task of spritzing the cycling shoes rented by riders with disinfectant after each class. “It cultivates a sense of equality and community. We’re all in this together.”

It’s a hierarchy-shattering move that’s reminiscent of the CBS reality show Undercover Boss, in which chief executives in (awesomely bad) disguise work alongside company employees at more modest levels—except it’s no secret at SoulCycle, where one of the official company “core values” is “get dirty.” Whelan can be seen pitching in behind the front desk at her “home studio,” SoulCycle Tribeca, and taking what she learns back to the boardroom in a form of firsthand market research. “If you want to know what’s going on, don’t look at the numbers,” she says. “Go to a studio.” Soul’s new CFO, too, has been working the front desk at the Greenwich, Connecticut, studio. And as a result, “he’s not sitting in a conference room, disconnected, saying, ‘Well, we’re slashing this and investing over here,’ ” Whelan says. “He’s saying, ‘I connected into the studios; I understand their challenges.’ ”

Employees get paid time off for charity work.Consider it the new, soul-nourishing job perk: SoulCycle gives staffers two paid business days per year to volunteer at a charity of their choice (this past year, many chose God’s Love We Deliver, which prepares and delivers meals to people suffering from HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other serious illnesses). There is even a three-person charity team at the company, which has launched additional initiatives like a scholarship program in which low-income high school students ride free and are mentored by Soul employees.

It’s all part of the SoulCycle effort to keep employees happy and fulfilled, according to Whelan. “We watched, years ago, a training that really stuck with a lot of us. It said that people are really looking for three big things in their careers: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. They want to know that they’re working toward something that’s bigger than themselves.”