Gourmet restaurants. Spa services. Acres of tennis and basketball courts. Yoga, Pilates, weight training and more. No ordinary fitness centre, Midtown Athletic Club offers “sport resort” class amenities to its members from the Midwest to Canada. Each club is a place where people can set, meet and surpass their fitness goals to transform into the best versions of themselves and then bring that energy back to their families and communities. Recently, the club expanded so rapidly that it outgrew its financial management and human capital management (HCM) systems. Midtown had plans to upgrade and streamline them, but day-to-day operations were so busy, that it didn’t have time – until the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Scoring goals while others sit on the bench.
The beginning of the pandemic was challenging for businesses in the fitness industry. While uncertainty was high, company leaders at Midtown saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to uplevel Midtown’s operational performance, improve team accountability, and build on company culture. To accomplish this, they decided to follow through on a long-planned effort to simplify business processes and replace disjointed systems with a single solution. The executive team used this time to reimagine the improved future state of Midtown on Workday.
The day we went live on Workday was perfect – boring and uneventful for our IT team.
Learning and Development Manager
Companywide consensus and change management.
Looking to achieve results quickly, Midtown decided to go all in with Workday, deploying the full suite of Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management at the same time. Members of the executive team saw how Workday could drive transformational change and were completely aligned in driving a change management initiative throughout the company. Using the Workday Launch deployment approach, Midtown was able to prioritise the critical functionality they needed to go live and start using features quickly.
As employees returned to the clubs, the deployment team met with everybody to help them understand how Workday could help them do their jobs. Midtown used lunch-and-learn events, informal briefings and frequent surveys of workforce perceptions and attitudes to get the entire workforce ready for and excited about Workday. Courtney Brouse, learning and development manager at Midtown Athletic Club, says, “It was a huge selling point for our associates to have Workday as the 1 system for everything – no more logging in to 10 different applications with 10 passwords or using 50 software tools to complete just 1 workflow.”
With the whole organisation pulling together, Midtown completed an entirely virtual HCM deployment in five months. “The day we went live on Workday was perfect – boring and uneventful for our IT team”, says Brouse. “That’s exactly what you want for such a major undertaking.”
We create a more accountable, individualised company culture on Workday.
Learning and Development Manager
Easy to learn. Easy to play.
For many Midtown employees, the Workday mobile app is the main entry point to the system. Brouse describes, “Our associates are on the run a lot. Waiting to clock in and out at a dedicated terminal wasted a huge amount of their time. Now they can use the Workday app instead. It also allows them to look at their pay stubs, see their schedule and make time-off and scheduling requests.”
Employees rely on Workday for much more than everyday activities. They use the app to review the company’s objectives and enter their own aligning goals. They receive all of their Midtown trainings through Workday Learning instead of a separate learning management system. And employees and team leaders manage performance and will implement merit compensation conversations later this year through Workday. “We’ve created a more accountable, individualised company culture on Workday”, Brouse says. “The system allows us to resolve talent management challenges that our entire industry grapples with.”
Instead of printing, signing, scanning and emailing forms, new Midtown employees and their hiring managers now perform all onboarding activities seamlessly and securely in Workday. New hires can log in to Workday to see which trainings are assigned to them and what the company’s expectations are. Brouse comments, “Workday enables us to offer new employees the right path to becoming happy, productive Midtown associates, no matter whether they are part-time, full-time or working in the corporate office.”
Workday helped us make our business systems more resilient to change and create a more fulfilling environment for our people, especially with its mobile app.
Chief Information Officer
Finance sprints toward greater efficiency and strategic insight.
Welcome changes in finance management took place immediately following the Workday deployment. Errors on the first payroll processed through Workday were at an all-time low of less than 1%. Midtown also streamlined how it compensates employees. Instead of paying people 20–50 different ways, the company standardised and simplified compensation across all 8 locations.
For Midtown’s finance team, Workday has made life easier – and more interesting. Workday Payroll helped the team automate and simplify their payroll processing. They went from nine separate and manual processes to one automated process, and payroll completion is now measured in hours versus days. Workday offers access to data that enables team members to ask analytical questions and make decisions at a more strategic level.
Midtown is still in the process of integrating all its financial data and processes into Workday and anticipates more beneficial changes. The team anticipates that they will continue to elevate their insight-driven decision-making with Workday to an even higher level.
Our finance team is no longer bogged down with administrative tasks. Since we deployed Workday, people finally have time to think about improving how the company works.
Chief Information Officer