Life Time, Inc. is a fast-paced company, always signing up new members and opening additional locations. Life Time operates several branded businesses, all of them supported by a centralized IT department. A large workforce—with many seasonal and part-time team members—aims to deliver top-quality member services in every Life Time club.
Workday allows us to achieve our goals for different business entities with great flexibility.
Director, Workday Operations and Process Improvement
Need for flexible, fast management capabilities.
Business conditions can change rapidly, and Life Time has to make staffing and operational adjustments promptly. That may mean onboarding additional staff, furloughing people during the pandemic, or bringing them back into the clubs as soon as conditions improve. The company’s HR and business systems must enable the agility and flexibility needed to manage change efficiently, transparently, and without disrupting the company’s reason for being—the best possible member experience.
Many Life Time employees play multiple roles. Their jobs may have varying compensation rates and plans, and they could be assigned to one of several cost centers. Positions can be salaried or hourly, and some may also include commissions. The activities of managing the workforce and reporting on teams, finance and club operations needs to reflect these conditions without becoming too painful and complex.
Simplifying business management with data insight.
Life Time, Inc. relies on a portfolio of Workday applications to facilitate financial and payroll management, human capital management (HCM), and business analytics. When the company became the 12th customer to deploy Workday, it consolidated 60 different software tools into one and reduced its chart of accounts by 90 percent. Administrative workloads for financial managers declined by two-thirds. Since then, Life Time has experienced dramatic growth, increasing its employee count by almost 60 percent. The company also has broadened its use of the Workday system and more recently deployed Prism Analytics.
With the use of Workday, practices for using, reporting and understanding business data have matured. Gaurav Sharda, director of Workday operations and process improvement, says, “Our data literacy has greatly improved with Workday. Finance and HR managers have become more and more comfortable and proficient in using Workday to understand and manage the business.” Workday is also embedding machine learning into its core architecture to deliver intelligent automation capabilities like Journal Insights as part of Workday Financial Management. Sharda explains, “We rely on journal insights to proactively detect anomalies in accounting entries by comparing them to entries for similar transactions. As we flag them in real time, users can quickly correct potential reconciliation issues saving us time at month end.”
Workday offers a seamless user experience for our managers and team members.
Director, Workday Operations and Process Improvement
Delivering a rewarding user experience.
While each Workday application helps Life Time achieve remarkable results in various areas of the business, the entirety of the integrated Workday system elevates these outcomes to another level. Commenting on the company’s Workday experience, Sharda says, “Workday offers a seamless user experience for our managers and team members. Its efficiencies make it possible to support and evolve the software with a lean team, quickly adapting one single system to accommodate a variety of changing business needs. You don’t need to worry about integrations or data flows, and you can save a lot of time.”
The Workday mobile app is a key asset for Life Time employees, especially the club workers who may support multiple locations and departments. Every day, close to 35,000 logins take place through the Workday app. “Mobile time tracking with Workday was a game-changer for us,” Sharda says. “Ninety-five percent of our user population use the Workday mobile app to check in, check out, review their benefits, update their personal information, and do lots more.”
Mobile time tracking with Workday was a game-changer for us.
Director, Workday Operations and Process Improvement
More agile, easier workforce management.
Life Time managers can reassign workers on the fly or, during the coronavirus pandemic, temporarily furlough them and later bring them back safely. Sharda says, “Workday allows us to make workforce changes at a very rapid pace.” Labor management with Workday is also extremely efficient. “Thanks to Workday, we are reducing overtime costs,” says Sharda. “We have reallocated close to 50,000 manager hours per year with automated time management.” Life Time will be using Workday Prism Analytics to drive further efficiencies and savings, starting with automatically tracking employees’ access card swipes as they enter and leave club locations.
Workday Machine Learning gives us time back and provides journal insights.
Senior Accounting Manager
Business insight, delivered fast.
Life Time relies on the machine learning features in the Workday applications to streamline accounting. Sharda explains, “We’re very excited about our machine-learning journey and the many ways it can help us learn quickly from our data, so we can understand and manage behaviors.” Machine learning also enables remarkable efficiencies. Katie VanHauen, senior accounting manager at Life Time, Inc., says, “The machine learning capabilities in Workday give us time back and provide journal insights. A process that used to take as long as a day can now just be a 30-minute refresh of a report.”
Workday tools deliver business insight quickly and in a highly usable format. Sharda says, “Reporting in general is a really strong area in Workday. We can spin up and customize reports quickly, and it’s easy to create dashboards where business managers can gather the insight they need.”
Making service delivery easier.
From HR to finance to hiring managers and workers in the clubs, Life Time uses Workday software to enable teams to deliver the best possible member experience. Sharda says, “People no longer need to navigate multiple systems, because Workday meets all their needs with self-service capabilities. The associated efficiency benefits are also exciting.”
Related Content