Inspire Brands Asia is a leading fitness and wellness platform redefining the industry across Southeast Asia. With a portfolio encompassing Anytime Fitness and the innovative SUMHIIT Fitness, Inspire Brands Asia aims to enable everyone to benefit from fitness, wellness, and health.
Omni has transformed our HR processes. With Omni, we’ve seen a 20% drop in attrition and a major boost in employee satisfaction and efficiency. It’s a user-friendly, time-saving solution that has revolutionized our HR department.
Currently operating more than 400 gyms in eight countries, Inspire Brands Asia is 1,000 employees strong. Their globally distributed team requires HR agility on all fronts, from payroll compliance to tailored onboarding programs. The absence of a single, unified platform for their growing team quickly led to inaccurate data, time-consuming manual processes, and compliance risks.
“There were no systems in place. Our payroll was done manually through Microsoft Excel which led to late social contributions and mandatory government payments.” shared Tengku Mohaizad, Group Head of HR Asia at Inspire Brands Asia. In an effort to reduce attrition rates and maintain a consistent and tailored employee experience, Inspire Brand’s sought a solution that would unify their HR processes and simplify managing their people across various countries.
Omni’s holistic People platform offered Inspire Brands a one-stop, single source of truth for their team, allowing HR to manage employee profiles, run multi-country payroll, securely store employee documents, and integrate with their favorite workplace tools to easily track deadlines, send reminders, and pull data to ensure compliance, improve retention efforts and bring harmony to their HR processes.
How Omni Adds Value to Inspire Brands Asia
1. Improved Data Accuracy
The Challenge
Prior to Omni, the Inspire Brands HR team faced significant challenges in managing employee data across their eight-country footprint.
Relying heavily on manual processes created a complex and error-prone system. As described by Mohaizad, “It was a mess,” with employee information stored across various Excel sheets and SharePoint documents. This decentralized approach led to widespread data inconsistencies and errors, making it challenging to maintain accurate and consistent data throughout the company’s multi-country operations. The team decided it was time to find a system that allowed them to process multi-country payroll, with the ability to track mandatory contributions and automate distribution to avoid manual errors.
Omni's Solution
Omni’s centralized employee records allowed Inspire Brands to consolidate their employee information from various spreadsheets and documents into one, secure system that supports the countries they operate in. As a single source of truth for employee data, Omni turned the time-consuming process of pulling employee information, calculating payroll, and manually cross-referencing banking and compliance details, into a swift and streamlined effort supported by automation.
Omni’s centralized employee information allowed the Inspire Brand’s HR team to create a single-source of truth, meaning employee information was entered in once and reflected across all HR functions—from payroll to employee benefits—eliminating the need for manual data entry and thus significantly enhancing data accuracy and consistency. Whatsmore, Omni’s system updates employee data in real-time, helping prevent any lags in communication and reducing payroll errors.
The Results
By consolidating employee data from multiple countries into a single platform, Omni eliminated Inspire Brand’s data discrepancies and ensured consistent information across their organization. Mohaizad shared that this centralized approach significantly reduced the financial impact of errors, with the company saving an estimated "$10,000 to $15,000 USD as a whole, for each quarter".
Furthermore, the real-time synchronization of data streamlined HR operations, including payroll, benefits administration, and leave management, while ensuring data integrity and consistency throughout the organization.
As emphasized by Mohaizad, “There are buggy systems that I’ve worked with before, but not Omni.” The platform’s ability to provide “instant changes” to employee records, such as transfers, role changes, and instant organizational chart updates across the company was a game-changer for Inspire Brand’s internal communications.
2. Higher Employee Retention
The Challenge
The pandemic presented additional pain points to Inspire Brand’s existing HR challenges. As Mohaizad described, “Attrition rates were high, particularly within our HR team.” High turnover rates amid rapid growth created a challenging work environment that impacted employee engagement. The lack of resources and inefficient processes within the HR team further hampered their ability to foster a positive and supportive culture.
Without HR software and heavy reliance on manual processes, the HR team struggled to accurately measure satisfaction for their workforce and identify areas for improvement. “The absence of a reliable HR system and reliance on manual processes further worsened these issues, making it difficult for our HR team to gain a clear insight into our workforce and foster a positive and supportive work environment.” This lack of insight made it hard for the HR team to develop and implement targeted solutions to boost engagement. Furthermore, as experienced HR professionals left the organization, data management issues and information lapses became the norm, negatively impacting employee morale and retention.
Omni's Solution
Omni automatically consolidates essential employee data, including hours worked, headcount and attrition rates, to generate real-time data in user-friendly graphs and reports. This data arms Inspire Brands Asia’s HR team with valuable insights into employee engagement and identifies key opportunities for employee growth.
Combining both automated employee satisfaction surveys and Omni’s data insights, Inspire Brands Asia was able to identify trends in employee turnover, gauge employee sentiment, assess the effectiveness of their HR initiatives, and optimize resource allocation. As Mohaizad highlighted, “The growing confidence that our staff had with the company in general, had a lot to do with having a robust HR system in Omni”.
The Results
Omni’s real-time reporting and user-friendly platform empowered Inspire Brands Asia’s HR team with valuable insights into employee engagement and satisfaction. This data-driven approach equipped HR with the ability to accurately identify and address active pain points, fostering a positive and proactive work culture.
By implementing tailored HR initiatives based on these newfound insights, Inspire Brands Asia significantly enhanced overall employee experience and reduced attrition. Mohaizad shared, “Our attrition has reduced by 20% since implementing Omni and our recent employee survey highlighted that our employee net promoter score grew by double digits within a year.”
3. Reduced Time Spent on Administrative Tasks
The Challenge
As Inspire Brands Asia expanded across countries, the HR team found itself overwhelmed with ever-growing manual tasks. Before Omni, functions like payroll calculations required “three to five working days” according to Mohaizad. The manual nature of these processes extended beyond payroll, impacting leave management and employee data updates.
Employees often went on leave without formal applications, creating administrative challenges. From manually tracking leave requests for approval to marking team calendars and calculating leave balances, this tedious process became an additional burden for the HR team, extending from team communication and productivity to payroll accuracy.
Moreover, the reliance on Excel for employee data further aggravated the issue. While spreadsheets provided familiarity and ease-of-use, they lacked the ability to handle the growing complexity of Inspire Brand’s HR operations. Tracking changes across multiple sheets of employee data was cumbersome, leading to frustration and errors. Reporting capabilities were also limited, making it difficult for Inspire Brands Asia to identify key insights and analyze employee data effectively.
These inefficiencies caused by reliance on manual processes extended beyond operational challenges. Delays and inaccuracies in mandatory payments posed significant compliance risks, threatening the company’s reputation and financial stability. As Mohaizad noted, “there were occasions where we were legally obligated to pay 10 days of annual leave due to the company’s inability to provide accurate records.”
Omni's Solution
As Inspire Brands Asia’s teams continued to expand their 1,000+ employee workforce, the HR team knew it was time to streamline and automate their payroll and leave management processes; as manual operations grew to be increasingly time-consuming and error-prone.
Omni helped bring clarity, accuracy, and speed to Inspire Brand’s HR processes. Custom leave policies allowed their HR team to standardize leave policies among their workforce while offering flexible parameters for different teams or locations, improving communication among employees and their managers. With automated and centralized employee profiles, employee leave balances were updated and calculated as soon as employee’s leave was taken or approved, reducing inaccurate data that previously caused payroll issues.
Beyond leave management, Omni’s payroll capabilities streamlined operations through automated calculations for payroll, taxes, social contributions, and government payments. By eliminating manual processes and reducing the risk of errors, Omni freed up Inspire Brand Asia’s HR team to focus on strategic initiatives.
After automating these processes, Omni brought further ease by allowing Inspire Brand’s team to set custom and automated approval workflows, automatically routing employee leave requests directly to the appropriate manager and removing HR from the admin cycle. Omni’s employee self-service portal brought autonomy to Inspire Brand Asia’s employees, allowing them to update their profiles, submit for time off, access payslips and more without the intervention of HR, while managers maintained visibility with automated calendar updates.
The Results
“Payroll calculations that used to take three to five working days can now be done in half the time,” Mohaizad shared, highlighting the significant boost in efficiency. By automating payroll calculations, streamlining leave management and setting up automated workflows, Inspire Brands Asia’s HR team experienced a 50% reduction of time spent on administrative tasks.
Inspire Change with Omni
With the use of Omni’s all-in-one HR solution, Inspire Brands Asia successfully addressed the challenges of retaining and managing their growing and geographically dispersed workforce. Omni’s features streamlined administrative tasks across payroll and leave management, leading to increased efficiency, reduced errors and improved data accuracy. Furthermore, Omni’s advanced reporting capabilities provided valuable insights on employee attrition and other engagement metrics, enabling the HR team to take proactive initiatives to boost retention.
Empowered by a unified platform and automated processes, Inspire Brands Asia’s HR team can now focus on strategic initiatives and provide a seamless and consistent experience for their growing global team.
