Background

Lifestyle Family Fitness, a health club focused on providing a fun and friendly experience for members, has grown significantly from its original club in 1982 to more than 56 locations in 2008, with 2,800 employees spread out across their corporate office in St. Petersburg, Florida and at clubs in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida. As the company grew, executives realized the large number of offices and employees was making it increasingly difficult to create relationships between employees and management that make team members feel valued, fully engaged and dedicated to customer satisfaction.

After realizing the appraisal process had become rushed and ineffective, Lifestyle started the search for a product that would streamline the process. They desired a product that would automate the employee appraisal process, and engage teams while being true to the company's mission statement. "Everything in our mission statement is about a fun and friendly experience and building relationships, so we wanted to make sure, from a technology standpoint, that we were bringing fun and friendly opportunities to our team, and SilkRoad did that for us," Leslie Daley, Vice President of Team Services said.

A Fully Integrated Solution

After meeting with several companies, Lifestyle Family Fitness chose SilkRoad's performance management solution, WingSpan. Primary features that appealed to Lifestyle included the product's quick deployment timeline, the user-friendly interface, and extensive product customization. As an added bonus, the company liked that WingSpan was part of the SilkRoad Life Suite offering of products that work together seamlessly. Already having purchased SilkRoad's OpenHire and RedCarpet, Lifestyle felt comfortable they would have no problems fully integrating their talent management solutions.

Daley said, "SilkRoad addressed the functions we needed and the economics were right on target."

Lifestyle Family Fitness Sees Immediate Results

After implementing WingSpan, Lifestyle found the software immediately increased communication between employees and managers, created a consolidated company approach to employee performance, and improved employee participation in the appraisal process. The new appraisal plan also helped define clearer expectations for employees and elaborated on goals against which team members would be measured.

With WingSpan, Lifestyle streamlined its performance management keeping employees engaged in the entire process and ensured a better relationship between club team members, management and the executive team working from the corporate home office.

"The functionality was exactly how we would have planned if we were going to build a technology to support that process ourselves," said Daley. "It is identical to our workflow. We are very pleased and it affords us the opportunity to really customize the appraisal."

Key Impacts