Managing 1,000 trips annually: How Urban Sports Club automated global mobility compliance

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🔎 ABOUT URBAN SPORTS CLUB

Europe's leading wellbeing platform meets global workforce demands

Urban Sports Club is Europe's biggest and most flexible sports platform, providing access to over 50 different activities - from swimming and boxing to pilates and bouldering. Operating across eight European markets including Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Iberia, France, and Belgium, the company brings wellbeing to both B2C users and corporate clients.

With an internationally diverse workforce, Urban Sports Club received increasing requests from employees wanting to combine work with family visits abroad. As Chief People Officer Sandra Strauss explains: "We have a lot of requests. Can we not spend time with our families and combine this with working?"

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🔥 CHALLENGE

Managing compliance complexity while supporting business development and employee flexibility

Urban Sports Club faced several key challenges in managing their global workforce's travel needs:

• Manual administrative burden: The HR team processed A1 certificates manually for employees traveling from Germany for business trips and workations. "This was a very manual process. High workload, time consuming," notes Strauss. For spontaneous trips, this created significant delays.
• Geographic limitations: Despite having employees with families worldwide, the company limited work-from-anywhere trips to Europe only. "We received a lot of requests outside of Europe, and we always declined. And this of course made people really unhappy. And it felt unfair," recalls Strauss, particularly for visa-holding employees.
• Compliance uncertainty: The team faced insecurity about legislation, social security, and permanent establishment risks. "There's a lot of unknown about legislation, social security, permanent establishments. How can we make it happen in a compliant way?" Strauss explains. Available solutions only covered German-based employees, not their international workforce.
• Lack of proper tracking: Without systems in place, many employees didn't request necessary certificates for business travel, and the HR team had limited visibility into actual travel patterns.

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🎉 SOLUTION

WorkFlex delivers comprehensive global compliance management

After scanning the market and speaking with other Berlin scale-ups, Urban Sports Club discovered WorkFlex - a solution that addressed their international needs:

• Global coverage from day one: Unlike other providers that only worked for German-based employees, WorkFlex offered "this global solution we needed," enabling worldwide workations that employees had long requested.
• Seamless API integration: The platform connected directly with Urban Sports Club's HRIS and travel booking system. "There is an API to our HRIS, which was really, really important. And there's an API to our travel booking system Egencia as well," says Strauss.
• User-friendly interface: The intuitive platform made adoption smooth. "The interface is very user-friendly, so everything seemed very seamless and easy."
• Complete compliance coverage: WorkFlex handles all aspects - from A1 certificates to visa guidance - providing the security the HR team needed.

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"When we saw WorkFlex for the first time and understood it really offers this global solution we needed, we were hooked."
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– Sandra Strauss, Chief People Officer at Urban Sports Club

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🎯 BENEFITS

Enhanced employee satisfaction and operational efficiency

The implementation of WorkFlex has delivered significant benefits for Urban Sports Club:

• Employee happiness: When announcing global workations at an all-hands meeting, the reaction was immediate: "We received emoji hearts flying around... for one minute. Just hearts flying around because everybody was so happy. All of a sudden the world seemed to have no limits any longer."
• Scale achieved: In the last 12 months, Urban Sports Club successfully processed "almost 900 business trips and workations" - volume that would have been impossible with manual processes.
• Reduced compliance concerns: "We don't think about compliance so much any longer because we feel secure with the system, both for business travel and for workations as well," notes Strauss. The automated process means "we don't think about it any longer."
• Key retention benefit: The workation policy has become "one of the most important" benefits in their structure. "There is definitely something which retains people with us because it's a benefit not every company is offering to their workforce."
• Significant time savings: "A lot of workload has been released for the HR operations team, which is amazing." The manual work previously required for nearly 1,000 trips has been eliminated.

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In the last 12 months, we had almost 900 business trips and workations. If you think about the manual work to provide for almost a thousand trips, you can do the math and realize how much manual work has been reduced. So absolutely worth it. Go for it.

– Sandra Strauss, Chief People Officer at Urban Sports Club