How BEAT81 consolidated its HRIS and cut onboarding time by 10+ hours a month
“Now that we have the HRIS and the feedback and reviews module in one tool, it helps in terms of the automation we set up for different workflows, but also reminders. It's really nice to have that in one tool and have one dashboard with your to-dos and your checklists rather than having multiple tools for that.”
BEAT81 is a group fitness company operating studios across five German cities. The workouts are central to the experience, but so is the culture that surrounds them — it shapes how the team communicates, how feedback works, and how the company runs day to day. With more than 240 people across office, operations, and front-of-house studio roles, keeping that culture consistent as the company has grown has been a real focus for the people team.
People & Culture Lead Sonja Grabner has been with BEAT81 for three and a half years, watching the team grow significantly as new studios have opened. Here, she shares how the people team approached that growth and what consolidating their HRIS and performance reviews in Leapsome made possible.
BEAT81 employs two groups of people whose working lives look almost nothing alike. In their HQ, the office and operations staff work fixed contracts, standard hours, and predictable weeks. In the studios, the front-of-house and hosts work shifts across multiple cities on schedules that change week to week. This group has more than tripled as the studio footprint has grown across five German cities. Both groups are BEAT81. Both deserve the same standard of HR, the same HRIS setup, the same onboarding experience, and the same quality of feedback conversations. However, for years, that required significant manual effort from the people team.
We had a lot of manual processes before, where we had to basically trigger every task and responsibility ourselves. We would have to reach out to all of the stakeholders regarding feedback for employees.
Previously, every new hire required someone on the people team to manually duplicate a spreadsheet for their upcoming feedback, build out the TypeForm, and confirm each stakeholder's responsibilities by hand. : one generic competency model applied to every role in every team, regardless of what the work actually required.
We used Google Sheets and TypeForms. It wasn't very user-friendly in general. What we experienced is that the sheet was breaking, and also feedback was very generic.
BEAT81's commitment to direct, honest feedback has always been part of the culture. The harder question, as the company grew to 230-plus people across five cities, was how to deliver it consistently for everyone.
When they moved to Leapsome for performance reviews, the first change was being able to build something that actually reflected what each team does. Instead of mapping everyone to the same competencies, BEAT81 started building reviews around role missions and outcomes: what is this person here to do, and what does it look like when they're doing it well?
For the reviews, it was way easier to set up categories and competencies, and also tailor them to teams already. We started looking at what domain expertise in tech means versus what it means for finance. Because it shouldn't be this one-size-fits-all approach. Leapsome allowed us to try more and more to tailor it to teams' needs.
Now with Leapsome, individual contributors and people managers follow separate tracks. Role missions are linked to employee profiles, so anyone curious about what a role actually involves, a new joiner, a colleague in another city, can look it up and get a real answer rather than a job title. Instead of working through a competency checklist, the conversation is about the work itself: what someone is there to do, and how they're getting on.
Getting the review structure right changed how the people team worked. With that settled, BEAT81 turned their attention to migrating the HRIS system into the same tool, in order to have it in the same place as everything else.
With performance reviews already running in Leapsome, the people team had one half of the picture in place. But employee records, absence management, and contract data still lived in a separate system — which meant the two sides couldn't talk to each other. Every connection between HR data and review cycles had to be made by hand.
The next step was moving the HRIS into Leapsome, too. With employee data, contracts, and start dates in the same platform as performance reviews, everything would finally be connected and visible in one place. The team expected the migration to take time. It didn't.
The data migration itself was only around three days, so that was actually super quick.
BEAT81 brings on fifteen or more people every month. Before partnering with Leapsome, every step in that sequence was a manual task for someone on the people team: reaching out to stakeholders, duplicating spreadsheets, scheduling check-ins one by one. With a workforce this distributed, across two different employee groups and five cities, it was complex and time-consuming.
With Leapsome, the team set up a fully automated onboarding flow. When a new person joins, the people team triggers the workflow, and it handles the rest: setting up documents, collecting signatures and personal information, and scheduling Feedback talks in the first weeks. Because the HRIS is integrated with the reviews module, the system also knows each new hire's start date and contract details, automatically scheduling what comes next based on when they joined.
Having feedback and the HRIS part connected allows us to automate certain kickoffs. Now that Leapsome knows when this person joined and has their contract information in the HRIS part, the review part knows, based on certain triggers, when to set up a new cycle. Say someone joined on May 1. Leapsome automatically knows this is the person's start date, their hire date. In three months, we're going to do a first pulse check.
With fifteen or more new joiners every month, the people team was working through the same onboarding sequence for each person, every time. That took up a significant part of their time.
If I had to estimate how much time we save through the new onboarding with Leapsome, I would say it's probably a minimum of 10 hours a month that we save due to having those workflows set up in Leapsome.
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New studios are opening, new cities are joining the BEAT81 map, and the team keeps getting bigger. The energy around what comes next is genuine.
The team now has one platform where all their to-dos, checklists, and workflows are gathered. It's super easy for us in the HR team and people operations to really see in one area, one field, what's happening and what's going on.
Bringing the HRIS into the same place as reviews and development was part of how they made that commitment hold as the company grew. Leapsome is built to make that kind of care visible and operational: who someone is, where they're headed, and what the company is actively doing to support them.
I would tell other leaders in the industry not to be scared of it. It's super intimidating to think about switching tools. But it was easier than I thought.
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