This remote adtech firm transformed their offsite planning, saving $50K annually with Workgrounds

Overview

A successful adtech company with over 10 years of experience and a fully remote team of 100-1000 employees, primarily based in the US, runs 10 or more team offsites per year. They saw a huge amount of value in bringing teams together in this way, but were struggling with the scale of their travel operation and the amount of resources it took. They decided to use the Workgrounds software to simplify their travel operations.

• Purpose of trips: Regular team offsites, including fun and work time.
• Requirement: Hotel rooms and workspaces
• Guest list size: Av. 27 guests per trip
• Annual travel budget: $100k - $1m (anonymised) 

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The challenge

As a fully remote company, this Adtech firm fosters team connections via in-person team offsites.

The People Operations team manages the annual budget which is between $100k and $1m (anonymised for their privacy). They collaborate with team leaders across various functions to plan trips. Individual teams have the flexibility to choose any destination they want to travel to, considering factors like the budget, the distribution of their particular team members, and simply how much the team wants to go there.

While the offsite program is highly valued within the company, managing it has become increasingly challenging due to its scale, with at least 10 trips occurring annually, sometimes multiple happening simultaneously. The company sought to address the following goals:

• Increase efficiency
  • Reduce the time spent on logistics and coordination by the People Ops team, team leads, and guests.
  • Allow teams to focus on the quality of their time together rather than the complexities of planning.
  • Enable leaders to focus on important tasks instead of spending hours coordinating with hotels and handling logistics.
• Be cost-effective
  • Deliver excellent employee experiences while adhering to the annual budget.
• Enhance employee experience
  • Make it quick and easy for team leads to plan trips independently, avoiding bottlenecks from the busy travel team.
  • Provide a simpler way for teams to explore multiple hotel options to get the best deals.

The solution

This company considered several alternatives:

• Hiring more employees to the internal travel team (a costly investment).
• Engaging an external agency to handle travel.
• Using a traditional Travel Management Company (TMC), which isn’t ideal for securing group deals.

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Ultimately, they chose Workgrounds for the following reasons:

• A product-first approach that offers speed, ease of use, and scalability.
• A product designed specifically for group travel, ensuring the best deals when booking for groups.
• The ability to book stays, workspaces, flights, and restaurants all in one platform.
• Custom support for additional needs, providing extra assistance to ensure their team offsites are exceptional every time.

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Implementation

The onboarding process was straightforward:

1. The company provisioned and created admin accounts for the People Ops team.
2. They invited other back-office operations teams, such as finance, for reconciliation purposes.
3. Connected the HRIS for easy invitations and the ability to import team setups into the product.

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Throughout the year:

• Each team lead is invited as an organizer, three months before their offsite, to take the lead on trip creation and booking (with oversight from the travel team).
• Guests are onboarded to the platform before their trip, so they receive all trip details and updates as the logistics are finalized.

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Impact and results

• 10 trips booked and completed:
  • New Orleans (stay, workspace, restaurants)
  • Miami (stay, workspace, restaurants)
  • Austin (stay, WeWork)
  • Denver (stay, workspace, restaurants)
  • New York (Creative/Design team: stay, workspace; Engineering team: stay, workspace) ‍

Teams: Partnerships, Operations, Supply, Creative & Design, Engineering, Customer Success

• Number of organizers: 7 organizers, 3 admins (People Ops team)
• Flights booked: 68

Estimated savings by booking as a group: $50K annually

Estimated savings from not expanding the team or hiring a partner: $85K

To see if your company can benefit from Workgrounds in a similar way, book a short demo call with our CEO here.