Workday Global Study: Leaders, Do You Know How Your People Feel?

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted employees to think more deeply about work. They’re asking questions such as how they feel about work, how they want to work, and the type of organization they want to work for.

Yet, there aren’t always opportunities for employees to share these thoughts with their employers—and even if there are, not all employers are ready to listen.

Put Employees First

Our research in “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation” contains some encouraging data. According to our global survey of 1,150 senior executives, half of human resources (HR) leaders are focusing on positive employee experiences to accelerate transformation across their business. 

Positive employee experience is their most important factor in acceleration. That’s followed by:

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion (45%).
• Policies and practices that support a hybrid workforce (40%).
• Scalable learning and development (34%).

It’s not just HR leaders who are prioritizing employee experience and engagement—senior managers across other functions are also paying attention. “Employee experience is front and center in everything we do,” says Jennifer LaClair, chief financial officer at digital financial services firm Ally Financial. “And there are some very obvious changes we’ve made around working from home.” 

Those initiatives have included new tools to facilitate communication with employees, additional resources focused on digital connectivity, and even a “petting Zoom” where employees introduced their pets to their colleagues. Despite the challenges of 2021, Ally Financial saw its engagement scores rise over the course of the year on the back of such efforts.

LaClair says that listening to employees’ voices was the first step before any transformation took place. “We spent nine months just diagnosing where we were as an organization and getting input from our 550 finance employees,” she says. “Those nine months were spent interviewing them and getting an extremely granular view so that we could then come back very thoughtfully and figure out what to fix, how to fix it, and how to connect all these things together.”

Our research shows CFOs are the only C-suite member to name organizational culture as the biggest barrier to their business achieving its transformational goals—with 56% agreeing. They also are the most likely to name organizational or team structure as the biggest barrier (24%). This suggests a strong awareness of employee issues and the impact of culture on engagement. When asked about the most important skills needed to enable their team to continually meet the needs of the business, CFOs are the most likely of the C-suite members to name empathy.

Engage a Dispersed Workforce

Technology platform Dashlane had an office-based culture before the pandemic, but it quickly pivoted to support employees working from home. With some employees working remotely and some on site, the firm is considering new ways to help employees foster connections, such as reconfiguring conference rooms to enable easier interaction between remote and office workers.

“We have close to 25% of our workforce now who have never come into an office,” nor met a single co-worker in-person, says Dashlane’s Chief People Officer Ciara Lakhani. “And it’s important that these people bond—not only with each other but also with the people who were with the business before this situation.” 

For companies who aren’t doing the work to listen well, employees are voting with their feet, warns Workday Chief Strategy Officer Pete Schlampp. “If the company'’s not listening—if it’s not creating those conversations—it becomes a much bigger business problem,” he says. In other words, listen when employees talk or be prepared for them to walk. 

Download the full report “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation” for more findings from the office of the CFO, CIO, and CHRO.