Riding the Wave of Innovation at Workday to Deliver a Seamless Experience

For me, there’s nothing like surfing. Being out in the sea and engaged in the elements—the beauty of nature, the ocean, the beach—and feeling empowered by the energy of every wave, catching that perfect one and riding it effortlessly to shore. That’s what a great experience feels like. At Workday, we’re working to transform the experience. Like an endless swell, Workday is focused on delivering new waves of innovation that will make work effortless and deliver an engaging and inclusive experience for every user. 

We’ve spent a lot of time working to understand what our users need by engaging with hundreds of customers in a number of ways including observational studies, in-depth interviews, design reviews, iterative testing, and experimentation. There’s two sides to creating engaging employee experiences: 1) simplifying the digital experience and 2) elevating the human aspect of that experience.

When it comes to simplifying, our mission is to make Workday feel effortless. For frontline workers, it should be easy to check-in to their shift with a single tap on their mobile phone, and managers should be able to approve an expense report quickly from their natural workspace without interrupting their flow of work. Power users should be able to have a hub of all the capabilities they need all in one place. For all these user types, they should be able to find information, easily and intuitively, when completing complex tasks.

In elevating the human element of the experience, we want Workday to be every employee’s trusted assistant—right there at every stage of their journey throughout their career. We unveiled our new experience strategy earlier this year that enables us to deliver on our mission to make work effortless, and we’re continuing to make great progress in every release to achieve it. This strategy consists of three primary initiatives: 

• Workday Engage focuses on transforming the employee experience to make Workday even more useful, usable, and valuable. This includes improving the most frequently used top tasks, or jobs to be done, and reducing the amount of clicks it takes to complete them across our products.

• Workday Empower automates repetitive work and personalizes the user experience based on role, function and behavior to make it more relevant to users. We analyze user data, insights, and behavior patterns to enable every user to be more efficient and effective.

• Workday Everywhere meets people where they are in their natural flow of work. For our frontline users, that’s often on their mobile device. For office workers, that may mean surfacing Workday to them wherever they spend the majority of their time, including the digital workspaces they use everyday. 

Our experiences need to be personalized and relevant for every user type—from power users to casual users, from frontline workers to managers. Here’s how we’re bringing Engage, Empower, and Everywhere to life for all types of users and delivering more dynamic, tailored experiences.

Making Work Effortless for Everyone, Everywhere

Our latest innovations are focused on making work effortless across all user types and modalities. 

The new Workday homepage is a great example of how we are creating a more personal and relevant experience for our users. This new experience surfaces an employee’s most commonly used tasks, plus other relevant content like announcements, important dates, and actions to be taken—all in one place. 

Another example of how we are simplifying tasks for employees is our recent improvements to the request time off experience. We have streamlined relevant time off and leave information into a single calendar, saving employees precious time. 

As for managers, we are making it easier than ever to take care of their teams with the new Manager Insights Hub, where managers can now see everything they need related to their team, including Workday Peakon Employee Engagement scores as well as actionable insights to help increase their team’s engagement. They’ll also find information about their team, including suggestions that help them better grow and develop their employees.

When it comes to managers, we also know that close-the-loop tasks, such as approvals, make up almost 50% of manager interactions in Workday, which means they should be super quick and easy to do. To reduce steps as much as possible, we’re allowing managers to complete them in-line— meaning they can simply hit “approve” right from where you see the notification.  

Best of all, many of our experiences are now everywhere, so that no matter how users are accessing Workday, they’ll have a simpler and easier experience. With Workday Everywhere—our seamless integrations into other digital workspaces—we’re bringing Workday tools directly to our users, right in their natural flow of work.

These are just a few of the ways we are simplifying discovery and making top tasks effortless.

Great, Scalable UX Is Built On our Platform

The entire Workday application suite is underpinned by a scalable, flexible platform of frameworks and services. It’s a shared foundation of reusable services that not only provides a consistent user experience, but it also means that every interaction doesn’t have to be built from scratch.

We are opening up these frameworks for our customers and partners building new applications and solutions using Workday Extend. Workday Extend opens up the Workday platform and supports business and IT developers rapidly building new applications that leverage the core of Workday, including our user experience frameworks. With Workday Extend, customers can consolidate systems, build apps that enable faster response to new business needs, and roll out new programs that look and feel just like Workday. And these new applications can leverage UI platform capabilities such as hubs, making them even more useful.

We’re proud of our innovation so far, but we’re just getting started. We will continue to release waves of innovation more rapidly and deliver more dynamic, adaptive, and personalized experiences for our customers. We continue working to achieve our mission of making work effortless and transforming the experience for all users. Are you ready to ride the next wave with us?

Check out this video to see how our UX vision will make work effortless for every user.