Workday Podcast: 15 Years Later, Workday’s Ireland Presence More Strategic Than Ever

Patrick Evenden: Workday's team in Dublin has been central to global product development and innovation since we first opened our office in Ireland in 2008. Today, we have more than 1,800 workmates in Ireland with more than 80% of them working in research and development. I'm Patrick Evenden, and on this episode of the Workday podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Graham Abell, Alan Crilly, Brian Montgomery, and Caroline O'Reilly. We're going to be talking about Workday's growth in Ireland and what makes a career at Workday special. Excellent, thank you all for joining us today on the Workday podcast. Normally, when we record podcasts, there's only one guest, so I'm delighted to have all four of you here today, even if I do feel a little bit outnumbered. I guess let's start with you, Brian. So Workday is celebrating 15 years in Ireland this year. You've been a part of that from the very beginning. So tell us about how it all started and how Workday's changed in that time.

Brian Montgomery: Wow, yeah. Well, it's changed a lot, as I'm sure you can imagine. So back then, we started off with just 23 people here in Dublin and Workday only had 250 people globally. So I was trying to think about this earlier. Thinking about it in terms of buildings is kind of interesting because Workday's first official building in Ireland was in a place called Donnybrook, and it was over an Italian and Chinese restaurant. And we had a mouse infestation and that final year there, one of my last and lasting memories of that office was hearing a scream from the finance room and finding our office manager and our CFO standing on their desks because a mouse had just shot across the wall. I remember thinking there are that many mice that they're pretty brazen about just wandering around in the day.

Patrick Evenden: More mice than employees.

Brian Montgomery: Oh, I bet. Oh, I bet. And even I remember once when I started working at Cape Clear – and  that's how a lot of us here, and Alan, who's with us today, was part of Cape Clear. My first week in Cape Clear, we had a really warm day. And my boss said, right, you've got a choice because the aircon doesn't work, so we can either leave the windows open, and you'll feel cool, but you'll smell like you worked in a kitchen all day long because the Chinese restaurant kitchen is one side and the Italian kitchen is on the other; or we can close the windows, and you'll sweat a lot. So she says it's kind of a question of perfume. So it's really surreal to think about that journey from those really kind of humble beginnings to where we are now in the King's Building and where we're going to go with Grangegorman. But…

Patrick Evenden: Well, I was going to say it couldn't be a bigger departure from where we are to – I mean, I haven't seen any mice today, but the room that we're recording in is possibly the most air conditioned room I've ever been in.

Brian Montgomery: Yeah, I know. We actually have a dedicated media room. And it's really incredible and a fabulous building here in Smithfield, which we're very proud of. And it's been a big part of what we try to do here and back from the very, very beginning with those Cape Clear kind of days.

Patrick Evenden: I guess, as well, certainly in terms of our beginnings in Ireland, that sets us apart from a lot of other large technology companies that you find in Dublin, I guess, because we've got that, I guess, that strong Irish connection through Cape Clear.

Brian Montgomery: Yeah, well, see, what happened, if we go back in time, Workday, at that time, was a customer of Cape Clear. And we built integration technology. Our founders, Dave and O'Neill, felt that integration was really big challenge in the ERP space and that it was strategically important for – if you wanted to be successful in that enterprise software landscape, that integration capability needed to be front and center. And what had happened before that was you could buy a large complex finance and HR system, and the integration piece was separate. And of course, most of our customers have multiple systems, so integration is key to success. But it was sort of – it was carved out, and it's like, "We'll sell you this finance and HR software." And, "Oh, you need to integrate it? We can sell you this other stuff as well." Whereas Workday, from the very beginning, decided, "Look, no, this is our problem, too. You need our products to integrate with all this other stuff, and we're with you on that journey." So again, it was that if you think about that software as a service model, it's not just a technology model. It's also a partnership model. And that was sort of – that was what I felt was really different, and I think that's sort of we stayed on that journey, right, all the way through.

Patrick Evenden: And what changes have you seen recently? Obviously, we had the global pandemic and that's changed a lot in terms of how people work and the flexibility, certainly in terms of coming into the office and things like that. So how has that affected certainly our allocation in the King's Building?

Brian Montgomery: Well, it was a pretty challenging time. And I found personally, it was really hard to see what we'd built just empty. But I think what we did do or spent a lot of time doing was thinking about how do we make this work? How do we look after first and foremost our employees? And then second to that, are our customers. And one of the advantages of being a technology company is that we had the underlying infrastructure to make all that possible whilst remote. But we did lose something, and that was that culture. I'm sure you're over visiting from the UK, and you can feel the energy when you come into the building, right?

Patrick Evenden: Definitely.

Brian Montgomery: And that's part of who we are and part of our success – a big part of our success. So I think we spent – we got through the pandemic. I think we did a good job of it, but certainly with the King's Building, and then with our future plans, it's really about getting back to where we were in that sort of very dynamic creative space, and coming in and having fun, as well as doing really, really good work, and building relationships with people again.

Patrick Evenden: Excellent. Oh, you touched on our future plans there. Graham, so this feels like quite a pivotal time when it comes to Workday's presence in Ireland. Last year, we announced plans for a new European HQ at Grangegorman. This year, we're opening new offices at Dockline. What's behind all that change?

Graham Abell: Yeah, well, first, I think it's like it's been really exciting. It's a huge vote of confidence in Workday as a company, but also kind of Dublin and Ireland as a strategic site for us. And I think some of this is just the mechanics of we've run out of space in this amazing building we have here, and so Dockline is an immediate response to that. It gives us more space. It allows us to kind of continue to grow, and as Brian kind of said, as we're kind of focusing on our in-office experience, making sure we continue to kind of provide the best experience possible. We've had, as you said, the kind of origin story of Workday in Ireland came from acquiring a company that was strategic and critical for Workday at the time and it's continued to be that. And Alan here has been involved in the integration space for many years. But that set the tone of really core important parts of the Workday system being built, run, managed, owned, directed from Ireland. And I think we've got Caroline here as well, our GM of analytics.

Graham Abell: Again, it's a huge vote of confidence for Ireland that we're seeing these global roles being here and continued plans to grow and continuing wanting to kind of make sure our employees are engaged, etc. And really, we see with those folks going back and with our really strong ties to our location here in Dublin 7, really that opportunity when it came up with Grangegorman, just up the road from us on a college university campus, it just seemed too good to be true, to be honest. We get to stay in the same area that we know and love and which we have deep ties to. We get to accelerate and probably have a broader impact by working with TU Dublin and their skill sets, etc. And then we get to be part of a college university campus, which is what so many of our peers try to emulate in their own right. We actually get to kind of be attached to the side of them and build up that symbiotic relationship to where we're kind of helping each other and the local neighborhood, I think. In general, this area has been pretty disadvantaged. Local secondary schools are all with classes disadvantaged. And so as a result, their kind of attendance rates and third level and particularly in STEM courses is low. And we are motivated to try and move the needle on that. TU Dublin are clearly motivated to move the needle on that. So it's a huge opportunity ahead of us where we think we can have pretty long-lasting impact on that local area.

Patrick Evenden: I think that's something that's quite purposeful about Workday in Dublin is the way that it works alongside the community. Brian, can you tell us about some of the projects that – well, you and the wider Workday team have been involved in, in terms of what the immediate community around the office in Smithfield?

Brian Montgomery: Sure, we have a long-standing relationship with the Capuchin Center. They're literally just around the corner here. And they do incredible work helping people who really need it. It can be queuing up for food parcels, coming in and having a warm meal, and really helping people in our immediate community who are struggling. So we have volunteers that go in. They help prepare those food packages; they help serve meals. And we also have a philosophy at Workday where our workmates – where they volunteer. Then we also pay for those hours, and that payment goes directly to whatever organisation they're helping. But broader than that, we're very passionate about education and what that means to the community that we're in and the broader community in Dublin. We started working on the time to reprogram kind of pretty early on. That's through business in the community.

Brian Montgomery: I remember being really struck when we started doing it that we brought a bunch of the kids in here, and that's fantastic to see them coming in and be curious about what we're doing. But one of the teachers pointed out – it was a young girl. Her parents, after she had started this program, arrived at the school, and they said, "Look, we both really struggle at reading. And now our daughter is coming home for the first time, and she's reading stuff to us. And we want to - we're blown away by this, and we want to know what we can do to help the school." And the dad started helping out with the grounds and mom started helping with hot meals for the kids. So that ripple effect down into the community is something that we've thought about a lot, that even small things can just have this wonderful effect. And we're very conscious that we're the blow-ins and the community's been here long before we got here. It'll be there long after we're gone. So we have to do all of this in a very respectful way and really listen to what the community needs.

Brian Montgomery: So some of the things we worked on, the inner city partnership working with folks who've had to move here from the Ukraine and who are trying to start their own businesses, which is incredibly impressive. Transition year as students from, again, local schools, schools that in terms of their work experience don't necessarily have an easy access into work experience somewhere like this. So opening our doors to these young folks is something that's gone really, really well. Alan's going to hopefully fill us in on the great work he's doing with TUD, but a lot of work going on through them and different community initiatives. And indeed, as we think about our new home, that Graham mentioned in Grangegorman, again, I think right at this heart of what we're thinking of doing there is the community and how we engage with them.

Patrick Evenden: Perfect. Yeah. I was going to say, presumably, we will take the approach that we've taken in Smithfield, and we'll take the same approach in Grangegorman in terms of the way that we engage with the community there. How is work at Grangegorman progressing, and I guess what the employees expect from our Grangegorman campus, but what can the wider community in Dublin expect from that?

Graham Abell: Yeah, so I think, for me, it's been a really interesting opportunity to be involved in this. I've been in the kind of software industry for most of my career and you're dealing with bits and bytes and kind of intangible things and to be moving to very much physical presence like in a location. It's a different set of muscles and kind of top [inaudible] you have to leverage. And we've been really lucky with the team we've built. I'm working with some local architects, and they've engaged some specialists in placemaking, as it's called, and really to try and understand, how do we want to sit in that landscape, and how do we want to interact with the stakeholders, and who are the stakeholders? And so they ran a number of kind of offline sessions with a group of folks both from Dublin and from the U.S. in terms of what are we trying to achieve from this new headquarters in Grangegorman? And then we spent a couple of days actually kind of in a workshop process kind of working through that, and what came through really clear, it's not that we're trying to just have a building for our employees to go and sit and work. It was that we really wanted to be purposeful about creating a permeable element to this, that the public has access, and we can interact and that we are providing kind of services and good for the local community.

Graham Abell: And so it's an amazing opportunity because we're designing from scratch rather than going into a building and trying to refit it. And so we get to decide where there are stores and where there's kind of barriers and stuff, and [inaudible] there's stuff that is secret and important that's happening here that we need to protect, but not everything is, and how do we create that space? And so we're still going through that design process. But we're being very purposeful about making sure that there's community spaces, there's place for us to engage with kids, whether that's maybe potentially a homework club or some of the stuff that we're working on with TU Dublin around [inaudible] that there's space for us to do that in our building, that there's kind of sensitive retail probably there that serves the local need but also serves our customers – sorry, our employees, and that we're probably providing incubator space for local businesses to step up, and to some extent, extending on our history here. Like when we moved into Smithfield into this building, it had been vacant for quite a while. The leaders at the time made a very conscious decision not to have a full-service canteen here, and that was bucking the trend, frankly, of a lot of the peers, globally and in Dublin. But the intent with that was that we would go out into the community and spend dollars and Euros in the community, and business would be able to survive in that.

Graham Abell: And most of the folks here have been here longer than me, but in the kind of six and a bit years I've been here, the local landscape is radically changed. We've gone from banks of empty units to kind of nearly all of them are full, and we've seen a lot of construction. And I think as a company, we've had a huge part in that. And we're moving a bit further up the road, and it's not quite as well established from a commercial or retail perspective. And so I think we feel like we can be that flywheel again for that area. So I think we're going to have a really important impact I think in that neighborhood. Going through the process has been amazing. Myself and Brian took a tour up there probably 18 months ago and met with the president of TU Dublin and I think it's the CEO of the Grangegorman Development Agency whose kind of overall responsibility for developing that campus. And we were kind of just floating the idea of potential – well, on two fronts, one that we wanted to have a strategic relationship with the university, but secondarily, there was this land that maybe there might be an opportunity for us to kind of look to build on.

Graham Abell: And they had ultimately [visual?] rights on that if they didn't kind of like the look of the cut of our jib, but they knew about us, right? And not because we'd been some marketing campaign, but they knew about our work with Capuchin Center and Time to Read on the local schools and our people doing all this stuff. And so they were fully open. They were like, "Yeah, look, you were turning up the way we want to turn up in the community. You clearly care about the same stuff we care about." And so there was an openness to kind of really exploring that and seeing if there was the opportunity, and obviously, it has worked out well. But really, what opened the door was our reputation here in Dublin 7 which I don't think a lot of our peers probably could have had the same position going in from that. So in terms of the tangible stuff, we're true to those initial kind of design phases. We're starting into the planning process. We're in the middle of kind of starting the conversations with the council. And we hope to have kind of planning fully submitted by the end of this year, and fingers crossed it goes well, we get a quick answer.

Patrick Evenden: And what do you anticipate in terms of timelines when – I mean, I might not be able to tie you down to an exact date, but when do you think it's likely that we'd be able to open the doors in the Grangegorman?

Graham Abell: I think we're probably talking about like a four-ish-year process from here, probably a bit longer. We'll probably try and phase it, so open one building and move folks in, and then continue to work on the second one so that, yeah, we can get access a bit earlier. But it's a big building to build. We have to go through planning. There's a lot of work to happen. So yeah, it's probably the bit of four years.

Patrick Evenden: I guess, as well, that speaks to Workday's overall vision for the future. Certainly in terms of the role that Dublin will play, but also in terms of their level of confidence in terms of their ability to grow over the next few years.

Graham Abell: Oh, 100%. It's an immediate vote of confidence that we want to stay in Dublin, right? We're talking about this long-term plan. The plan is to build a larger building to hold more people because we'll continue to grow, and the way we're thinking about our involvement in the community is on a long-term thing as well. We understand that we're here for the long term, and so we want to start planting those seeds now to have harvest in a number of years' time. It's not just kind of tactical, quick kind of hit stuff. It's we're trying to build up a strategic case here and kind of go after something that's probably a 5, 10, 15-year payoff. But frankly, in our industry, the only way for us to start moving the needle, particularly on things like gender diversity in STEM, is first to start getting in earlier. And that, by necessity, is going to have a long payoff, but we have to do it.

Patrick Evenden: Excellent. Alan, I feel like you've been name-checked a lot in this podcast already, so I can't ignore you any longer.

Alan Crilly: Very sorry about that. [laughter]

Patrick Evenden: Alan, Workday has a long-standing partnership with Technological University Dublin. As part of the news yesterday, we also announced €2 million in funding to establish a new chair of technology and society, which I understand is a first in Ireland. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Alan Crilly: Yeah, so this is a really important step in terms of deepening the development of that partnership with TU Dublin. And as you say, it's the first chair of this type in Ireland. It's the first chair in the university itself. And what it entails is that we're hiring a senior researcher to take the chair position, plus we're funding a couple of additional permanent staff and co-funding a group of PhD students. So what we're going to arrive at is a very powerful and compelling research unit, and that's going to be looking into that ever-expanding boundary between technology and society.

Patrick Evenden: Excellent. And what impact do you think that will have on Workday as an organisation?

Alan Crilly: Well, I think the important thing about this is that we're trying to generate technology research that really deepens our society impact, right? And I think you've heard that through this entire conversation, that it's a major focus for Workday. It's really important to us, I think, that we're here to build a long-term sustainable successful business, but we also want to leave the world in a better place than we found it, right? So the types of research, for example, that we looked at when we were putting the proposal together, we walked through a few potential themes. You've got things like the impact of technology on a more inclusive society and culture, topics like the technology and the remote workforce or remote education. And one that's really, really important to us is AI in the workforce, and anyone reading news will understand that every day, that's more important. So I think that this has the potential over the long term, a bit like some of the other investments we're making, to really yield research results that make a difference.

Patrick Evenden: Excellent. And what would it mean – maybe not this announcement, the relationship that we have, what difference does that make from a student at the university?

Alan Crilly: Yeah, well, if you're a student at the university, obviously, there are multiple ways in which you're going to be able to interact with Workday over the coming years. In addition to that, the research methodology that we're bringing to play in this unit is a thing called active research. And it's not an ivory tower. The research unit goes away, does the work, and comes back seven years later with some papers. It's very actively engaging students in the college, the community. Workday employees will potentially have an opportunity to participate in it as well. So I would expect that as we build up the unit and we kick off the research, there's going to be opportunities for all those stakeholders.

Patrick Evenden: Excellent. Sounds brilliant. Caroline, tell me some of the things that the team in Dublin is working on at the moment.

Caroline O'Reilly: It might be easier, Patrick, for me to tell you what we're not working on because we work on all aspects of the tech side here in Dublin. We really are a microcosm of the California HQ. I really see us as a sister site, especially in terms of R&D. We have teams here working in our data centers. They work on Workday in public cloud. We have a significant investment in the office and security, which is foundation of Workday. We have teams building the infrastructure and services to enable Workday to grow to our largest customers, and we're always doing considerable research and investing in our user experience. So we have user experience labs here as well. We run design partner groups through our customers to make our products work better for our customers. And then we're developing the products that you can touch and feel and that you love in Workday, our financials products, our HCM products, Peakon, analytics, [inaudible] planning, learning recruiting student. So we're working on all parts of the Workday stock here in Dublin, which I think is really unique that we're given that responsibility to really build all of the products here in Dublin, which is great. And of course, Workday's core value is all around our customers. And so we have a number of customer groups here as well. We have customer support and services and sales also here in the Workday Dublin office. So you know you shouldn't need to wake up anyone in California.

Patrick Evenden: And what about your role, Caroline? What are some of the things that you're directly involved with?

Caroline O'Reilly: Yeah, so my team, we run the analytics organisation. So we have a number of products around enabling our customers to accelerate their decision-making with their own data in Workday and to enable them to bring – it's not normal now that you make your decision on just a very small set of data; you have to bring in data from lots of different other sources and you have to blend it and have to blend it in a secure way, so that's really important. You'll hear a lot about us in Workday always talking about security of the HR and financial data that we protect and then bringing in other data in a secure way and being able to accelerate your decision-making on that data. And then we build products as well that enable you to see the trends in your data. So it's a big lift to actually go and slice through all that data and try and find out where your trends are. So we have a product called people analytics, which will let you run over your Workday data and it will surface those trends in your people data.

Patrick Evenden: Excellent. As I said, I think, in the introduction, we've got more than 1,800 people working in Dublin now. From your point of view, what do you think the perfect Workday employee looks like?

Caroline O'Reilly: I can't believe it's – apart from it being you. Is it, Brian? He's pointing out himself here. [laughter] No surprises there. I can't believe we're 800 people actually. When I joined, we were around 150 people in a very much smaller office. So it's brilliant that we've come here now. I don't think there is a perfect Workday employee. I think in Workday, we're very concerned about everyone bringing their own uniqueness. And when everyone brings a unique trait, we're stronger as a whole. So I think that's definitely part of our DNA. And part of our DNA as well from day one was really that diversity, right? So Aneel and Dave, when they came together, the Truckee diner 18 years ago to think about creating Workday, they really thought about diversity from day one. It has never been something that we've had to shoehorn in into this company. You've seen that from the very beginnings of Workday. And it's so important to us, diversity, that we've even built it into our products. So we came up with an idea called the VIBE Index, which is value, inclusion, belonging, and equity, and it's an index that shows you measure of how you're doing at all those fronts. And we've built it into our products because it's that important to us.

Caroline O'Reilly: In Workday Dublin, we're really proud that we have a lot of employee belonging councils as well in lots of different areas. So we have the Black@Workday employee belonging council, South Asian, East Asian councils, Pride@Workday, Women@Workday, people with disabilities, and Families@Workday, and we keep these very close to our heart. There's really active communities in these belonging councils in Dublin. What I personally love is, I love setting upstairs and having lunch and then realising I'm the only Irish person at the table. Like we have 67 different nationalities here in the Dublin office. There're so many different languages being spoken around the building. I really love that. You asked me about what's unique. I think there are some things that are in common with Workday employees. I don't think it's even just Dublin employees. I think we find this when we go and visit our sister sites. I think you'll find that we're all team players. I mean, Workday isn't a place where it's a solo run. You really are doing your work as a team. And I think that comes out as well in terms of the amount of people on our slack charts that are volunteering, or starting new initiatives, or asking us to get involved in things. We don't organise volunteering events. Our workmates organise themselves to do volunteering, and I think that's because of the people who are in the organisation.

Caroline O'Reilly: So I think another part of our teammates' core traits is that they're very ambitious. So we have our own employee listing tool called Peakon. And when you listen to Peakon, a lot of the times, it tells you that our employees really want to accelerate their career growth. And we see that in the numbers. We saw last year that 20% of our internal job racks were actually hired internally. And we really encourage people to be mobile within Workday Dublin and within Workday, because it's great. You bring experience from one organisation to another. So 20% growth and internal mobility is great. We've talked a little about TU Dublin, and a lot of our employees are taking the joint courses that we're developing with TU Dublin as well. So we've developed joint courses in cybersecurity and entrepreneurial leadership, and we're going to start one as well on ML and AI.

Patrick Evenden: And you've been quite modest there as well in terms of your own involvement. I know that you do a lot with – you mentioned the employee belonging councils. I know that you're quite already involved in those. And as well, you've done quite a lot externally from Workday in terms of encouraging women into technology roles. Is that correct?

Caroline O'Reilly: Yeah. I think somebody asked me recently. When I talked to new hires, they asked me, "What are you most proud of?" I've been here almost 11 years now. And I honestly think that working and being involved in the employee belonging councils has been my best experience because my eyes have been closed until I started working with the employee belonging groups and really understanding the challenges that other groups have. So I'm obviously a woman in tech, and I care very passionately about that, and I care very passionately about younger women and really making technology available for all, not just women. It's an amazing career, and it should be available for all. So that's a passion of mine.

Patrick Evenden: Excellent. Thank you very much. Now, Alan, what can an employee who might be setting foot inside Dockline or the King's Building for the first time today – what can they expect from a career at Workday?

Alan Crilly:

Well, my first answer to that would be to go back a few minutes and listen to everything Caroline just said. Because all of those dimensions are really important. And it's a hugely multifaceted place to join. Let me take it right back, though, to the founding philosophy of the culture of Workday because Brian, earlier on, mentioned that software as a service is a partnership. And it's a three-way partnership in many ways. This whole business is built on customer satisfaction. It's the key metric for Workday, and we value it very highly. But if you think about what goes into that, Workday, as a business, looks after its employees. The employees look after Workday's customers. And Workday's customers look after the business. And so the whole philosophy and how we approach employees is founded on that core premise. So there are a couple of things that I would call out there, but they're glaringly obvious to anyone who's listened to the conversation so far. One is that when you join here, you're joining a communal endeavor. It's an endeavor to build a really successful, impactful, important company. And at the same time, to leave the world a better place, as I said earlier on, to have that societal and communal impact.

Patrick Evenden: I guess as well, to that point about it being a communal endeavor, I mean, despite the fact that we said there's 1,800 people now here in Dublin which makes it the largest office for Workday in Europe, it still has that – you can still feel that sense of community here. It doesn't feel like a building full of 1,800 disconnected people.

Alan Crilly: Absolutely, and at all sorts of levels. And that's largely down to all of the list of kind of multifaceted initiatives that Caroline outlined. Things like the employee belonging councils or social clubs or community volunteering, as well as all of the business interactions that go on between the many parts of the business that are resident in Dublin just builds up this really, really rich kind of sense of being somewhere that matters. And I think that that's very important for anybody joining. The other thing I would reiterate what Caroline said about bringing yourself to work with all of your abilities and interests. Workday tries to innovate in how it nurtures everyone who walks through the door, basically.

Alan Crilly: One really good example of that is our recruitment program for our graduates and interns. Graduates, we call generation Workday. We have a shelf downstairs that's so stacked with trophies for that particular program that it was getting dangerous and we had to build a second shelf, [laughter] right? Literally, it's got a sofa underneath it, and we were worried that it was going to collapse and actually do somebody damage. So some examples of what that entails is that we have an accommodation allowance for interns to make the transition to Dublin easier. We've got dedicated intern and graduate focus orientation day. We've got supplementary support throughout your first 18 months, including a lot of soft skills training like speaking with confidence, for example, and then various social activities to try and give those people a strong peer group across the company, so you feel part of the bigger business, not just isolated at your desk or within your team.

Patrick Evenden: Excellent. Brilliant. I warned you as well-- before we hit record on the podcast, I warned you that I had devised a game that would test your Dublin credibility. Well, it wasn't created by Chat GPT; it was created by me whilst I was eating my lunch. So are you familiar with the band Fontaines D.C.?

Alan Crilly: I'm handing this to Caroline. [laughter]

Patrick Evenden: So to test your Dublin credibility…

Caroline O'Reilly: I thought that was the question.

Patrick Evenden: I have four song lyrics. I'm going to ask each of you whether that song lyric is by Fontaines D.C. or Daniel O'Donnell.

Caroline O'Reilly: Okay.

Patrick Evenden: Okay? Easy, easy, you say, Brian? Okay, let's start with Brian then. So Brian, the song lyric is, “I love you. Imagine a world without you. It's only ever you. I only think of you.” No cheating, Caroline.

Brian Montgomery: That's a Fontaines'.

Patrick Evenden: It is Fontaines D.C. Very well done, Brian. Who's up next?

Brian Montgomery: Oh, Graham, I think.

Patrick Evenden: Graham?

Graham Abell: Yeah, let's go.

Patrick Evenden: Here you go. Here you go, Graham. “I got a feeling you got a heart like mine, so let it show. Let it shine.”

Graham Abell: I'm going to go with Daniel O'Donnell.

Patrick Evenden: It is Daniel O'Donnell. Two out of two so far. Caroline, “Every single day, my love for you keeps growing more and more.”

Caroline O'Reilly: Daniel.

Patrick Evenden: It is Daniel O'Donnell. Three out of four. Yeah, three out of four so far. The fourth for you, Alan. “Well, is it liberating just to be so fine? Happens all the time.”

Alan Crilly: So I'll take a [inaudible] question if you happen to have one of those. [laughter] But if we have to do popular culture, I'll say Fontaine's D.C.

Patrick Evenden: It is Fontaine's D.C, very well done. Your Dublin credibility remains intact. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining me today. I think the conversation's been fantastic. It's been great speaking with you and learning more about what the future holds for our team in Ireland. That's all we have time for today, but if you enjoyed the show, you can subscribe at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud, and you can also read more on the Workday blog. Thank you for listening and have a great work day.