Focusing on People to Make Companies Stronger

Now more than ever, a focus on people is critical to every company’s ability to emerge from the crises of the pandemic and social injustice stronger than ever. 

In fact, noted HR expert Josh Bersin says employee experience has now “firmly landed with COVID-19” and is the "big wakeup call."  What’s more, he cites research showing that companies are treating employees better than ever, and employee engagement is rising amid new levels of trust and transparency.

At Workday, employees have been our number one core value since day one. We have long focused on putting people at the center of enterprise software to help our customers enable their employees and their companies to reach their full potential.

Against this backdrop, we’ve launched three new solutions—fueled by machine learning and other advanced technologies—to empower companies to create hyper-personalized employee experiences, respond faster, and better understand their workforces.

Workday Help and Workday Journeys: Elevating Employee Experiences 

Over the past few months, people have had to make huge changes to their day-to-day lives, whether that be working from home, working in new ways, and perhaps even changes to what they do. 

As Bersin noted, making sure that employees are engaged, happy, and productive is especially critical now given the new challenges that everyone faces—professionally and personally. 

Workday is announcing the availability of Workday Help and Workday Journeys to enable our customers to meet new worker expectations brought on by the current climate. By extending the power of Workday People Experience, Workday’s latest machine learning-driven employee experience, these solutions will help employers better engage and support employees while making work more personal and productive for people. 

With Workday Help, organizations have a complete HR service delivery application that enables a more intuitive case management experience. Workday Help provides access to relevant articles to a person to promote resolution via self-service; if escalated to a case, HR case solvers uniquely have insight into how an employee tried to resolve an issue and contextual information from Workday about it. For example, an employee can read a knowledge article on what to do if they are impacted by COVID-19, then self-report an infection by creating a case. A case solver could confidentially receive the information about the impacted employee, send them supporting documentation, and assist them through the process. 

Workday Journeys makes it possible to create personalized experiences that help guide employees through transitions and moments that matter, such as virtual onboarding, a leave of absence, and more. Businesses can easily curate experiences specific to each person—based on location, job, or management level—with tasks in Workday or connected systems across the enterprise, key steps to take, or other informative content. For example, an organization seeking to improve a diversity or belonging within a particular team could create a journey with guidance, learning, and examples tailored to increase the sense of belonging for all colleagues.  

Workday People Analytics: Enabling Better, Faster Decisions

In today’s changing world, as companies reskill, rehire, and return to the workplace, having a deep understanding of the workforce is critical to success. We are also announcing availability of Workday People Analytics, a new augmented analytics application that identifies top risks and opportunities regarding the workforce and delivers these insights in easy-to-understand story form. With these insights, organizations are empowered to make better people decisions—faster—to shape business outcomes.

Many organizations today face constraints on scarce workforce analytics resources. Workday People Analytics is like having an additional team of specialized digital analysts who do the difficult work of studying patterns throughout the workforce over time to find the “needles in the haystack.” Powered by graph processing and machine learning, Workday People Analytics identifies the most important issues for users to see, and employs natural language generation to then explain what is happening in a simple and actionable story for HR and business leaders.

Workday People Analytics automatically surfaces insights across five critical focus areas including organizational composition, diversity and inclusion, retention and attrition, hiring, and talent and performance. As companies focus on diversity efforts, for example, they might analyze promotion rates and compensation through this lens to ensure equal opportunities for all employees. By focusing on the top issues, leaders can have confidence in a plan of action, supported by data-driven insights.

Organizations like Nationwide see the value of these workforce insights across their teams. "Workday People Analytics will allow our business partners to share meaningful insights that drive outcomes, instead of delivering routine metric updates,” said Steve Sylvia, People Analytics, Nationwide. “Our goal is to make Workday People Analytics available to the front-line leaders, staff operations, and HR business partners who are at the leading edge of making critical workforce decisions.”  

Responding to a Changing World

No doubt, the recent health, social, and economic crises have forced changes on workplaces almost overnight. As a result, we’ve learned new ways of living, new ways of working, and new ways of collaborating that we believe will enable even greater personalization, engagement, and workplace wellness in the future. 

But we all know that conditions can rapidly change. Companies need to be able to anticipate changes, and respond quickly in all ways—including with their people—and become more agile than ever. The underpinning technology of our new products enables companies and workforces to be more efficient, agile, insightful, and targeted. 

As we continue helping our customers navigate various stages of recovery and return, we look forward to ushering them through these challenging times to enable them to emerge stronger in an ever-changing world.