Workday People Experience: An Advantage in the Changing World of Work

Today we announced Workday People Experience, a personalized, more intelligent employee experience aimed at improving efficiency, knowledge sharing, and collaboration.

Everything is becoming personalized. Smart thermostats get your home to your preferred temperature while you’re en route from work. Your phone pushes you updates about traffic conditions so you can get to the airport on time. Your favorite streaming services recommend shows and music you’ve never heard of, but will probably like.

At Workday, we think our experiences at work should be as personalized, streamlined, and simplified as the ones we have every day outside of work. In fact, there should no longer be a difference between an enterprise experience and a consumer experience. Today it’s about what people need, when they need it, wherever they are.

Unify Your Work Life, in One Place

We’re excited to announce that Workday People Experience is now available to our early adopter customers. Workday People Experience is a personalized, more intelligent employee experience aimed at improving efficiency, knowledge sharing, and collaboration; it’s supported on any device, from desktop to tablet to mobile. 

Workday People Experience

Our customers are enthusiastic about the possibilities. “At Sun Life, our employees put our clients at the center of everything they do. What if we could simplify our employees’ day-to-day workplace tasks to help them easily connect the dots between HR programs?” says Clare Dickinson, assistant vice president, Global HR Shared Services, Sun Life. “That’s why we’re excited to be a design partner for Workday People Experience. We believe it will enable and empower our employees in their day-to-day work with an engaging digital experience that ultimately gives them more time to focus on innovating for our clients.”

Using machine learning, the different facets of Workday People Experience curate experiences for every user, making work more personal and productive. Unlike the static employee portals organizations use today, it provides everything from career development guidance and answers to HR and payroll questions to personalized content—from both inside and outside of Workday. By predicting what people want and giving them quick access to what they need, we help save time and reduce stress.

Workday People Experience begins with a home experience that serves up the most frequently accessed employee tasks, helping them find those tasks and act on them more easily. Cards surface information and insights, such as reminders for managers about birthdays and work anniversaries. We are introducing journeys, which provide personalized recommendations during critical career moments by orchestrating multiple applications, services, and content into a guided experience. For example, if an employee is transitioning into a new manager role, they will receive curated suggestions with onboarding tasks alongside content and actions. These suggestions and nudges are a springboard to get things done, connect, collaborate, and share ideas. 

Even better, Workday People Experience will be accessible from the productivity tools people use to do their jobs, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. This lets us bring the experience of Workday to employees where they prefer to work, allowing them to do such things as check time off balances or a payslip amount. 

We’re also adding enterprise search capabilities to Workday People Experience to help employees find more relevant information, tasks, and insights, in addition to knowledge sources, both internally and externally to Workdayand find them more quickly. Over time, machine learning will continue to refine and enrich the experience Workday provides.

Assistance On-Demand

Another facet of the holistic employee experience is Workday Assistant. Powered by natural language processing, Workday Assistant rapidly guides users to the information and tasks they seek.

Workday Assistant will integrate with other popular third-party collaboration software such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Workday will also offer extensible APIs for customers to further customize the power of Workday Assistant, enabling seamless interaction with other industry and specialized bots from partners.

Surfacing Insights, Right When They’re Needed

To enable HR teams to focus on the most important and complex employee issues, Workday People Experience aims to help employees resolve more common matters on their own. Around 50 percent of HR tickets are routine requests that would be better answered by knowledge base articles or other FAQs, so Workday People Experience uses Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) system data to power relevant search results, personalize tasks and suggestions, and surface accurate information in a new knowledge base. This brand-new feature will include articles, embedded video, and searchable video content, but goes beyond a traditional knowledge base with the power of machine learning. Instead of searching, users can also use the interactive chatbot to find answers in Workday.

Sometimes a complex HR situation can’t be solved with self-service, and to address those, Workday People Experience will offer a new HR case creation and management capability aimed at ensuring employee requests are resolved quickly and thoughtfully via a friendly, intuitive user experience.

This capability adds relevant HCM context to the conversation between a worker and HR professional. Each case can be augmented with Workday data and attachments that provide extra information on the issue, ensuring that every conversation is as productive as possible so that cases get resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible.

For example, an HR professional will be able to see a worker’s location, manager, and job title. They will also see the history of what the worker has been doing on their own to resolve their issues, so they won’t serve up the same knowledge base articles that haven’t yet provided an answer.

And when you’re dealing with potentially sensitive HR matters, security is always a top priority. Leveraging Workday HCM business processes and segmented security roles, Workday People Experience enables greater confidence in case security for customers, ensuring that only the right people have access to sensitive case details.

Getting Smarter and More Agile

Bottom line, business systems need to evolve to keep up with shifting workforce demands. When companies provide tools that are personalized and engaging, people use them and reap the benefits. Reducing the places people need to go to access information, tasks, and insights helps people feel smarter and more agile. As a result, productivity increases, frustration decreases, and the line between consumer and enterprise software becomes a thing of the past. 

The world of work is changing. That’s why we’re changing the world of work. To find out more about Workday People Experience, watch our innovation video.

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