During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Workday is taking precautions to ensure the safety of the Workday community, including our employees and their families, customers and prospective customers, partners, and visitors. You'll find regular updates on the steps we're taking here.
In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and to help our employees across the globe better manage the financial and caregiving challenges created by it, we’re updating some benefits and offering new ones. Highlights include:
In addition, the majority of our employees will not be required to return to their regular Workday office before August 2, 2021. However, we will continue to open offices in regions across the globe when it is safe to do so. Should an employee opt-in to return to an office, there will be policies and processes in place to help protect them and visitors from exposure to COVID-19.
Given the unique time we're living through, we've decided not to hold the Workday Rising digital experience. Instead, in October 2020, we will convene a special digital event, Conversations for a Changing World, as well as deliver Workday product news and content through other channels.
We look forward to safely welcoming the Workday Community in 2021 to Las Vegas and Stockholm for Workday Rising.
Today we are sharing an update to our back-to-office approach for our North America (Canada, Mexico, and U.S.) employees and contractors: With significant and unpredictable increases in COVID-19 cases across the U.S., we are extending the current work from home guidance for our North America employees and contractors through Friday, January 1, 2021. This means that North America employees (outside of those deemed office critical) will not be asked to return to an office before Monday, January 4, 2021 at which time we would evaluate the safety of beginning a phased reopening of offices. If circumstances change in the meantime and an office may be safely reopened, we will keep our audiences updated.
Because the COVID-19 situation varies greatly by country, we will continue taking a local approach to reopening. Accordingly, our offices in APJ and EMEA will continue to follow a regional back to office approach, with local leadership teams making reopening decisions on a country-by-country basis in partnership with Workday global leadership, Global Workplace Safety, and our People & Purpose teams, only reopening when it’s clearly safe to do so and for employees who wish to return.
As part of our ongoing efforts to support the Workday community during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re excited to share that we’re joining forces with Salesforce to help our mutual customers forge ahead in their plans to safely bring employees back to work.
Together, we’ll offer integrated solutions between Workday, the source of truth for real-time worker information and skills insights for today’s dynamic workforce, and Salesforce’s Work.com, a new suite of applications and advisory resources to help business and community leaders around the world reopen safely.
Our goal is to support and empower our customers, enabling them to sync critical worker and skills data from Workday with Work.com’s safety, health, and workplace information. This will help them prepare and protect their workplaces, safeguard and support their employees, and rapidly adjust to the changing world of work.
As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, and as we prioritize the safety and wellbeing of the Workday community, we have decided to make Workday Rising and Workday Rising Europe one global, digital experience in October. We will still deliver the same great event where we celebrate, share, and inspire each other, in new and inventive ways. In addition to hearing Workday stories from our executives, employees, customers, and partners, we will also be making time to reflect and learn from one another on how we’re all navigating the changing world of work during this time. Learn more here.
In addition, we continue to evaluate the best time and way to bring our employees back into the office, guided by our core values, government, and health organization recommendations, and our own safety analysis. Our work-from-home guidance remains in place for the foreseeable future, and we will regularly revisit it as the situation evolves.
We will continue to post any significant updates on the precautions we’re taking in this blog post.
In an effort to do our part to address the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19), we’ve made donations to causes that are on the front lines of this crisis and to the communities that need our help. Additionally, we’ve provided our employees with tools and resources so they can do their part in supporting our communities. Our efforts include:
As part of our Employee Match Program, our employees can have their donations matched by Workday to organizations that include CDC Foundation, COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for WHO, Direct Relief, and Doctors Without Borders. Bay Area employees can also choose to contribute to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s Regional Response Fund and have their donations matched.
We’ve also provided our employees with access to a platform through Workday that allows them to set up fundraising campaigns for organizations in their own areas that need critical funds to support local residents and small businesses.
We’ve joined a collaborative of 25 companies to collectively raise $22 million to address the COVID-19 crisis. As part of this effort, Workday has donated a combined total of $1.5 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United Nations Foundation.
We’re supporting The Community Foundation of Ireland. Through a grant to the COVID-19 relief fund, this will help support those most vulnerable, including the elderly and homeless, with critical services.
We’ve committed to the #StopTheSpread pledge, and we’re supporting the production and distribution of high-quality ventilators and other supplies at scale.
While these efforts are a good start, we know more work needs to be done. We’re all in this together, and we encourage others to join us in supporting our communities at this critical time.
At Workday, we have a set of core values that guide us, and our employees—without exception—are number one. We want to support and protect them during this challenging time so they can take good care of themselves, their loved ones, our customers, and communities.
As part of this, we have made the decision to extend our work from home guidance through April 17 for all our global office locations. In addition, we have announced several employee relief initiatives and benefits, including:
A one-time payment—equivalent to two-weeks pay—for the majority of employees to help accommodate any unforeseen costs and needs at their discretion. With schools and support services moving to virtual experiences or being temporarily suspended, we know our employees need the additional financial support and flexibility. We hope this additional pay will help alleviate some of the pressures. You can read more about it in our financial disclosure.
We are setting up a relief fund to help employees who may need additional support and have significant hardships that go above and beyond.
We’re expanding our Care.com benefit from 10 to 15 days to help source and pay for back-up childcare providers.
We’ve arranged one-year access to Headspace—a research-backed app that offers meditations on everything from stress and anxiety to focus and sleep.
We expanded our paid sick leave policy for any employee who becomes infected with COVID-19.
We feel that by taking care of our employees, we are in turn helping take care of our customers, who are relying on us during this difficult period. These are unprecedented times and we feel it’s important that we do what we can to protect and support our workforce and community.
With the coronavirus (COVID-19) situation continuing to evolve, we have decided to expand our work from home guidance to now ask all Workday employees and contractors in our global locations to work from home through the end of March. We are doing so out of an abundance of caution for the health and safety of our employees and broader community.
As we continue to navigate this situation, we will lean now—more than ever—on our core values and the strong culture we’ve built to collaborate more closely with each other and our community, helping our customers also feel supported during this time. We’re all in this together.
We will continue to closely monitor the situation and provide updates on the precautions we’re taking.
As the coronavirus (COVID-19) situation continues to rapidly evolve, our priority remains the safety of our community and doing our part to reduce the risk of it spreading. As such, we have decided to expand our precautionary measures to include asking employees and contractors in the Bay Area and Portland to work from home through March given the increasing number of cases in these areas. In addition, we are temporarily closing our Munich and New York offices, and will continue to keep our Milan, Seattle, and Seoul offices temporarily closed, with employees from those offices working from home.
Our global employees are encouraged to work from home if they are not comfortable coming into the office or commuting.
Our hourly site operations workers will continue to be paid for their standard work hours despite any reduction in schedules.
We feel these recent changes are important in our efforts to protect our community as well as those around us. We will continue to be able to operate critical business functions to ensure we are supporting our customers and their organizations during this challenging time as well.
As the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread globally, we are closely monitoring the situation and evaluating what travel and safety precautions we need to take to keep the Workday community—including our employees and their families, customers and prospective customers, partners, and visitors—as safe as possible.
In addition to making our global sales kickoff meeting a virtual experience this past week so that all of our global sales colleagues could participate, we have decided to expand our policies to include new precautions through the end of March.
These include no internal business travel across international borders and no domestic business travel unless seen as business critical. In addition, as part of helping our workforce feel supported during this challenging time, we are encouraging employees to work from home if they do not feel comfortable being in the office or commuting, while also making sure business-essential functions continue to operate seamlessly. We will continue to evaluate company-wide and regional work from home requirements as the situation evolves.
We will also continue to host small-scale events and meetings in our offices and offsite that are in line with our policies. And we’ll be asking our visitors and the community to apply the same travel and safety guidance we’ve provided our employees, including turning to a virtual experience where possible.
We are closely monitoring the situation and will update our approach based on guidance from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and local governments.
Our hearts go out to those who have been impacted by the virus, and we will continue to do our part to minimize its spread. We appreciate your understanding and partnership in helping support the safety of the Workday community and everyone around us.
Please continue to watch this space for any updates on the precautions we’re taking.
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