Workday Podcast: Global Media Giant Improves Business Insights

Audio is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Experts from Kantar gather extensive information about celebrity audiences, a company’s consumers, brand reputations, and much more—in real time. Behind these big data insights are 30,000 people working around the clock on every continent. The tools and processes they use evolve as quickly as consumer marketplaces, making internal workforce management extra challenging. To ensure that employees have the right tools and information at their fingertips, and that business strategies align across global sites, Kantar needed to give decision-makers faster insights about its own organization. 

I had the opportunity to sit down with Nadia Hutchinson, global director for payroll projects at Kantar, to talk about changing requirements for internal business insights and automation, and about the skills employees need to be successful.  

Below you’ll find a few highlights of the conversation, edited for clarity. You can find other episodes of the Workday Podcast here.

• “Our critical decision was, do we localize as much as possible and lift and shift our processes and our practices as they stood—or do we use the capabilities in Workday to standardize? We decided to leverage standardization to drive behavior and business change. That way, instead of each country and each division using their own methodologies, it can all be done in Workday.”

• “Another piece that's really important is the control element, or governance, that Workday allows. All processes are fully auditable and date-stamped. We also established a centralized digital HR team that manages any changes. We’re seeing massive benefits by approaching solutions from an HR and employee perspective, rather than just a technology perspective.”

• “We surfaced a number of dashboards so that business leaders can now see the truth. Some are finding that their perceptions or thoughts differ from the data. This is what we call evidence-based practice. This is real, and these insights may inform a change in your thinking, be it positive or negative, whichever way is most appropriate.”

• “There’s a global reassessment of the meaning of skills. Many people will have a technical background; many people will have a university or a professional background. But what a lot of employers find is you can come with all of that book learning, but if you're not able to be a social participant in the workplace, if you're not able to embrace change, the book learning has less relevance . . . More and more, it's about social interactions and people's agility in the workforce.”