Workday and Microsoft: Connecting the Employee Experience

Today we are excited to announce that we are deepening our partnership with Microsoft. We are working closely with them on a new Microsoft Viva integration.

Joint customers will soon be able to leverage the power of Workday directly within Microsoft Viva Connections, part of Microsoft’s employee experience platform, furthering the experience for their employees to access Workday insights and actions when and where they naturally work. 

We sat down with Josh Lannin, vice president of employee experience technology at Workday, to understand more about what customers can expect from this integration.

Why did Workday and Microsoft partner on this integration?

At Workday, we believe that in order to support employees in the evolving, people-centric world of work, we need to provide them choices for how, where, and when they connect to the important insights and actions Workday provides. Meeting employees where they are, which increasingly means directly within their natural workspaces and collaboration tools, is a key aspect of our strategy.

The last 18 months have taught us that work has and will continue to evolve. We know the future of work is hybrid and complex—people are working from home, the office, or both—so having great digital connectivity to both co-workers and business systems matters more than ever. We’ve already had great success with the adoption of Workday for Microsoft Teams, so this is a natural progression of our partnership—helping better serve our customers and provide Workday to users in the places where they are spending much of their time.

Today Workday has over 50 million users representing more than 8,000 customers, many of which run on Microsoft 365. Microsoft’s investments in building Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform that is built from the ground up to be extensible, provides Workday a new powerful way to make these users more productive. Our customers rely on us to make their Workday experiences more accessible and intuitive through these kinds of intelligent integrations.

What makes Microsoft Viva Connections a good fit for Workday?

We see Microsoft Viva Connections complementing and broadening the reach of our employee experience management solution, which consists of Workday Journeys, Workday Help, Workday Talent Optimization, Workday Learning, and the continuous listening platform from Peakon, a Workday company. 

Business leaders want to create a simpler, more connected experience for employees. It’s about having a central place for employees to get their work done in a way that is approachable and easy to adopt, and helps their workforces get the most out of their experience.

Enabling customers to add key aspects of Workday to Microsoft Viva Connections is critical to providing the full set of capabilities their employees need to work—whether it is requesting time off or looking up information on a co-worker. For example, frontline workers may be able to leverage Microsoft Viva Connections on their mobile devices to clock in and out of their shifts using this new integration. 

By providing these kinds of essential capabilities to Microsoft Viva Connections, we believe that we can help make our common customers’ businesses more connected than ever before.

What experiences could the Workday integration with Microsoft Viva Connections provide?

The great thing about this integration is that it will surface Workday data and common Workday tasks, without requiring users to leave Microsoft’s employee experience platform. To begin, we’ll be focused on employee self-service capabilities such as reminders to clock in and clock out. For example, a retail employee can get a notification that their break is nearly over and with a tap, clock back in on their mobile device.

We also know that capturing important dates—whether it’s a birthday, anniversary, or holiday—creates peace of mind so we’ll be bringing it all together in one place. In addition, given the stresses of the past 18 months, we know it’s critical for employees to take time off and recharge so we’ll be providing reminders if it’s been a few months since an employee’s last vacation. 

Over time, we will expand this catalog of Workday capabilities to include the integration of Peakon so customers can capture real-time employee sentiment as well as additional manager self-service capabilities. While this is just the beginning of our work with Microsoft Viva, we’re committed to delivering a frictionless Workday experience for greater engagement and worker productivity.

How can CIOs and IT leaders at joint customers benefit from this integration? 

CIOs are constantly grappling with a complex network of systems that are supposed to empower their people to be productive and get their work done, but the reality is employees are having to switch between multiple applications. At Workday, our goal is to deliver out-of-the-box integrations that help address this by supporting the CIO’s platform of choice. 

Leveraging our integration with Microsoft Viva Connections, CIOs can help to reduce the number of unique systems required for people to interact with in their daily work, ultimately lessening overall costs of management and support for IT systems while enhancing employee productivity. The integration is designed to be straightforward to configure and deploy—eliminating the need to develop multiple custom integrations that are time consuming to create and costly to maintain. This will help increase an IT organization’s ability to streamline its application and integration technology portfolio.

As we look to elevate customer experiences in Workday, we’ll continue listening and understanding how to best expand the power of our system to key areas—whether it’s productivity or collaboration tools—where our customers want us more. It’s about bringing the Workday experience everywhere. 

This blog post was updated on November 8, 2022.