Workday Podcast: Why Employee Experience Innovation Is Crucial

Workday leaders Pete Schlampp, executive vice president of product development, and Jeff Gelfuso, chief design officer, talk about why a consumer-like user experience in the enterprise is more important than ever.

Audio also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

For many workers, digital work and collaboration spaces are the new office. While we as a society are in the midst of collectively deciding what the future of work will look like, one thing is clear: The tools we use all day, every day, need to be intuitive and friction free. 

In this episode of the Workday Podcast, Workday leaders Pete Schlampp, executive vice president of product development, and Jeff Gelfuso, chief design officer, detail how they are thinking about the next generation of employee experience in the enterprise and why it matters now more than ever.

Below are highlights from Schlampp and Gelfuso, edited for clarity. Be sure to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. You can also find other podcast episodes here.

  • “If you think about some of those very big consumer companies, your expectations for them and the value they deliver is very high. That shouldn't be any different for an enterprise company. You should be able to think about and do your work in an intuitive way without it being difficult. I joke around that we have this mantra, ‘If you have to have a manual, we've done something wrong.’ As we've expanded and we've grown, and we've added more and more powerful capabilities, we've gotten a little more complex. And so we really have to focus on making sure we understand those different user needs, those different tech literacies and skill levels.” —Gelfuso

  • “The last year has impacted businesses in all sorts of expected and unexpected ways. We're at this inflection point where CIOs and CHROs need to deliver a better experience to their employees. Why? Because the digital workspace is now our workplace, and now, especially when we're in this hybrid work environment where people are at their desks most of the day, they're sitting inside of software, and that's where they work." —Schlampp

  • “The flaw with most enterprise software is that we want to present everything to you all the time. But actually, users don't want that. I've been having lots of customer conversations, and they're asking us to simplify the experience. What they say is: ‘Present what I need to do right now. And then that leads me to the next thing I need to do and the next thing.’ So we can still have all that power and complexity, but we hide it behind that ability to do the simple task that leads you to the next one, that leads you to the next one.” —Gelfuso

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