Upholding Ethics and Integrity to Fuel Innovation and Technology Excellence

This week we celebrate the most ethical companies across our customer and partner ecosystem and the individuals who are committed to establishing, accelerating, and upholding business integrity around the globe. For the third consecutive year, Workday has been named one of The World’s Most Ethical Companies® by Ethisphere Institute, an honor we share with more than 50 Workday customers and partners that we collaborate with.

We sat down with Chris Fedrow, chief compliance officer at Workday, to learn more about the importance of integrity and what she admires most about Workday customers, partners, and fellow Most Ethical Companies® honorees.

Why do you think Workday has been named one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies® for the third time?

Ethisphere is a global leader in defining the standards of ethical business practices that advance corporate character, trust, and business success. Workday’s focus on ethics and integrity is something we share with Ethisphere, and customers and partners across our ecosystem.

As a technology company built on integrity and trust, we relentlessly seek to deliver meaningful value to our customers and our wider industry and beyond. We operate in an ecosystem that places trust and values front and center. Ethics and integrity are ingrained in our DNA as we execute on our mission to help companies and organizations worldwide to thrive in a fast-changing environment. Our company was founded with integrity being one of our core values, and it’s part of our guiding principles to this day. Every team and every interaction at this company are fueled with integrity in mind.

Year after year we strive to improve our standards, and our leadership continuously communicates our ethics and integrity program across the company to inspire our teams and to ensure that it remains front and center for all our employees. I think this dedication to act with integrity deserves recognition.

What has your team and the company focused on in the past year?

Integrity is the cornerstone of our daily operations. My team has continued their work to enhance awareness of responsibilities, standards, and available resources for leaders across the company to educate themselves and their team members on our practices.

To continue our progress, in the past year we’ve implemented additional in-person interactions and training sessions to educate our employees on the value and importance of ethics, compliance, and governance. In order to be a good corporate citizen, we need to recognize all employees and leaders as conduits of these efforts.

Additionally, the world has seen a major shift in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the past years. At Workday, we leverage AI and ML to help our customers improve the way they work. Our vision is to use AI and ML to elevate human capabilities and make finance and HR more intelligent, so employees can have more personalized experiences and get intelligent insights and recommendations to improve decision-making. 

That leads us to our question about the Workday customers and partners that are also honored in Ethisphere’s Most Ethical Companies® Awards 2023. What do you admire most about these organizations that champion ethics and integrity?

Looking through the list of 2023 honorees, I can confidently say that we’re in great company. I see that multiple Workday customers and partners are being recognized this year, just like last year. Not only am I proud of our team’s commitment to ethics and integrity, but I’m equally inspired by our extraordinary customer and partner community that lead the way in implementing ethical business standards around the globe.

I’ve talked about integrity being a core value at Workday. Collaboration and customer service are two other values our employees live by. The power of collaboration across our Workday ecosystem is evident. When you look at Workday, you’ll see that we don’t operate in a silo. We collaborate closely with our partners to develop offerings and solutions, and we’re constantly working in tandem with our customers to adapt to their needs as the world around us evolves. 

So many of our customers and partners that we admire and appreciate are honored this year, which creates a unique opportunity to benchmark our efforts against other leaders in the field in order to move forward together. They help and inspire us to improve and reimagine how to best serve our community. It fills me with pride and joy to see that so many of our day-to-day collaborators have the same standards as us—and it fuels me and my team in our work too.

What's next, and what excites you when you look ahead? 

The award honors and celebrates our customers, partners, and our team for their hard work. So, I want to take a moment to celebrate that. I also want to acknowledge Ethisphere Institute’s framework. 

This year, we exceeded the average scoring in multiple categories. For example, in the ethics and compliance category, we were measured on our rigorous program structures, oversight, training, enforcement, and standards—which are all done across the company and across the globe. We can only continue to make progress and raise the bar from here. Receiving this award also encourages us to measure our efforts year over year. It’s an honor, but it also holds us accountable to upholding our integrity and initiatives according to a globally recognized and standardized way of measuring.

As for the future, I want to ensure our employees know they all received this award together, and that they understand that our customers and partners have brought us here—that we’re operating and collaborating with some of the world’s most ethical and admirable companies. I look forward to analyzing our scorecard breakdown to see where we did well, how we can amplify that across other areas, and how and where we can continue to improve together with our customers and partners.