Workday Podcast: How Allstate Created a Consumer-Grade Employee Experience

Pete Rutman: With so much change in the past years, embracing technology to adapt and grow seems essential for insurance companies. How can leaders prepare their people for this transformation and the future of work?

Hi, I'm Pete Ruttman. I'm Group Vice President for Financial Services here at Workday. I've been with the company for 16 years. And today on the Workday podcast, we have a very special guest, Bob Toohey, EVP and CHRO at Allstate, our very own rockstar on our Rockstars of Business Forever Forward Tour.

Bob Toohey: I'm not singing. That's good. 

Rutman: Welcome, Bob. Great to see you. 

Toohey: Great to be here on the bus. Great to see you. 

Rutman: Well, let's kick this off. You know, I know you, but our audience doesn't know you. You know, and I think it would be helpful if you could walk us through, give us a little bit of your background. 

Toohey: Sure. I have, Bob Toohey, as you said, CHRO over at Allstate. Had about a 35-year career. I hate saying that because it makes you realize, wow. But over my career, I probably spent half of it in HR, half of it in business. I've been at Allstate for a couple of years, going through a big transformation there.

I say that because in my past careers, a lot of the places I've been is around transformation of organizations, people. And then when I ran businesses, it was about leading people.

So I'm passionate about all of my career of how do you really make businesses run well through people? And that's really what we're doing at Allstate is, that's what powers a business just like Workday.

And that's where passion is. So I spent a lot of time in my career just doing that and having fun. 

Rutman: Yeah. Yeah. And here we are on a bus. 

Toohey: We're on a bus. We don't have to sing.

Rutman: We've got Billy Idol. 

Toohey: If you asked me 20 years ago, would I be on a bus talking about Billy Idol and a Workday logo on the bus, I'd say no. We've both been around a long time and I don't think we'd envision, yeah, how about a Workday tour bus?

But it's a good idea. I like the campaign. It's great.

Rutman: Your career's really taken off. I love it. I love it. Well, let's go a little bit deeper then, and maybe I've got a couple of zingers I'll throw at you.

I don't know. But, you know, I think one that our audience would be really interested in is just some of the challenges, you know, just not within the insurance industry, but kind of beyond for the HR function overall, and kind of what trends you're seeing.

Toohey: I think a couple of things. I think every organization you talk to, going through transformation, digital's impacting them, AI is impacting them, pressures.

Thankfully, we're well past now going through the pandemic, but you think of all these things. And I think since the pandemic, everything has accelerated, technology, the needs, what people want, flexible work, people distributed around the world.

So you have all these different things going on. And I think companies are struggling with, how do you have an engaged culture? or how do you stay connected to your employees?

And how do you have a productive business also at the same time with all these different varying things going on? And I think whether it's insurance or any business, I'm going back to what I said, it's about the people.

So if you could really harness the power of your organization by keeping them connected, bringing them into the digital world, I like to say they are our customers. That's what I think about our employees, they're our customers.

And so a big challenge for us, probably why we're on this bus, is how do you create an experience that's consumer-grade experience inside of organizations? And I think that's the journey we've been on as we go through a transformation.

Technology is the foundation. So how do we do that in a really different way? And I think historically, let's be honest, you guys have been around this long time, HR is not the best at technology.

The HR vendors, the providers, it's been a long 20, 30, how many years? And I think it's progressing, but I think the last four, it's accelerated and it's a huge opportunity.

I think it's created such an opportunity for all of us to kind of really get what we've always wanted in the past. 

Rutman: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. You know, if you think about that too, let's maybe talk about the past and maybe just a little bit at Allstate and kind of maybe some of the specific challenges you were having on legacy technology that you wanted to correct or change and transform with more modern technology.

What are some of those things? 

Toohey: Yeah, so we had this aspiration where we want to leverage AI, we want to leverage digital experiences. But when we started this journey two years ago, we basically had four payrolls, I think six, I could argue seven HCMs, and then wrap around a bunch of bolt-on systems, 16 learning systems.

So you could get the story. And we have 54,000 employees globally. It was hard to connect them all. We never really had that connectivity. We didn't have that one platform.

And that's where we made the decision. Let's go to one platform rather than try to re-engineer and bandaid everything that we had. We had a great opportunity and we got support by management.

Just let's go clean and start over. And that's what we did. We took everything out rather than clean the garage and put it all back in. We bought a new garage and we just said, let's start over.

Rutman: Yeah. And that new garage is Workday. 

Toohey: Happens to be we're on the bus. 

Rutman: Yeah. We're on the bus and we're celebrating your go-live. 

Toohey: I think it was, and I'll credit to what we did. I think you remember, one of the things we had the passion to do is change the employee experience. And we set the core of that and the foundation is going to be Workday.

We made that decision and everybody has these other systems and bolt-ons, but we really said, we have to bring everybody together, whether it's in healthcare or other areas.

How do we make us all work together? And I appreciate your guys' partnership where you came in and we brought other partners in and we said, let's go on this journey together.

And we now have a, it's, what are we in now, in week two, three? Yeah. We have that one system and it's, you know, internally people are like, it's so great just connecting people because now we're connected globally.

We don't have different systems. We can talk to each other, we could see information. So it's made a difference right out of the gate. 

Rutman: Big project, a lot of people, a lot of time involved, needs leadership. Can you maybe speak to that and some of, you know, the other leaders on your team and how those conversations took place as you're, bringing a lot of change across to a well-known iconic company.

Toohey: All sorts of different. So first, I think to both the technology and my HR leadership team, huge kudos to them. I mean, they and you guys who all partnered together. We also worked with Accenture as we know, and we had a strong partnership if you think of all these different folks coming together.

The start of it was though getting everybody on the same page. I think that's where you and I had a lot of conversations. There was a big, bold vision. It's not just about putting the technology in.

It's an enabler. You need to have the different processes. You need to think differently. So there was a journey, just getting people what the art of possibility is. And I think over time, and we spent a lot of time with leadership and then with everybody on the working teams.

I mean, we had those meetings where we'd have a hundred people together, just going through where we're going and really helping people see the path. There's an, it's never really ending, but where are we going? But steps to get there. And I think it became very collaborative. There's always bumps, there's always doubts, there's always concerns, there's nerves. But I think once everybody kind of felt they saw that, we had to really bring people along.

And I think it helped a lot. 

Rutman: And we've talked on this and we talked to other customers of ours about this too, about the Go Live that's not necessarily viewed as a destination.

It doesn't end with the- Just begin. 

Toohey: Just begin. That's what it was two weeks ago. 

Rutman: You know, and I'm kind of curious about this because you do have a great vision. You've kind of met one strategic objective by going live, replacing legacy technology.

You're a big proponent of that user experience and leveraging technology to make it the best experience. What are the things in the future that you're thinking about that you hope to accomplish with not only just our technology, other technologies that are out there and how we interrelate?

Toohey: I think first, that's a great question. So I think now that we have the foundation and it's interesting because we're doing an update on the organization on our presentation.

Now we were just talking about this. So the foundation's in, that allows us to have the data and that powers everything. So now that we have, I'd say, clean data, clarity of the organization, next is how do we make managers' jobs much easier?

So we wanna take out and really drive self-service through everything we do and leverage it with AI. I think there's a lot of folks who are very nervous about AI and is it good, is it bad?

I think it's great because I think it's about how do we change the way we work, give people different things to do and use their skill sets elsewhere and take all the administration things they want.

So a couple things like feedback. How do you do fast feedback through tools and then have the AI kind of give you that information back? How do we create the personalized learning journeys?

So how do we use AI to kind of create that we know what Pete wants, we know where he wants to go in his career, we give you what you want for learning and then we help you on that pathway.

I think a really fun one credit to the recruiting team, and they've been using it already, is really leveraging it for recruiting, both internally and externally, but we're really creating that internal marketplace.

Our recruiters today call their employees and we talk to them about their interests. Now we're gonna use the tools to do that. So we're gonna call them, we're gonna use the tools, we can reach out to people, really drive skills.

That's a big one, and I think that's one that I know we're partnering with you all to really think about, how do you leverage skills? And I think too often we just use skills for, we think skills and capabilities for doing your job, moving jobs and learning, but it really hits everything.

How does it inform compensation? How does it inform where you wanna go in the organization? How does it inform your learning journeys? To me, it's the foundation of the whole talent lifecycle.

I think that's our opportunity to really kind of leverage that. So we're gonna make your product team crazy because I think, and they're great partners and we really want to push to say, where can we go?

So we want to kind of take it where kind of others haven't gone yet and try new things. 

Rutman: Yeah, we see that as a definite opportunity for us and it's an opportunity to make us a better company. Your feedback's very valuable.

You mentioned recruiting a bit, a technology that is a new member of the Workday family HiredScore. 

Toohey: HiredScore, yeah, that's right. 

Rutman: And maybe if we just touch on that, because I think that's an excellent example of orchestration, AI coming into play, two companies coming together, we're seeing the value and that's so much that we acquired Hired Score.

So maybe just to touch on that. 

Toohey: Do you want me to tell you who you should acquire next? Or do you want to just, because we could do that. 

Rutman: No, I think- We turned the mic off for that one.

Toohey: HiredScore was, as you know, you were both at that partner meeting and we were thrilled when you purchased them because it made everything, we just, we know the power of that.

So, HiredScore is a great example where now we're really confident that all the stuff we're doing with them externally, now that they're in and part of Workday, we see a great opportunity in talent management internally.

Same tool, same work, same AI, same, and really just leveraging that same capability. So, for us, we look at that as hopefully it's an accelerator now, because obviously they got more, a lot of power behind them with you guys.

So, I think it's a great opportunity. And I think what was great is how you guys worked together there before you bought them. I mean, it was, you were already integrated.

You were working well together. You were, and then you guys said, well, here we go. HiredScore is now on board. So she's great. 

Rutman: That's fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. And then maybe just around that with everything that's going on and you were thinking about, you know, your teams and you get down to that employee that just turned on Workday today and is using Workday and the change that's associated with that.

Was there anything in particular that you thought about from a change management perspective that an individual contributor could offer?

Toohey: There's a couple of things we did for both managers and individual contributors.

We brought them on the journey, because this is a big, you know, to us it was our systems weren't perfect, they were okay. Now we have, we've really gone up the curve, going self-service, bringing everything digital.

That changed, we didn't want that to be like, we're just dumping things on you. So the tool has to work really well. and we did a lot of communication telling people what's coming.

I think one of the things we learned and we did on that launch was we're launching. We've got a big launch ahead of us. It's not gonna be perfect. Work with us and we'll fix things as we go.

So we're trying to make all of us together part of the solution. It's not an HR thing, it's a business enabler. And then for employees, I have a saying internally and you guys have heard it a lot.

Anything that you use on an app or on your computer that's online shouldn't need directions. So our goal is make it so easy that we don't have to talk to about it. That just makes their life and work easier when they're at work.

So that's really the goal is we want them to feel that they could see more, they could do more, they can be more productive and go focus on their job but the stuff that they need to do around human capital is simplified and that's the goal.

We gotta keep working together to make that, you know, directions not needed and just use it.

Rutman: Yeah, and if we think about that, you know, three, five years out, your feedback that you're going to be giving us over all these years.

I mean, what in particular, if we were going to focus on an area that you would think would need improvement or that we, in order for us to stay ahead of the game a bit.

Toohey: We double down on data and skills.

Rutman: Data and skills, okay.

Toohey: I would think about, if you think of the two biggest things out there, there's everything you have right now in the Workday suite, but there's one big engine that's out there that everybody uses every day.

It's about your wellbeing, your benefits, your pay, all of that, put them together. Put them together. Now you got everything. Yeah. Now you got everything in one app, one thing, and you start, and the power of that would be great.

Or make sure there's tight integration so that people don't have to feel like they have two different places to go. That's a broad, I know that's bigger than just tweaking some things.

I think the data and skills and how you're gonna leverage that is big. And I think the user experience, I think you have to continue to make the user experience so simple, because think of everything we do.

Buy a car, get a mortgage, you could shop, do everything you could do, and still we've gotten a lot better. And in HR, and things that you do that around work, it's harder.

We have to make it so easy that no one thinks about it anymore. It just happens. Yeah.

Rutman: Well, kind of from where we are today and where you're going and where Allstate is going and where your team is going on all this modern technology. And we're here to celebrate the go live.

I mean, if there was something that you would think to say to your team, if they were sitting in here in the booth that we're in, what would you say to your team after this big project?

Toohey: First, big thank you. They've heard it a lot. I think the night, I remember the night the cutover happened. I stayed up with them and I sent the teams to the hundred of people that were all involved in it.

And I just said, you guys should feel so proud of what you just did because I've been, you've been involved in a ton of code overs. This wasn't small. We could have done this in phases.

We asked them to do a big change and take out every system and do the globe one time. I think they underestimated how big that was. So I think one, their dedication to make it great is just a huge thank you and how proud they should feel that they really have changed it and what they've done for managers and leaders in Allstate.

They've really changed the game for them. And it's just the beginning, as we said. 

Rutman: It is just the beginning, but an amazing project, an amazing team, an incredible leadership.

Toohey: You guys are great partners.

Rutman: Yeah, we really appreciate it. And so I just want to thank you. Bob Toohey, everyone, EVP and CHRO of Allstate. Thanks for joining us, Bob.

Toohey: Thank you. Look forward to great things ahead. 

Rutman: Should we go celebrate inside with Billy Idol? Let's do it.