Foundational Workday Strategies for Uncertain Times

How to gain more value from your Workday investment

By Erin Larson, Jodi Ballard-Beach, Mike Kurtz, and Mike Sarette

Now, more than ever, change and uncertainty seem to be the only things we can count on. HR and Finance organizations are feeling the effects of shifting workforce strategies, priorities, workloads, and demands for data. At Slalom, we’re proud to partner with Workday, a leader in HCM and Finance software, known for its architecture, innovation and ability to progress with an organization through growth and change.

Yet, we often speak to clients who, for a variety of reasons, don’t feel like they are leveraging their HCM platform to its full potential. Are you finding that is true for your organization? If the answer is yes, here are some impactful strategies to help you get back on a path towards gaining full value of your Workday investment.

Set the team up for success

Most organizations understand the importance of defining a clear strategy and objectives while adhering to a formal set of governing standards, practices and structures during an implementation. But what happens once the implementation is complete? We believe that when it comes to protecting and maximizing your technical investments, the choices your organization makes after implementation are what will ultimately determine long-term success and return on investment.

• Strategic Alignment. Every organization is going through profound operational, economic or people-driven changes that have likely significantly altered the work planned for this year. A comprehensive review and prioritization of your organization’s business strategy will provide direction into where to make technical investments. In the face of the unprecedented economic and human impacts resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, can your HRIS meet the current and future needs or strategic objectives of the business or its workforce?
• Governance, structures and processes. A strong governance model protects your strategy and ensures operational sustainability. Key components of successful governance include, an effective intake process, a collaborative approach to prioritization, established change, communication and training plans, and a reliable, evergreen release management strategy.
• Roles and Responsibilities. Well-defined roles and responsibilities are a must for effective Workday management. They represent the intelligent core of your digital strategy. It is critical that all system users, from employees to security administrators, know what they are accountable for maintaining and innovating.
• Service Delivery Model. With employee and manager self-service facilitating most of the data collection, having a well-thought-out and fully resourced service delivery model is essential to manage their questions and requests as they arise.

Evaluate and Define the Employee Experience

While employee experience is not a new topic of discussion, it has taken a whole new meaning in today’s organizational and economic climate. Memorable moments, empathy, and positive visions for sustainable recovery and growth help assure employees that their needs are being met. Such assurance in times of uncertainty is critical to keeping an organization’s people engaged and able to focus on their work. This means HR needs to deliver predictable and consistent services with a high degree of accuracy. We recommend focusing on maximizing your technology while applying a lens of the users’ experience.

• User Experience. When Workday is configured to accurately portray the unique identities of an organization’s workforce, it empowers Workday’s machine learning to create more personalized experiences and enhances available data for workforce analytics. Designing Workday’s signature business processes with an eye towards simplification for employees and managers is another way to optimize the user experience.
• Employee Lifecycle. The employee lifecycle describes how employees engage with the organization and illustrates touch points that can be modeled into memorable moments. Memorable moments turn transactions into differentiated experiences unique to your organization. These moments develop and reinforce organizational culture and demonstrate to the employee their value to the organization.
• Ongoing Adoption. As a product, Workday continually releases enhancements and updates, as well as regularly deprecating functionality. Unlike other platforms that allow unique customers to have different versions, Workday customers are always on the same version of the platform. Having a method for ongoing adoption will give your organization greater control over how you communicate, train, and encourage employees to interact with Workday and ensure continued optimization of the system.

Create a Roadmap and Enhancements Plan

Workday is a smart choice for any business, but are you getting where you want to go? Strategic alignment, governance, roles, and service delivery lay a stable foundation for your organization to discover, develop, test, and deploy new or enhanced functionality. Are you ready to take your organization further?

• Define a healthy feature intake and backlog process. This is key to successfully managing and updating Workday. The intake and resolution process needs to provide differentiated approaches for the following tasks: troubleshooting regular break / fix issues, maintaining business processes, strategic project work, and twice-yearly releases. A robust and healthy intake and backlog process will aid in decisions to properly prioritize HR, Finance, IT, and Business resources.
• Landscape Analysis. Evaluate your organizational enterprise projects and initiatives. Discuss where the touch points are for this work and how they might integrate and work together to achieve an organizational strategic initiative. Consider how Workday could support these initiatives, either with current functionality or through other offerings in HCM, Finance, Planning, and Analytics. Develop a technical roadmap based on these findings that will guide future prioritization and act as a reference during annual planning sessions.

During these uncertain times, there is no clear predictor of success. These strategies provide parameters for clear and focused conversations as you consider how best to adapt to shifting priorities while optimizing your Workday investment. At Slalom, we use these strategies to inform our Review and Recommend service. It’s a full-service review of Workday functionality. We evaluate findings using defined key criteria aligned to strategic outcomes. Our recommendations focus on people, process, and technology, identifying targeted areas to focus on for optimization.

As Workday Advisory Partners, our focus is on enabling customers to obtain value from their Workday investments. We approach this holistically, combining elements of strategy, people, process, and technology to enable transformation. We tailor our approach based on client needs, from end-to-end strategy and deployment leadership, to tactical health checks on topics such as integrations, data, and adoption.

Interested in learning more about our Review and Recommend service? Let’s talk!

Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Learn more and reach out today.