Workday Elevate by Andrew Stevenson (@philww)
HR and financial management vendor Workday held a one-day event in London last week for customers and prospects, just days after announcing plans to invest more than £500 million ($700 million) in its UK operations over the next three years. As always, the most interesting session was hearing how customers are using Workday in their own companies. Speakers from luxury hotel operator Lore Group and shareholder services provider Equiniti highlighted the impact on cost control and employee engagement. For both companies, being able to analyze detailed information from across their workforces has proven invaluable.
The two companies spoke about their use of employee listening app Peakon, which Workday acquired in early 2021. One of the aims of the acquisition was to feed insights from employee engagement metrics into operational decision-making. Equiniti showed a great example of this combination in action: predictive analytics of attrition signals helped them cut their average hire time in half. Andrew Stephenson, Chief People Officer at Equiniti, explained:
We put a lot of effort into churn prediction. In our organization, the predictions are very accurate. In fact, the predictions are so accurate that, first of all, if it looks like something is going on in the organization, we can tell our managers to try to intervene. But more importantly, Peakon tells us which teams are predicted to be attriting so we can prepare our recruiting teams accordingly.
We’ve reduced our average time to hire by 100%. We now typically fill jobs in 25 days because we’re not making offers, we’re actually recruiting in the area before people leave. It’s best if we can avoid turnover, but when we do, we’re much further along in bringing in new talent.
One reason Peakon’s data is so trustworthy is that Equiniti achieves a 91% response rate worldwide to its monthly surveys, and Stephenson says getting employees to actually respond is key to achieving that level of participation.
I don’t think you’d get that level of response rate unless people thought they could trust you and that you would actually do something with the information.
Transparency and Trust at Equiniti
Transparency is also a key element in building trust. People need to feel that management is being honest with them. This is perhaps a different mentality to the one that has prevailed for nearly two centuries, since Equiniti began managing pensions for the British Army.
People don’t trust organizations, but this is nothing new. Why do they do this? If you trace industrial relations back to the 18th century, companies want to get the most work for the least amount of pay, and employees want the opposite.
But today, many more people want to work with companies, not for them. They want to know what’s on both sides and how to get there. They want to know where the company is going and how it’s going to affect them. So our starting point is to achieve as much transparency as possible within the organization.
One of the ways Equiniti provides transparency is by having executives host a live broadcast to employees every six weeks. The broadcast features business updates, HR updates, issues covered in Peakon, and live questions from employees during the broadcast. These can be anything from acquisitions to the state of the restrooms in a particular building. He says it’s important to address tough issues like market exits and layoffs, but also good news, and to be upfront about what the company is doing and why.
I think a lot of the lack of trust in organizations comes from not understanding why something happens and it comes as a surprise. [especially] HR people, sometimes you can’t share too much up front about a plan, but if you’re always talking about what the strategy for the organization is, and then when you present it, you explain how it fundamentally fits into that strategy and allow people to work backwards, that goes a long way in increasing the acceptance that it’s the right thing to do.
Transparency, honesty, and going back to the question I asked earlier – how do we get to 91%? We answer all the tough questions, no matter how hard they are, so people know we’re really thinking about it every month and making proactive decisions based on that.
The monitoring also extends to picking up on cases where the data shows that managers are encouraging team members to enter favorable scores.
We can extract that from the data and teach them why it’s not the smartest thing to do. We don’t just want numbers to go up. We want an authentic environment where people really buy into what we’re trying to do.
Managing Payroll Costs at Lore Group
Roar Group, which operates blue-chip hotels such as the Pulitzer Hotel in Amsterdam, Sea Containers in London and the Riggs Hotel in Washington DC, also uses Peakon data to compare its performance against hospitality industry benchmarks on metrics such as workload, growth and staff turnover. The ability to dig into live data from across operations means it can act quickly, without having to wait for numbers to be compiled and analysed. “We use Peakon data to help us measure our performance and improve our business,” says Chief People Officer John Dawson.
With everything in one place, you can make better decisions faster.
Cost control has become a big focus for hospitality businesses amid uncertain consumer spending and rising labor costs. Before implementing Workday between February 2022 and May 2023, the company ran 22 different HR, payroll, learning and development, and engagement applications. Consolidating everything onto a single system that runs across all properties, including early adoption of Workday Scheduling, has transformed visibility into daily payroll expenses. Dawson says:
So when you put all of that together with all the rules behind it and you can actually create a global payroll report that allows your front office manager, your restaurant manager, your bar manager to literally get real-time workforce forecasts, and you know that when they access that report, they get real-time data, that’s just game-changing.
One example of savings is an app that Roa built in Workday that alerts line managers when they are about to exceed the 40-hour threshold at which they would have to pay US employees double pay. This has saved them $25,000 last year. Roa is currently in the process of integrating its contingent staff into the same integrated system, which should result in further savings. Dawson comments:
For me, the scheduling product is probably the golden nugget for us, it’s the scheduling product where you really get the ROI on your investment.
Skills Development and Careers
Another area where Workday is making an impact at Equiniti is by providing new opportunities for staff to develop their skills by contributing to short-term projects elsewhere in the organization.
Tasks and opportunities come and go. When your workforce is spread across the globe, no matter how good your management infrastructure, it’s very hard to say, “There’s someone in India who’s perfectly qualified for a task in Minnesota.”
Workday allows us to optimize talent from anywhere in the world so that they can step into that role, do great things for the company, and hopefully learn something for themselves and go on to do something else. So we’re really excited about the add-ons that give us more flexibility for our workforce.
Equiniti’s culture encourages managers to look at the broader goals of the organization, rather than just focusing on their own specific function or team.
If I really go for it [organization-wide] If I’m a group of peers and I have the best people in my department who might actually be better served over there, I’m happy to do that. That’s the mindset we try to instill throughout the organization. We want to put the best people in the best places. It’s not about the success of any individual little department, it’s about the bigger goal.
In some cases, this may involve recognising that an individual’s skills development may be best achieved by working for a period at another employer, particularly if they work in a market segment where opportunities for advancement within Equiniti are limited. Stevenson says it’s important for companies to be upfront with their employees.
Our employee retention rate is very high, but the downside is that in a stable market, there are fewer places to move. We are very honest with our employees about where the opportunities are within the organization and when they will be available. We are also very clear about how to move laterally, because that is a great opportunity to build your career.
But we’re very honest about acknowledging that in a very stable market, the best career path might be to leave us. We connect you with our alumni group, and we keep you engaged and in touch, because you might come back with more skills. It’s about being very honest with people that it might not just be in and out, or a linear career path.
My take
Many vendors have been touting the benefits of consolidating data and capabilities onto a single platform lately, and Workday is no exception. These customers took to the stage to reinforce that message with examples of how having live data at their fingertips helps them control costs and act faster.
Interestingly, while AI was a big talking point in Workday’s presentation at the event, it was more of a subtext in their conversations with customers. Equiniti and Lore Group both recognize the role AI plays in areas like predictive attrition and scheduling, which would be completely useless without AI. But the technology is not an end in itself, just a means to better business outcomes.
