Reflections on Workday Rising 2024: Past, Present & Future

The following are impressions from attending the 2024 Workday Rising conference. This is not a critique, comparison or endorsement of Workday versus other HR solution providers. Nor is it a critical review of Workday solution features and functionality. It is just a summary of things I found myself thinking about after the conference.??

Legacies of Workday’s Past

• Customer centricity. Workday has always prided itself on being customer focused. This came through in the conference. They showcased several customers who have been using their solutions going all the way back to 2008. While I heard grumblings about some product features and costs, I never heard a customer complain about the company.
• Understanding HR. Workday was founded to create a cloud-based core HR system better than the on-prem solutions that dominated the market in the early 2000s. The size of the Workday Rising conference demonstrated they were successful! While they have since moved into finance and other areas, their HR roots were visible in conference presentations that showed a deep, sincere understanding toward the realities and value of operational HR.

Impressions of Workday’s Present

• Expanding into finance. One of my favorite sessions featured a CFO talking about finance data the way transformational CHROs talk about employee experience data. Using technology to empower frontline leaders to understand and make evidence-based decisions about operational practices. Her comments made me wonder if finance solutions differ when they are built by a legacy HR technology company.?In particular, is more focuse placed on features supporting end-user adoption? I suspect the answer is yes since managers are more likely to ignore requests from HR than requests from finance.
• Partner Focused. For years Workday had a slogan called “the power of one” that emphasized the value of having a single solution that does it all. This approach worked in the past, but as one Workday leader told me, they know it doesn’t work anymore. Given the explosion of innovation in the HR technology market , Workday has pivoted to make partners a key part of their go-to-market strategy. From the many partners I spoke with at the conference, they appear to be making considerable progress in this direction. ?This includes providing extensibility applications that enable partners and customers to build new solutions on the Workday platform. ?
• Skills Strategy. Every HR platform provider is talking about skills management , but not all talk about it in the same way. Workday appears to be embracing the use of 3rd party skills content as a valuable extension to their own skills management featuers.? I spoke with several skills partners at the conference including Lightcast, Techwolf , Censia , and Kahuna . All shared successful applications of their solutions within the Workday system.
• Frontline & Deskless Workers.? I was glad to see a number of sessions devoted specifically to supporting field employees . As one would expect, these solutions emphasize extensive use of mobile and texting applications.
• Global?? Many Workday customers use their solutions at a global level. But the conference did not feel global. One would expect a conference in North American held by a North American company to be primarily attended by North Americans.?And most major HR technology company’s leadership teams are not highly global, being dominated by either North Americans or North Europeans. Nevertheless, given the growing importance of talent drawn from historically under-utilized geographies I found myself wanting to see more content focused on the needs of employees from other parts of the world.?

Hopes for Workday’s Future

Given their dominant size in the market, Workday’s product strategy will profoundly shape the future of work. This is because the functionality Workday builds can enable new ways of working at a global scale. With that in mind, here are things I hope Workday will include in their future growth.?

• Integrating HR & Finance data. The biggest challenge to improving HR effectiveness is demonstrating the business impact of HR practices. Using technology to overcome this challenge is a core focus of my book Talent Tectonics . This starts with recognizing that the business value of people is not measured in HR technology systems. Companies do not pay people to have skills, be engaged, and not quit. They pay people to drive company profit and growth. The data needed to demonstrate the business value of HR practices is located in financial systems. Building solutions that integrate HR and finance data will enable companies to more accurately demonstrate the return on investment gained from spending money on people and calculate the revenue impact of cutting workforce costs.
• Managing People & Money & Things. Workday describes its current solutions as enabling companies to manage people and money. People and money are core fuels that enable companies to be agile and adaptable. Money can be spent on anything, and people can be asked to do anything.?Whether the money is spent wisely or the people are successful depends on how they are managed. What makes a company successful is its ability to use people and money to generate things: products, services, and customers. ?Historically, companies have used disparate systems to manage people, money and things. The siloed nature of existing enterprise resource management technology severely limits our ability to rapidly rethink and redesign jobs and organizations in response to changing business conditions and labor market demands.

Workday is one of a few companies with the technological capability to radically transform how companies manage people and money to drive business outcome. The investments they have made in their financial platform and the partnership they announced with SalesForce are solid steps in this direction. Based on what Workday has accomplished over the past 20 years to improve the quality of HR, I am optimistic for what they can do over the next 20 to improve the quality of work in general. And this is not just about Workday building their own products. It is also how Workday drives the larger HR technology market to grow and evolve in response to their actions. ?As is said, a rising tide lifts all boats.?