Building agility and bridging the skills gap with the power of one

In talking to our CHRO customers, all of them consistently agree that their companies are currently focused on creating the right responsive and agile organisations. They're looking to establish a great place to work for all their employees, and they need to create a highly skilled and resilient company. Moreover, they know their businesses are continually looking to create efficient workforce operations and payroll processing that can be truly transformational. CHROs also want systems that make their operations not only effective, easy to use, accurate, well informed and that produce good data, but also reduce manual intervention.

CHROs, however, are profoundly aware that employee expectations are changing. Employees expect a consumer-like experience and want to engage with systems that are personalised, relevant and contextual. And CHROs know if the services they provide don’t meet employee standards, they risk failing in the process of creating an engaged and productive workforce.

Frictionless foundation

It all starts with a frictionless foundation. And by that, I mean the worry-free service delivery of a true cloud offering. With that foundation in place you can start to develop a clear picture: your financial + people + operational data, in a unified data core. Data is always live, easy to understand and secure.   

This frictionless foundation allows us to move quickly and effectively to deploy new technologies. It is, for example, enabling us to provide our customers with the benefits of Machine Learning, conversational assistance, and data-to-data point analysis. New capabilities, such as these, can help us to guarantee a consumer standard experience. At the same time, it helps large customers, with multiple sites, and thousands of employees, to standardise practices in areas such as recruitment and training procedures — which we know can be a vital asset to maximise workplace performance.

So, let’s take a brief look at what the Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) will be able to offer you and your organisation, now and in near the future:

1. Strategic workforce planning based on skills

Knowing what skills are available within the business and what needs to be acquired to solve business problems, is critical for the CHRO. People analytics will enable CHROs, managers, and leaders, to understand the aggregate skills that they have in your organisation. We are building algorithms into our products that help to create real insights as to the net and aggregated skills that you've got within the business. Our algorithms will look for information and data that otherwise require you to engage separate management information teams to gather this information and pull it forward for you. Workday’s technology, instead, will do that for you. It will create dynamic dashboards that can be utilised to surface relevant information. Information, that in conjunction with our standard dashboards, reports or discovery boards (which are configurable dashboard capability for data), will enable our customers to really understand a very clear picture of what their skills capability looks like at any point in time.

Building skills into our solutions as a unit of measurement enables our customers to look at where they may need to recruit or upskill, in order to address business problems. It is a great way to commence scenario planning for all future events. This is where Workday Skills Cloud comes into play. Launched in 2018, it is a unique tool that makes it possible for our customers to use a centralised skills library in the cloud featuring over 55,000 different skills.

We're also creating Skills Match, now live in the product. This allows managers, and HR teams, to match open requisitions with existing candidates in the business that have the right skill set. We’re now looking at ways of deploying new capabilities that allow us to bring external survey data for market compensation survey management into the Workday product — enabling compensation experts to benchmark the data in the external market through machine learning, instead of doing it manually.

In conjunction with machine learning, Workday’s HCM solutions will also enable our customers to apply the data set right across the lifecycle of human capital management. In doing so, they can start to create some truly informative ideas about the way in which we can bring together concepts such as strategic workforce planning in line with recruitment and development, etc. And as a consequence of that, this gives our customers a real opportunity to get to the heart of what really matters to their business.

2. Recruitment and upskilling made easy

All CHROs know that recruitment and the management of individuals own learning and development are key ways of addressing strategic workforce planning. At Workday, we also acknowledge the importance of this function and we’re heavily investing in ensuring our technology can help managers and HR can make recruitment more effective, and identify the right learning for the right people.

In terms of recruitment, as it stands, many organisations have two or three ways in which they move employees and fill new roles. They either have very lengthy and complex internal recruitment processes that look very similar to their external recruitment processes. But they also know a lot about their employees and still run them through those traditional processes of interviews assessments. We enable recruiters to change this. Using Skills again, we've created the Talent Marketplace, a talent mobility solution that enables employers to connect their people with targeted opportunities for greater organisational agility. Talent Marketplace also fosters employee development and helps HR, and managers, to better allocate talent to meet evolving business needs—all greatly improving how work gets done.

In addition, we have Recruitment Hub, which brings together all tools recruiters need into one centralised hub. This solution empowers recruiters to personalise their workspaces so every individual can work the way they want, streamline the recruitment process, and provide a better candidate experience.

Upskilling existing talent is equally as important as recruitment — not only for retention but also for employee productivity. When it comes to upskilling, Workday is actively improving the whole way in which learning lands on the desktops of employees. Talent Marketplace delivers more personalised, data-driven opportunity recommendations to empower employees to take an active role in their development while enabling organisations to promote internal mobility to keep their best workers.

For example, a sales associate interested in developing a career in marketing could use Workday Talent Marketplace to find hands-on experiences in that field. With tailored recommendations for internal marketing gigs or projects, this person could pursue the growth opportunities that align most with their career goals and aspirations. This has been particularly important for many of our customers, whose workforce has become more distributed, or where opportunities to work in the classroom have dissipated as a consequence of COVID-19.

3. Personalisation perfection

Finally, to create a great place to work, CHROs recognise the importance of treating every employee as an individual. Employee experience has to be every bit as delightful as the consumer experiences they have outside the workplace. Let’s use an analogy to explain what we mean — Our homes. Before the era of smart homes, our homes were unable to predict remarkably little. Now the lights come on, the temperature adjusts and your favourite music starts to play, all with the click of a button. This is how Workday is thinking about the employee experience. We're redefining what it means to know people, their interests, actions and tendencies, so we can quickly provide personalised recommendation notifications and an unforgettable experience.

To do this, we are using the latest and predictive technologies. We start with an intuitive and relevant homepage, greeting users with a familiar card-style interface that has relevant content. We are introducing journeys and a completely tailored set of tasks that are presented when additional guidance is needed. For example, we can help a new manager better understand the tasks, they should be aware of.  Or, while onboarding, getting them off on the right foot and setting them up for success in their new role.

As we continue to invest in transformative technologies, such as machine learning, natural language processing and enterprise search, Workday will get even smarter and make the job of the CHRO and their team easier. We will make it simpler for employees to find what they want, when they want it. We’re also building a native knowledge base. This new search service will make it possible to assist employees throughout their tenure, to be more productive and lead more meaningful work lives.

The end goal is, no more enterprise versus consumer. Just what people need, when they need it.

The future now

While 2020 might have been the year that changed the world, we’re on the precipice of the future. CHROs have the opportunity to dynamically change the way they engage employees, and both meet and exceed their expectations. And they can do this all while shoring up to meet their businesses’ strategic needs, and lowering the volume of traditionally painstaking manual tasks. Using Workday’s solutions, computers can now say yes, instead of saying no. And this is the future we all want, and business needs.

Do you like what Workday HCM has to offer? Are you interested to learn more about Workday and Tietoevry services? Contact us or visit our Workday page.