Workday Peakon Employee Voice: Why businesses thrive when employees are heard

It's no secret that employees are the organisation's most valuable asset. So it follows that during a period when change truly has been the only constant, providing employees with a positive employee experience—and being able to flex to support shifting needs—has been critical. Technology plays an important role in supporting this, helping organisations understand their employees' concerns and feedback, more deeply analyse their sentiment, and take meaningful action in response.

Workday Peakon Employee Voice is an intelligent listening platform that converts feedback into actionable insights. In this blog post, David Somers, Workday’s group general manager of product for the office of the CHRO, and Phil Chambers, Peakon co-founder and now Workday’s general manager for Peakon, tell us all about Workday Peakon Employee Voice and why employee listening is so critical for organisations.

"Put simply, it lets organisations continuously collect employee feedback and provides a way to turn that feedback into dialogue and action."

To set the scene for our readers, let’s start with an overview of the product.

Chambers: Workday Peakon Employee Voice is a platform that enables intelligent listening at scale by using machine learning to collect and analyse confidential feedback from employees in real time. Put simply, it lets organisations continuously collect employee feedback and provides a way to turn that feedback into dialogue and action.

The employee voice was always important, and it’s well known that engaged employees are not only happier but also more productive. The societal changes we’ve seen over the last few years accelerated the need to make employees a first-class stakeholder in their own engagement, which is exactly what Workday Peakon Employee Voice does. It turns insights about topics such as engagement, diversity and inclusion, and health and wellness into action through conversations, personal dashboards, team collaboration, and contextual learning resources.

Somers: In this time of massive digital transformation, intelligent listening enables you to get a continuous view of what's going on with your employees, and that's a superpower for an organisation. It helps you get ahead of challenges by identifying them early so you can reduce the risk they may create. It can also help you reduce attrition risks and attract new talent. You can truly listen to your employees, hear what they're saying, benchmark that information, and respond in real time. It's more important than ever.

Why is adding the ability to listen to employees a benefit to our customers?

Somers: According to survey analysis, "Organisations that invest in employee experience outperform peers by 147% in earnings per share."

If you’re the CEO of any company right now, your biggest opportunity to execute on your strategy is people: retaining and training the people you have, helping them understand where your organisation is going, recruiting new people to your company, and also encouraging and promoting belonging and diversity.

Companies build many applications that allow you to push things down, but very few allow you to get information flowing back, providing a real-time feedback loop. I don't know how you run an organisation without having a product like this today—without this constant feedback.

And if you’re a manager, your team executes based on what you’re doing and your guidance. Now we can give managers a toolset that allows them to listen to their team, take that feedback, and get better at their job. Who wouldn’t want to put something like that in place? Who wouldn’t want that capability?

Chambers: Our platform allows customers to accurately and contextually merge both demographic information and what we call “perceptual data,” such as the level of employee engagement, sentiment, and productivity. It provides a complete picture of your employees that nothing else can.

We provide a seamless experience for users and admins, alongside the rest of Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), with single sign-on, one security model, and one place to manage employees. Customers can also drive action in Workday based on these employee voice insights and then measure the impact of those actions. It’s a more powerful analysis this way.

Any final thoughts?

Chambers: Workday Peakon Employee Voice helps create a dialogue between employees and people leaders that’s dramatically different from what’s come before, and it’s really powerful in terms of surfacing what’s on people’s minds and turning that into actions. Ultimately this is a continuous feedback loop that can help your company as a whole become much more agile.

Somers: Workday Peakon Employee Voice allows you to have that context around comments and ratings, and I think the context is critical. And then you use technology like natural language processing, which allows you to take thousands of employee comments, roll them up, and slice and dice them quickly, so you can look at things you should be looking at. It becomes scalable.

Change has become the norm, and with that organisations must build resilience and adapt to constantly changing needs, especially as we think about future work models that work for everyone. To be and stay successful, organisations must be able to shift without friction. This is enabled by a workforce that feels engaged, safe, empowered—and heard.