Name: Looking Forward With Workday Human Centric Leadership in the era of AI
Uploaded: 2025-04-29T03:56:09.456Z
Duration: 40 min 4 s
Description: Looking Forward With Workday Human Centric Leadership in the era of AI

Transcript for "Looking Forward With Workday Human Centric Leadership in the era of AI": Are the rock stars. And using Workday to put finance and HR on one platform, Tim, you are a rock star. Using responsible AI doesn't make you a rock star. It kinda does. You are not rock stars. Okay. Most of you are not rock stars. Oh, data driven insights, large language models. Oh, that's so rock and roll. It is. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today on the topic of human centric leadership, which is increasingly critical in today's dynamic work environment. My name is Abigail, and I'm a value manager here at Workday. I work closely with organizations like yours to define strategic objectives of your transformation, understand how technology can drive meaningful business outcomes, particularly around your most important asset, people and money. In this looking forward webinar, we will dive into different differences between a traditional manager and a more progressive people manager. We will explore why embracing a human centric approach to leadership is no longer a nice to have but a fundamental pillar of a successful HR leadership. Last but not least, we have Joo Wen here today. She's our HCM solution consultant. She will demonstrate to us how Workday can empower your organizations to cultivate and support human centric people leaders across your organizations. Now think about the organizations that truly thrive. What sets them apart? Oftentimes, it's a culture where employees feels valued, supportive, and empowered to do their best work. This doesn't happen by accident. It's driven by leader who understand that their role extends beyond task management to fostering career or even personal growth, well-being, and a sense of belonging. So what exactly is the difference between a manager and a people leader? Traditionally, the role of a manager has often been focusing on these areas. First of all, task completion. Overseeing task, ensuring projects are delivered on time and on budget. Performance monitoring, tracking individual and team output against set targets. Problem solving, addressing immediate issues and keeping things running smoothly, last but not least, process standardization, enforcing established policies and procedures. No doubt that these are critical functions. However, in today's rapidly evolving world, employees are increasingly seeking more than just a paycheck. They desire purpose, connections, and more importantly, opportunities for growth. This is where the people leaders come in. While a people leader also understand the importance of task and performance, Their focus extends to these areas. Purpose, how can their team understand how their individual contributions align with the broader objectives and values in the organization? Empowerment, trusting enable their team members to take ownership and drive initiatives, investing into the growth and skills development through coaching, mentorship, and opportunities for advancement, building a strong relationship based on trust, empathy, and open communications, lastly, health and well-being, recognizing and supporting the holistic well-being of their team members, fostering a positive and inclusive work environment. Why is this important? The shift towards people leadership has tangible business benefits. Organisations with strong people leaders often experience higher employee engagement and retention. When people feel valued and supportive, they're more likely to stay and be invested in the company's success. Studies indicate a a 37 percentage increase in engagement under People Century leaders. This increased enablement directly translates into higher motivation levels with research suggesting that happy employees are 12% more productive as empowered team are more likely to take initiatives, share ideas, and drive better results. Improved collaborations, strong relationships, and a sense of belonging foster a more collaborative and productive environment. Of course, organizations known for their positive leadership attract and retain top talents as well. Now you might be thinking, this sounds great, but we are in the era of AI. Technology is the key factor that is transforming our organizations. Is it truly essential right now to talk about people centric leadership? My answer is absolutely yes, and this is particularly important as we navigate the increasing AI use cases into our workspace. Indeed, there is a expected shift of the share of work from human to technology, which drives automations and human technology collaboration. The future of work is not about human being replaced by technology. Instead, technology could be designed and developed to complement and enhance humans' work. As such, talent availability remain top of mind among organizations. The World Economy Forum published the future of work, future of job reports 2025 analyzing the view of over a thousand employees representing more than 40,000,000 workers around the world about the workforce transformation strategy that employers are planning for 2025 to 2030. It shows that only 29% of the business expects talent availability to improve in the next five years, dropping from thirty nine percent two years ago in 2023. And only 44% of the organizations expect improvement in their ability to retain talents, a decline from fifty three percent two years ago. It also mentions that the top three priorities for employers to increase talent availability are, firstly, supporting employee health and well-being, provide effective reskilling and upskilling, improving talent progressions and promotion processes. Very likely, you won't be surprised by now that a human centered approach could drive better success in all these areas we mentioned. In this technology driven workspace, the human element of leadership becomes even more critical. As routine tasks are being automated, the ability of a leader to inspire, motivate, and foster collaborations, a skill that AI cannot replicate, will become the key differentiator for high performing teams. Therefore, the shift towards human centric people leadership is not just a trend. It's a strategy imperative driven by the future of work. And this is precisely where Workday provides powerful tools that can equip your leaders with insights and capabilities to adopt a human centric leadership approach. Solutions like Workday Journeys, manager insight hubs, and Pickcoin Employee Voice, these are not just features. They are strategy enablers for fostering a culture of people leadership. Now to bring this to life and show you exactly how these Workday solutions can be leveraged, let me hand it over to Joo Wen, our solution consultant. Joo Wen will provide a brief demo of Workday Journeys Manager Insights Hub and PickOn showcasing how this empower people's entry leadership. Joo Wen, over to you. Hi, everyone. My name is Joo Wen, and I'm a HCM solution consultant of Workday. So in today's session, we'll be talking about our three broad capabilities of Workday, namely Workday Journeys, managers insights hub, and also Workday Pickcoin Employee Voice, and sharing with you how we will be able to empower our managers to become even better people leaders and how they will be able to take a human centric leadership approach. So today, we'll be going through a quick demonstration, and I'll be starting off with the first portion of the demonstration around workday journeys. So workday journeys, you can imagine it like how we will be able to tailor the different types of journeys for our different people in the organization based on the different moments that matter. Moments that matter, for example, your new hire onboarding, or in today's demonstration, we'll be looking at a new manager. So let's say today, I log in on my mobile device as a new manager. So I'm Amelia who comes into Workday, and Workday will be able to automatically identify that I'm going through this moment that I have, which is a transition from an individual contributor to become a manager. So right here, what they actually showcases to me that I have to go through this journey. And you can think of it as a guided approach to help guide our leaders, tell them exactly, as a new manager, what are some of the things that you'll be able to do. So right here, you'll be able to see we can string together the different tasks, the different learning courses, the different types of articles and resources to help our managers so that they'll be able to be, empowered with all the resources they need in order to become an even better manager. So in my example right here, I can see that, at the start, just to get started as a manager, maybe I can go into the op chart to understand my team better. Maybe I wanna be able to find a mentor for myself so that I'll be able to go even better as a leader. Or we could also recommend certain courses to our people leaders for them to be equipped with what they need to become a better manager. Right here, we have also broadcasted to her some articles that might be useful. Maybe some guides on how you will be able to engage our team better and things like that. So this is something that we have in Workday called Workday help, which is our knowledge and case management capability where we'll be able to have all these kinds of articles to be broadcasted to people so that they will be able to have a better understanding of certain information. So right here, you can then imagine all these different steps, all these different journey tasks. These are things that are configurable by organizations on their own, and what I'll do right now is to change my, persona to a HR person who is trying to design the different kinds of journey steps. So right here, what I've done is that I've logged in as a HR person, Logan McNue. So she's a HR partner who wants to be able to design the different types of journeys for the moments that matter for her organization. Out of the box, Workday already delivers various standard templates that you will be able to leverage on to, design your journeys so you don't have to start everything from scratch. You actually already have something that you can work on. So if I like one of these journeys, what I can simply do is to use the template and make changes from there. So if you want to, take a look at this, just now we were looking at this, journey of a transition to a manager. And how I'll be able to make changes to it is really through drag and drop. For example, maybe as part of, additional, checklist that I have, I wanna be able to drag in additional tasks. Maybe I want to, arrange lunch with my employees. So what I'll be able to do is, just go ahead and say, arrange lunch with team. K? So whether it's something that is tracked offline or whether, like, a to do or whether it's a task within Workday, you'll be able to design it accordingly via drag and drop. So in case it's a task for Workday, you can drag it in. If you want to be able to embed some learning courses for your managers to be able to run through, as a as a resource to guide them on how to be a better manager, you can actually drag and drop it in as well. And if you notice, we also have the ability to manage articles within Workday. You can think of it like a repository. Could be your FAQs, could be certain guides that you wanna include into Workday so that from a experience standpoint, whether an employee, whether a manager, they can just come into Workday to get hold of all your resources. And in a similar way as how we were able to easily, curate the journeys for the respective people, we also have a help article workspace, which will be able to allow our HR partners to easily create articles. And the interesting thing about this is that we also have gen AI capabilities to help you to automatically come up with an article, whether it's a FAQ or things of sort so that you'll be able to, create these resources very easily. So just a quick example on this. Let's say today, Logan, she already has a certain, policy file that she has in place. Let's say she has this guide to effective promotions. So I'll be able to upload a certain policy document that I have in PDF, and I could then ask Workday Gen AI capability to configure the article into a certain type of article. For example, right here, I wanna have certain talking points to our manager. Or if I wanna create it as a FAQ, I could simply just choose the options. And what I'll be able to do then is to have, Workday Gen AI capabilities to automatically generate the article, in in the way that you like. And, of course, that's just for reference, and you will be able to go ahead and make changes as and when needed. And one thing to highlight, Workday's AI capabilities is really embedded as part of Workday's foundation. It's not like a separate tool that you have to purchase because we already have AI built in as part of our technology foundation. You do not have to worry about, going to separate screens or making sure that, these technologies talk to each other. These are really part of the same unified platform. Alright. So this is just a quick overview in terms of how, certain configurations can be done very easily so that as a HR partner, I'll be able to spend less time to design the journeys. I'll be able to spend less time to create the articles. And then at the end of the day, I'll be able to always come back to my journey workspace once again to track the progress. So as, my managers, complete the task, we will always be able to come back to the metrics to see and track the completion rates to see how engaged our managers are. Alright? So this, pretty much sums up the first demo scenario related to our Workday journeys. And, beyond the experience of our managers right from the time that they start as a manager, beyond enhancing and guiding them on how to become a manager, the next thing that we wanna be able to empower our managers with is also to give them real time insights into their team so that they will be able to make, better decisions around some of the talent strategies, and, also, they would then be able to engage their team better. So what I'll do next is to change my persona. So I'll come in right now as a manager. So coming back as Abigail, who is a manager, who wants to learn more about her team after she has gone through the new manager journey. So right here, Abigail will be able to access, what we call as the manager's insights hub. And you can imagine the manager's insights hub to be kind of like a one stop shop for managers. So everything they want to know about their team, they will be able to come to Managers' Insights Hub, whether it's around, hiring and staffing, maybe related to performance, related to talent. This helps to summarize some of the key things that a manager might be interested in. And particularly as a people leader, I wanna be able to help my team go. I wanna see where are the opportunities for my team to go. So what Abigail does right now is that she comes ahead to, the performance overview, where she can gain a quick glance in terms of what are some of the latest activities. So, of course, we always have things like notifications and all out of the box. But in addition to that, in case I wanna take that ad hoc approach, take the, active approach to go in and see what's happening to my team, whether they are updating their career goals and stuff like that. I'll be able to come ahead to managers insights hub to take a look at some of these details. So you'll be able to see, for example, if I have any check ins coming up, what are the goals, what's the progress of learning, and stuff like that, this becomes the one stop shop, the one stop page where I can come to to gain the key information. And as all things work there, we always encourage curious clicking. So in case I wanna zoom in to one of my employees, Angela, right here, I could always go ahead to her profile information, in managers insights hub to see what are some of the opportunities that I would like to, highlight to Angela. In this case, in a glance, we'll be able to see some of the key details. For example, around Angela's skills and skills interest. So I could always drill in to understand what are the skill sets that Angela has, what are her skills interest. So just to share, in Workday, we have this concept called skills cloud whereby we provide this whole skills library out of the box, to our customers so that you'll be able to, leverage on it. And then we do one step above it, which is we put in inferences and we apply machine learning to it to be able to study the profile of the employee and then identify based on things such as your history, your job history, your feedback given, the learning courses completed, certifications, etcetera, etcetera. So we use all these different types of sources to then be able to suggest what are some of the skill sets that our employees may have. So with that, this is how we identify the skills that the employees have and also together with skills interest that they are interested in. This is where Workday then takes the initiative to use AI to be able to recommend various opportunities for our employees. So on one side, from a employee standpoint, employees, they will be able to access what we call as a career hub to be able to look at some of these opportunities. But beyond just, showing all this information to our employees, we also want our people leaders to be aware of some of these opportunities that might help our employees to grow. And as such, this is where we can come into the managers insight hub to see what are some of the AI suggested opportunities for our employees. For example, who might be a good mentor, who could help, Angela right here to go in her skills interest areas. Or even in Workday, we have this concept of flex teams. You can think of it like, some people call it agile teams, some people call it gigs. But, basically, what this is about is, small informal teams whereby you have certain task forces that you want to roll out, from an organization perspective. So what we'll be able to do is the opportunity owners can create these flex teams and employees can then, enroll into these, flex teams to be able to participate in some of these task force and it gives them the opportunity to learn and grow as well. So in this case, as a manager, I would definitely want my, employee to be able to grow in the organization so I could actually take a look at what are some of the flex teams out there. And in case there's something that I feel is very relevant for any of my employees, this is where I could actually go ahead and share it with the employee. So here, these are some of the ways whereby we can actually try to engage our team and help them to go by having all these recommendations. So, of course, in addition to, these, other connections, learning, and all that, this will be, various capabilities that we have in order to be able to, help our employees grow and learn in their role. In addition to that, from a performance standpoint, whatever goals that have been set at the start of the year, you always remember. You just need to go into the manager's insights hub, everything in one place. You'll be able to keep track of the goals, make sure that their goals are up to date, and even to the point of, the employee reviews when the performance appraisals kick off. You'll be able to also manage your various evaluations right from this single stop page. So some of the things that we have done, in recent years as well is, we have developed a lot of, AI related capabilities. And just now, we have shown one example of the Gen AI capability, when I talk about, the managers insights hub where we have the different recommendations that's also based on AI. And in addition to that, what we also realize is that sometimes there's a lot of information, but managers find it difficult to plug and play from everywhere to be able to come up with conversations. So as such, what we have done is to, come up with this capability to be able to generate talent highlights. And what you can then imagine is that because AI is embedded as part of our technology, we will be able to, in real time, pull out the different types of sources. So, for example, from my job profile information, from performance review information, goals, feedback, etcetera. So we pull information from all these different sources to generate it as a talent highlight for employees. So this is where Workday will then help to summarize what are some of the strengths of our employees, what are some of the opportunities for them to grow so that managers will be able to have a more guided approach to have career conversations with your employees. Right? And, definitely, this is something that we are constantly developing on. So, over time, you will also see more and more capabilities related to the managers insights hub. Okay. So, managers insight hub, again, is where we will be able to, have a view, of our employees, our team members in the organization. And after understanding it on a broad level, some of these key insights, I think one other thing that is really critical is about engaging our people and making sure that they are happy and staying within the organization. So in Workday, we also have this active listening solution, which we call it as Workday p con employee voice. And the idea is that we wanna be able to have a continuous listening approach rather than doing a survey once every year or once every, once every, half a year or so. We wanna do it in a more continuous approach because in a continuous listening approach, we'll be able to react to any of this feedback that was given by our employees. And what then happens is that as we roll out this frequent, engagement surveys to our employees, we will be able to, in real time, generate real time insights so that the managers will be able to take a look at some of these areas and identify if there are certain gaps in terms of the engagement score of our employees. So right here in the grants, as, Amelia comes into Workday, she'll be able to take a look and see that the engagement score is currently at 6.5, which to me doesn't seem to be too great. So what she'll be able to do then is to go ahead into, the manager's dashboard. Alright? And this will allow her to then drill in more deeply into some of the key engagement matrices that she's interested in. So we have known that the engagement score right now is at 6.5. And common question is, is 6.5 good? Is it bad? How does it stand in terms of a benchmark perspective? So with Deepakon employee voice, what we do is to provide you with a benchmark. And this is based on industry trends that we have collected. And in fact, beyond just benchmark, we call it a true benchmark. Because what we also realize is when we talk about benchmark, there are some attributes that may, skew the, numbers. For example, people tend to be more engaged when they just join an organization compared to people who have been in the organization for a longer time. So to make sure that we are having a fair kind of comparison, what we do is we use this benchmark and we apply various adjustments, for example, tenure, for example, location, gender, etcetera, so that it becomes a more fair kind of benchmark that we are looking at. So looking at this, seems like, Amelia is not doing too well. She's at the bottom, 5%, and there's room for improvement, which makes her want to be able to drill in further to understand how can she further increase the engagement score of her team. What we will also be able to then look at is to view it over a time period because engagement scores, might be something that takes time to be improved. So it could be that we are already putting some measures in place. We are seeing a increasing trend, and we want to have that to be, shown to our people leaders as well. So in the glance, I'll be able to see, is it a a case where my, engagement score is actually going up? Because in this case, even though it's low, we can see the trend of it going upwards, which means maybe some of the measures that I put in place, they are actually effective. It just takes a little more time. So if all this, overview insights, this brings Amelia as a people leader to want to drill in further. And what will be able to do is to help me to narrow down, to know which are the focus areas that I should focus on because there are so many things that I can do to increase the engagement score. But where do I start from? So right here, automatically, what Workday Pick n Employed Voice does is that you'll be able to study the different, responses from our employees and tell us, based on the scores, which should be the recommended focus areas. And we always believe in transparency. So at any point of time, if you wanna understand, oh, why was this recommended? We can always drill in to understand why this was being, shared and make decisions around it. So right here, I can see that, these three areas, because of how our employees have responded to questions related to these topics, it seems like, these are areas that I should focus on. So to make it an action item, to make it actionable, we could always set it as a focus area so that I could create it as a action plan for myself. And also, if I want to, I can share it with the team so that they will know what we are trying to do to make it even better. So these are just some of the areas that we have. And other than looking at areas of improvement, we always believe that we also wanna know what we are doing well. We wanna focus on the strengths as well because these are things that I wanna continue doing. So we will also highlight, to the people leaders which are the areas that, people have waited, positively on and what are the things that we should continue doing. So this helps us to take that approach whereby we can then see which are the topics, which are the areas that I should focus on. And then it brings us to the second, portion, which is which is the segment of employees that I should be focusing on. For example, right here, I can see that, some of these, segments of employees, maybe, people reporting to a certain manager, maybe people of a certain job grade, people in a certain department, people of a certain tenure. These are the groups of people who are less engaged. So this helps us to automatically break it down into this level so that we know who are the people that we should be targeting at. And, in fact, what I could do is also to look at it from a heat map perspective. So it makes it even more visual. It makes it easy for me to identify. And right here, I can see that, let's say, people in a director level, they seem to be, disengaged, and I wanna find out why. So, again, in Workday, we always encourage you to click and find out more. So here is where I'll be able to drill in. Directors seem to have a low engagement score of 3.9. And in the same way where we could see which are the areas of focus as a whole, division or as a whole department, we could also drill in in this case for a respective segment. But, of course, you don't have to worry about, confidentiality and things like that. We have put in thresholds in place to make sure that we have sufficient, data points before we review some of these matrices. So right here is where I'll be able to see, some of this information based on the areas that I should zoom into and focus on. And beyond quantitative insights, we also want to look at qualitative insights because those are typically where we can find additional information. Those are typically where information are more actionable. So many times, we forget about the comments that were put in from our employees. And if there were comments coming in, sometimes the common challenge is that there are so many feedback, that's open ended, that it makes a manager very hard to filter through, all these comments. So, again, what Workday then does is that we have embedded AI into this to be able to automatically group our comments into topics and also to showcase and summarize to you some of the common comments. So for example right here, some of these, things have been highlighted. For example, it seems like there is an issue related to management support because there were 31 comments that had led to an average low score of 4.2. And some examples of comments included, that the manager wasn't in touch, doesn't understand us, doesn't support us, etcetera etcetera. So this is definitely something that, as a people leader, I want to be able to understand more about and take action. So I would be able to then go in, which is where they will be able to then give that summary view of what, are the common, topics or or the common, comments that are coming in as a summary. And the other thing is very often when we do employee surveys, it becomes a one way thing where employee gives survey, but they don't know whether the manager or the leader is taking any action on it. So to prevent this from happening, what would they pick on employee voice task is that we take this two way approach. So as employees put in their feedback, the manager will be able to acknowledge it or even to trigger a conversation, with the employee to find out more. For example, right here, someone, indicated that, the manager, doesn't really have, one on ones with me. And you'll notice that I can't tell who is this employee because we have ensured that confidentiality is maintained. So to encourage people to put in feedback, honest feedback, we wanna make sure that we can maintain the confidentiality. So here, I don't know who is it, but what I could do is to say acknowledge it so that the employee knows that I've read it and I'm doing something about it. And at the same time, I could even start a confidential one on one, discussion with the employee. To highlight, please reach out to me if you wish to have a chat. I'm open. Okay. So you could actually have this kind of two way conversations so the employees will feel heard. And this is one of the things that a people leader will be able to do to be able to really, make their employees feel heard and take, the the initiative to be able to, identify which are the areas that you can help to improve the employees' engagement accordingly. Alright. So this is really a very quick overview in terms of some of the key, capabilities within, Workday that will be able to help, a manager become a people leader who is really engaging the team and takes a human centric leadership approach. And, with that, I'll just end off this presentation, and, feel free to reach out to, the Workday team in case you have any additional questions or in case you wish to dive into, more details for any of these topics. Thank you.