Workday [Nasdaq:Wday]

The nature of work is rapidly changing. Driven by the momentum of smarter connectivity and cognitive technologies on the one side and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (as the most recent catalyst) on the other, the structure of the traditional workforce is quickly taking a new shape.

The changing nature of work is, in turn, adding pressure on existing employers’ compensation strategies and programs. More often than not, today, many organizations are stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of compensation reviews, reforms, and rollouts. Industry experts are of the opinion that to take bold action in the face of uncertain times, organizations should look beyond compensation as a “spot market” for talent acquisition and retention. Instead, they should start viewing it as a lever to bring about the bigger shifts in today’s work environment, including modifying the way work is done, attending to the evolving expectations of the workforce and expanding the role of organizations as they become social enterprises. To do this effectively, organizations must focus on a core set of principles that will enable them to craft compensation strategies designed to stand the test of time in the new world of work.

Enter Workday [NASDAQ:WDAY].

The company believes that managing workers’ compensation efficiently can indicate the difference between hitting or missing an organization’s business objectives. From attracting the right resources to fulfilling employees’ needs based on a business’s ‘bigger picture’ (and not simply performance), the Workday Compensation management solution offers all the tools for helping businesses make ideal decisions across their organization.

Not only this, but today, the company is also a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance, HR, and planning that delivers human capital management and analytics applications to the world’s largest companies, educational institutions, and government agencies.

Shaking Up the World of Enterprise Software since 2005

On a fine evening of February 2005, software visionaries Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield met at a diner in California and seeded an idea to form a startup that would revolutionize the enterprise software market. A little less than two years later, they officially inaugurated their Workday with their Human Capital Management (HCM) solution. Within close quarters, they also launched the beta release of their Financial Management solution with an entirely new model for helping companies seamlessly manage revenue, resources, and financial accounting. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, with more than 1,000 clients and close to 5,000 employees worldwide, Workday has become a household name in the enterprise software landscape.

From the very first day, Workday was driven to solve the core challenges of the enterprise software industry by probing the most pertinent questions: Why is enterprise software so hard to use? What do businesses need to support change? And how can we provide people more time for what really matters? And this curiosity continuously led them to the right answers, which helped them create new enterprise software that did right by employers, employees, customers, and the world. And they haven’t stopped since.

Designed for performance, ease of use, and insight, Workday Compensation fosters greater collaboration among administrators for conducting employee evaluations and making compensation adjustments

To this day, Workday operates very closely and collaboratively with clients to understand their precise needs and business objectives. Then, Workday innovates to its fullest potential to give businesses the technology they desire to reach their goals. “With the conjoined effort, we can shape the future of work” is the motto that Workday lives by.

The Bee’s Knees for Modernizing Workers’ Compensation Management

Designed for performance, ease of use, and insight, Workday Compensation fosters greater collaboration among administrators for conducting employee evaluations and making compensation adjustments.

The solution’s configurable grid functions as an instinctive worksheet for compensation administrators and managers. For instance, administrators can create award budgets and distribute budget pools to managers so they can reward their teams. These pools can be set up for merit and include additional changes for promotions, in addition to bonuses and stock. Each of these compensation components can take advantage of pay-for-performance components, either in the allocation of an award or in the creation of a pool. Appropriate, contextual information, such as market survey information, talent information, and also virtually any information in Workday, can be provided at the point of action to ensure that compensation decisions can be data-driven. Additionally, with built-in logic and custom calculations, administrators can process compensation-related events, including new hires, transfers, promotions, and terminations via automated rules and eliminate manual intervention commonly connected with compensation solutions. To top it off, the wise panel function on the grid can be configured to show certain employee attributes, giving managers additional details to make more informed decisions.

In a nutshell, Workday Compensation enables administrators to define compensation packages, plans, programs, and processes using real-time data throughout the Workday suite of solutions, helping a company turn insights into actions. Moreover, with Workday’s highly configurable global system today, an organization can use flexible location profiles and currency options to configure compensation for their employees around the globe without breaking a sweat.

Navigating the New Normal

To say that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every aspect of life—how we live, work, and interact—might be an understatement today. Workday, as a company that is progressively navigating the new normal itself, is also committed to supporting its clients to steer through the challenging times. “We’re here to do whatever it takes to see you through these unprecedented events,” says Bhusri, co-founder, co-CEO, and chairman of Workday.

In that pursuit, the company has put a guide to show how their products and solutions can help an organization confidently chart their course toward ensuring the health, safety, and wellbeing of their workforce. For example, by combining workforce data with timely external health, virus, or vaccine management data on Workday solutions, an organization can effectively monitor their workers’ sentiments, understand their challenges in returning back to work, and ultimately provide strategic insights to bring people back together in the safest way possible. This is but one of the instances; the company is similarly leading the charge of several strategic changes in workers’ compensation management as well. Concluding in the words of Workday’s leadership team, “As you adapt to a new normal, you need to be able to adjust your processes, implement policies, train your people, and create new compensation programs quickly. Workday can help you pivot, so you’re ready to meet new demands—from your workers and the business.”