By Steve Dunne, EMEA Staff Writer
I spoke to Workday Co-President and CFO, Robynne Sisco*, who shared her insights on why the finance and IT partnership is more crucial than ever, and how to make collaboration work.
*This article was written and published before 1st February 2022 when Robynne Sisco transitioned from her dual role to focus solely on her position as Co-President, Workday.
As CFO, you’ve seen your finance team shift to a remote model during the pandemic. How important has your relationship with IT been during that process, and what have been the main technology and cultural challenges?
Not only important, but critical. It would be impossible to overstate how important the open and transparent relationship I have with our CIO, Sheri Rhodes, has been during this global crisis.
During the pandemic, many companies have discovered that the legacy tools and processes they had were not going to work in this new world. Fortunately, we didn’t have that challenge. If I think about it from a technology perspective, the pandemic has certainly led to increased finance automation, as companies dialled back hiring but still needed finance to support the business. Workday’s growth didn’t suddenly stop, and that meant we had to drive greater efficiencies and look for more opportunities to automate finance processes.
If you look at it culturally, I think one of the challenges has been adjusting to working from home and having to be more deliberate about our interactions. Normally, in the office, you can just grab someone from IT or from the Workday on Workday (WoW) team and have on-the-fly discussions. Now everything has to be more planned out and deliberate, so to some extent you lose those collaborative hallway conversations. That said, Zoom and other digital tools play a huge role in keeping us connected with our IT colleagues.
You have spoken about the importance of the CFO leading on culture and not just numbers. How should CFOs think about their relationship with the CIO and the impact they can have together on company culture?
I think the CFO/CIO relationship is an increasingly important partnership because the decisions we make impact our number one core value – our people – and that changes the way we make those decisions. For example, if we’re looking for a collaboration tool that all employees are going to use, cost is not our number one priority. It becomes a question of which tool has the best user experience to help people be the most efficient they can be. That’s how you impact culture if your employees are your number one core value.
Sheri and I meet regularly to align on the key challenges and the role of technology across the organisation. This partnership is key because we make a lot of decisions that impact the entire organisation, not just the finance and IT functions. We need to keep in mind our priorities and align those with our values to make sure we’re making the right decisions for the business.
CIOs can help CFOs align technology investments with corporate strategies, values and objectives.
In terms of understanding employee sentiment, how important has the ability to survey the employee base become since the pandemic?
Hugely important is the simple answer. I pay a lot of attention to these surveys because it gives the employees a voice. I used to run into people in the hallway or stop by their desks, which would give me a sense for how they were feeling. But we lost most of that because of the pandemic and you can only get so much sentiment from a video call, so tools like Workday Peakon Employee Voice are vital in providing us with these insights. We’re learning so much about how people are feeling and what the issues are that I need to proactively address before they turn into a significant issue that might impact attrition. I know exactly what the top concerns are for my entire organisation. When you get really big, and then suddenly you’re remote, that’s a hard thing to do.
From a C-suite perspective, collaboration is about leaning in with our business counterparts to make sure we’re focused on the right problems, processes and go-forward strategies.
I think we’ve evolved to the point where both CIOs and CFOs agree that digital change is no longer an open question, but an imperative. How do you navigate that line between investing in innovation versus balancing the books, particularly given the challenges of the pandemic?
I think for organisations that are taking on huge levels of transformation, it’s about aligning IT investment with strategic growth plans. It’s not about picking one system in isolation, but understanding how that tool plays into the bigger picture of what the business is trying to achieve.
When I think of some of the great businesses that we have worked with to help transform their finance and HR functions, the ones who have the most success are those who choose technology because it aligns with their overall vision and the values they are trying to deliver on. As I said earlier, in some instances, cost is not the number one priority; it’s more about finding technology that supports a broader vision and culture.
Agility is a term that continues to dominate the business agenda. How can finance and IT leaders remain aligned on their goals, on innovation and the future, when things evolve at such an incredible pace?
This is probably one of the greatest areas of collaboration and where leading companies who have already embraced digital change have a substantial head start over their peers. CIOs can help CFOs align technology investments with corporate strategies, values and objectives. Similarly, CFOs can help CIOs build out the business case and ROI justification for these investments. I don’t believe that any company can innovate and exercise prudent financial discipline without this relationship working effectively. How that works in practice I think requires a good working relationship that’s based on trust, transparency and a shared consensus between the CFO and CIO on values and objectives. There’s no point being agile if you’re both moving in different directions.
We’ve talked a lot in the past about CIO/CFO collaboration, but can you give us some examples of how that has worked in practice?
In the case of the onset of COVID-19, when things were changing rapidly, we had to embrace our global crisis management processes, which required stakeholders from across the entire organisation. Fortunately we had a playbook and a framework to operate against, which helped our in-house experts and our executives come together and focus on the right things, such as closing our quarter virtually and keeping employees informed about COVID-19.
While I had previously worked closely with our CIO, this situation brought us closer. Together, we had to make tough prioritisation decisions, and those conversations are ongoing, always centring us on our biggest priorities. For example, we gave employees a stipend for unforeseen costs during the pandemic. This required real high-speed collaboration across finance, HR and IT because time really was of the essence.
From a C-suite perspective, collaboration is about leaning in with our business counterparts to make sure you’re all focused on the right problems, processes and go-forward strategies. We support these goals by embracing an agile, lean startup culture that moves swiftly. The one indisputable way to truly know your customers is to be your own customer. Internally we use our own products to run our business, which takes a very strong partnership between finance and IT. It also allows us to share best practices and ideas with our customers around the globe.
What advice would you give to technology and finance leaders on building a healthy, collaborative relationship?
I think this goes back to aligning on values and each side being willing to be flexible as long as it ladders up to those bigger priorities. For example, if we both agree that the system they want is the right solution but needs more budget, I would want finance to support that. I shouldn’t stand firm or be the roadblock. You have to be flexible on budget, and be willing to make difficult trade-offs. At the same time, IT needs to be flexible too. Can they adjust their time frame or the resources they have allocated to get things done faster? Like the stipend example I gave earlier, collaboration is a two-way street, where everyone has to jump in and get the job done.
For organisations that are taking on huge levels of transformation, it’s about aligning IT investment with strategic growth plans.
