*How to spearhead transformative change*
By Patrick Evenden, EMEA Staff Writer
At Workday Elevate London, five leaders shared how their organisations are thriving through uncertainty, winning talent and unleashing the power of AI.
While speaking with several CIOs earlier this year, Patrick Blair, President of Global Sales, Workday, noticed an interesting thread in the conversation. The C-suite leaders all described business challenges in their different industries, but while the problems varied, their solutions were strikingly similar. They were all moving away from multiple, on-premises solutions and toward a cloud-native enterprise management platform. They were all innovating and transforming.
“We can all learn from each other. We can all innovate together,” Blair said during his keynote speech at Workday Elevate London. At the event, leaders from five Workday customers came together to share their insights into spearheading transformation. Three major themes emerged.
Uncertainty is a double-edged sword: it provides us with challenges but also opportunities.
1. Thriving through uncertainty and change
Representing the financial services, fintech, insurance, professional services and supermarket industries, the panellists all described an uncertain, rapidly changing business environment. Contributing factors ranged from agitated financial markets, to extreme weather events, to rising costs stemming from inflationary and supply chain pressures.
But digital transformations are providing their organisations with the resilience not only to adapt to change, but to stay ahead of it. “Uncertainty is a double-edged sword: it provides us with challenges but also opportunities,” said Stuart Collins, CFO, BDO UK.
Yes, we're in the process.
No, but we're considering it.
No, and we have no plans to do so.
We've already made the transition.
In early 2020, leaders at BDO UK, an accountancy and business advisory firm, struggled to create their annual budget amidst seismic upheavals. The organisation leveraged Workday Adaptive Planning to shift from annual budgeting to a more agile, quarterly forecasting model. “Workday Adaptive Planning keeps us very up to date with what is happening and what is forward-looking,” Collins said.
For Asda, one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains, change has entailed both macroeconomic and organisational shifts. Following its 2021 sale by Walmart, Asda has been replacing various systems and vendors with the Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) platform. Asda’s previous manual processes wouldn’t work for business as usual, much less during times of change. But with a modern, cloud-native platform, Asda can communicate with colleagues and customers more quickly and it now has “better insight and data to help us make decisions,” said Karen Bennett, Senior Director for HR Transformation, Asda.
For insurer NFU Mutual, transformation has involved eliminating clunky spreadsheets and databases, which in some cases only a few employees understood, instead adopting “an evergreen cloud solution,” said Nigel Bryan, Head of Financial Control, NFU Mutual. With Workday Prism Analytics and Workday Accounting Centre, NFU Mutual have transformed their finance systems and processes and gained access to granular, analysis-enabling data.
Checkout.com, a payment service provider, has likewise found that Workday Prism Analytics and Workday Accounting Centre “have enabled us to get the most out of people, processes and systems,” said Sam Allen, Finance Transformation Director, Checkout.com. Instead of employees manually extracting data from disparate systems, Workday Financial Management has automated those processes – saving costs while also providing “the audit trails that auditors and accountants love,” Allen said.
Change is constant, how we equip our leaders with tools and skills to embrace uncertainty and change will be critical to how well we come out the other side of any change.
2. Securing top talent
Attracting and retaining top talent has become increasingly tricky amidst new and shifting ways of working. “This is something we are still getting our heads around,” Collins said.
The Financial Ombudsman Service leveraged the Workday HCM platform to manage a spike in requests for flexibility in when and where their employees work – revealing that most of their people’s jobs could be done remotely. Their shift towards remote work has enabled the organisation to significantly expand their candidate pool by broadening their recruitment approach from local to national.
Both Asda and BDO UK now empower employees to determine where they work. “Some people work brilliantly at home. Some people need the office environment. As long as we get the right output, you take accountability and choose,” Bennett said.
Yet the swing toward remote and hybrid work could have unintended consequences for company culture. “What we missed were the opportunities for collaboration,” Bennett said of remote work. Similarly, Collins of BDO UK said that despite all the advantages of hybrid – such as gaining scheduling flexibility and saving commute time – he noticed “a loss of productivity that comes from a team approach.” And Nicole Wadham, CIO, Financial Ombudsman Service, added, “I predict a loss of the stickiness of teams, so people will be a little more ready to churn.”
“Business is fundamentally about relationships,” Bryan said. Hybrid works because it involves interactions among colleagues who already have established relationships, according to Bryan. How will the hybrid workplace fare among employees who don’t know each other well? That’s an open question.
Workday has enabled us to get the most out of people, processes and systems.
3. Unleashing the power of AI and ML
AI and ML will continue to have a dramatic impact on business – if not a wholly foreseeable one, the panellists agreed. “AI is going to be big for the insurance industry because insurance is fundamentally about data and AI is about a lot of data,” said Bryan of NFU Mutual. He offered the example of real-time premiums. For instance, AI could provide drivers with less and more risky routes, then indicate a higher premium if the drivers take the riskier journey.
While AI and ML have automated Checkout.com’s business processes, “I think AI and robotics will do things we haven’t even thought of asking,” Allen said. Collins echoed that: “We’re just scratching the surface of what these new tools can do.”
As the panellists considered AI, the conversation circled back to where it started: change and uncertainty. “Change is constant,” Bennett said. “How we equip our leaders with tools and skills to embrace uncertainty and change will be critical to how well we come out the other side of any change.”
It will revolutionise our operations and offerings.
It will bring moderate changes and improvements.
It's still too early to tell.
We don't see significant impact in the foreseeable future.
