Workday Reviews

I used Workday mainly for day-to-day operations, particularly on the functional side. In Africa, I played a central role during its implementation, training HR business partners on how to use it. After moving to Canada eight years ago, my first job here also involved Workday implementation.

The most helpful Workday features for our HR processes were in HCM, particularly in areas like talent, compensation, benefits, and learning.

One area that could be improved with Workday is the analytics side. Additionally, they could keep improving with AI.

I have been using Workday since 2011.

I would rate Workday's stability as an eight out of ten. Our global company values customization for each country's needs, and Workday has been good at accommodating these variations.

I would rate the scalability of Workday as an eight out of ten. We have approximately 15,000 end users of the solution at our company.

I would rate Workday's tech support as a nine out of ten. The community support, webinars, and office hours are really helpful when we have questions or need assistance. The strong community and willingness to help make it great for support.

Positive

Workday has positively impacted our return on investment by streamlining processes and providing access to valuable information. We continue to use Workday because we are satisfied with the product.

I would definitely recommend Workday to other organizations. I have been satisfied with it since using it in Africa and even sought out a Workday-related job when I moved to North America. It is becoming very stable and has a good reputation here.

HR management tools are evolving to include AI and become more agile. Workday stands out by regularly updating its services and listening to customer feedback through its community platform.

Overall, I would rate Workday as a nine out of ten.

If you're searching for a comprehensive HR solution that centralizes all of your personnel information, then Workday is definitely worth considering. It offers a wide range of features and integrations that can be incorporated into the system.

In terms of customization, while it may not be fully customizable, you can configure the features based on the foundation that Workday offers. This allows you to take the basic features and tailor them to the specific needs of your company or business. It provides a lot of configuration flexibility.

It's tough to pinpoint specific areas that need improvement because Workday is constantly evolving and listening to customer feedback. They have a system in place called brainstorming, where customers can raise concerns and suggestions for improvement. Through this process, Workday is able to gather feedback from multiple customers and develop solutions to address issues. If there are any areas that we find challenging or would like to see enhanced, we raise a brainstorm and work with other customers to bring it to Workday's attention.

Workday has recently made some enhancements that have helped in various areas. One thing that comes to mind is the ability to customize branding and imagery. Currently, you can brand the platform with your company logo, but when it comes to specific features or solutions, they still retain control over the images used. It would be great if we had the ability to alter those images, as different countries may have different preferences for imagery. We should have more control over the imagery used within the platform.

One potential feature that could be added is the ability to streamline business processes through quick tips and guided tours. This would allow for a smoother and more guided experience for colleagues as they navigate through different processes and steps. It would be similar to a guidance system or a step-by-step tutorial that could be added after the business process to guide users through it.

I have been using Workday for approximately nine years.

Workday is reliable. Based on the recent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that have been released, the uptime for the platform is currently at an impressive 97 percent.

Workday is one of the best platforms available. It is scalable. 

If you look at Workday against its competitors, and the opportunities on an HCM platform or system that is offered by the competitors, it is worth it to choose Workday.

We have approximately 47,000 full-time and contingent workers using the solution.

I rate the scalability of Workday a nine out of ten.

I have not used another solution that was similar to Workday.

The initial setup of Workday is not difficult. Workday provides a blank canvas for you to work with, but they also give you guidance and tools to help you get started. As you progress and bring a team with skills on board, you can then build upon the initial setup. Overall, the setup process is complex.

The size of my team we have for maintenance is approximately 20 members, not including our reporting team. However, even the reporting team is in-house and part of our organization. In total, we have approximately 25 individuals.

I rate Workday a nine out of ten.

We use Workday for all our employee-related information. It is a central hub where we can access pay slips, tax-related information, tax automation, and tax rules. Additionally, it manages employee hiring processes and other HR functions. It's a one-stop solution where employees can find everything about their profile, work experience, and associated technologies.

Workday has several helpful features. It has categorized payroll processes into sections, such as CTC separation and pay slips. It also provides detailed information on promotions and salary hikes, showing changes from the previous year to the current year. This includes a clear view of the new CTC and the monthly paycheck breakdown.

One notable feature in Workday that enhances financial reporting is the blueprint report. This report compiles all relevant historical data and generates a dashboard. Based on the available information, it offers insights into productivity.

Additional visibility features would be beneficial if the tool placed more options prominently on the main page instead of drilling down into specific categories. The first phase displays your profile, team information, current updates, pending tasks, etc. However, it would be good to move these navigation options to the top of the page instead of at the bottom.

For those starting with Workday, understand that while the AI features are useful, they can sometimes be limiting. If you encounter issues, you might need to raise a support ticket and wait for a response, which could take up to 24 hours.

Alerts could be beneficial, especially for upcoming tasks or deadlines. If these alerts are communicated via email, they should remain visible to remind users of impending due dates. 

The tool's stability is good. 

The solution's scalability is good. My company has 15,000 users. 

The tool's deployment is straightforward overall. We usually don't need additional help to navigate it. However, there are instances where we struggle to find specific paths. For example, someone who wants to exit the organization might have difficulty locating the exact process or path.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. It is an overall good tool. 

Our primary use case for Workday – as we had it integrated into the organization as an HRIS – is as something for the organization to run off of.

Before Workday, we did everything manually and were working from within a few systems. This solution has helped us centralize the whole organization. Also, considering the pandemic, we needed everyone to work together and be efficient as everyone was working remotely.

I think that the key component here is to have everything centralized and that is most valuable for me. The reason this feature is valuable is that when you're working with people in different geographic regions or with those who may or may not be in the office, this solution helps in getting everything organized.

My opinion is that this solution can improve the overall integrations and add more automation. I think anything that could be on a self-serve basis would work quite well.

I have been using Workday for about one year.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the technical support of this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Neutral

I would say that we have definitely seen a return on investment.

This solution is deployed on the cloud for our company.

When it comes to other people looking into this solution, I would advise looking at your work order and the types of things you need. There are tons of different applications out there and it's all about finding the one that's best for you and that fits the most to your organization's needs.

I would rate Workday as a solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

We only used Workday for the APS or the time acquisition model. Only about 30 people used the solution at the bank. 

Workday is highly intuitive from a customer experience perspective. It was effortless for us to understand what to do even though we didn't have any related training. It was easy to use without guidance.

I'm not sure they have added this feature yet, but there should be a cellphone version, so we do not need to do it on a laptop. I'd like to log in on a cellphone and have the same features. I'm not sure if that is already available or if it's on the roadmap, but that would be a great feature.

We used Workday when I was working at a bank in my previous role. Currently, I am working at a a local airline in Mexico that doesn't have a CRM. I used Workday for about a year and a half. 

Workday is stable.

It was already deployed when I joined the company, but the people involved in the deployment process say it is scalable. 

I rate Workday support eight out of 10. I only required assistance from Workday a couple of times, but they responded promptly every time. 

Positive

Setting up Workday is straightforward.

I rate Workday eight out of 10. We did not require training to use Workday, but they provide a lot of supporting material that's useful to help everyone embrace the solution. In my experience, there are always some people who are hesitant to work with a solution like this. 

The materials are a good way to overcome because you can show them the benefits they would get by embracing this new way of working. Highlight some facts and data about the benefits they would get by implementing a solution like this.

We primarily use the solution as part of our hospital administration.

The solution really is so simple to use for the end-user.

If you're one of those end-users that need reports, it will create it for you on the fly. The search engine for creating reports is so of-the-moment. I've not found that any place else - and I have either vetted or worked with the top 150 of the HRS platforms out there. 

The report creation just makes sense. It's AI-driven, which some of these older programs that are out there are not yet. With AI, it's continuously building, so that the more you use it, the more it becomes comfortable with who you are. Essentially, in the case of a hospital, it's 9,000 different users over seven campuses, and those are individual users. They're not being treated as part of all the nurses, as it depends on how they use it. 

The mobile platform works very well. It's very seamless. It is very self-serving, as the op center of the hospital was shut down early, several months early. Therefore, the clients, if you will - in this instance, the doctors and nurses, and so forth, and the other employees - found the mobile app to be very, very comfortable and very easy to go back and forth on. It even gives you a mini screenshot of where you were before, kind of like you do with TV. And that was helpful. It made it so that you didn't have to go in and out all the time. It would just take you on a journey that was self-created. 

The solution is going faster and smoother than ever. It's really working well.

We used the solution alongside Epic briefly. Epic was used as a training platform. I can't really speak to the process, however, it's my understanding that its training is even better than Workday's.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The seven hospitals weren't really used to talking to each other previously and now they're going to have to. It's helping to integrate them all together.

The solution was very good at reconfiguration and customization of their software. It helped us to meet federal regulations.

The cost of Workday is certainly not inexpensive. It's very pricey.

If your data is not very clean, it does make for a bit of a mess. It was part of the reason why we had to bring Epic in. 

I have found, within the hospital experience, that Workday's overall contribution to making healthcare better was lacking. Without a doubt, COVID has forced companies to be more responsive to the needs, and so forth, within a hospital system, healthcare, whatever. And as such, within a matter of months, the technology will exist that all we'll need is a smartphone to do enterprise-level type of work. You will no longer need a tablet, for example. You will no longer need a PC as official intelligence would have taken over. 

They're a leader in the market. I just wish the price would come down and they will continue to work really hard on making AI what it could be for them.

They've got to continue to grow, as they can get behind very, very quickly in the AI space. As quickly as AI is able to interpret what you now want as fast as the market's going to change. They need to stay on top of it, or they will get left behind.

I probably used the solution in and out of either the projects I've been managing; or as a part of my consulting work, or as a part of a direct-hire employment situation. I would say I've used the solution since 2013. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. We fixed everything in the very beginning. There were some older Microsoft platforms in those hospitals. One of them went back to Windows 2000. Nonetheless, those had to be brought in and upgraded first, to make the portfolio work across everything, all channels. The challenge was the older process systems that were already in place. 

The scalability is amazing. If you do your homework, you take care of making sure your data is clean and that you've got key messengers and all that change management, certainly being very agile in this process, as it just makes things easier. 

It integrates well too, which helps you expand. We'll be using Salesforce and Google will be our search engine. Google is offering $100,000 worth of advertising on their platform for free. Once we get up and going, and that's more of recruiting, advertising, obviously, solicitation of funds. Then, we're just nailing down whether or not Salesforce and PowerSchool are going to integrate well together, doing exactly what we need and not off-the-shelf. The big difference is going on in the background. And they're working very hard on it.

Within the hospital, we have 9,000 users on the solution.

Technical support was a critical part for us. They come in late with reconfiguration in order to meet federal guidelines. The hospital was state-mandated and had a lot of state-mandated requirements. Technical support really was amazing at coming in and customizing and reconfiguring the software to get the necessary federal funds. 

They were extremely helpful and responsive. I'd rate them nine and a half out of ten overall.

The client had actually used ADP. From a software point of view, ADP was originally a loan/bookkeeping company/accountancy up in New York. That's how they started. It just grew, grew and grew and grew like Microsoft and actually had Microsoft as a layer on it. They began to offer brokerage services, and then HR as well. It wasn't a part of their original mandate. 

There was a push to move to something bigger, faster, and more AI-driven.

ADP also owns the data. That's part of the cost to move away from it and that will cost you a minimum of $50,000, no matter what size company you are. That is to just retrieve your own data about your own people from them.

The initial setup is very straightforward. That’s the amazing thing about it. Epic is able to explain to you the processes of getting what you need. It's AI-driven, and once you get on there are certain templates necessary that you've got to have. You have got to go in and reregister yourself, however, it's already pulled all the information.

For us, on the hospital project, there was a whole lot of front-end work that had to be done. However, that's why we wanted the solution - to tie all this together and have it centralized, at least the data processing and data mining aspects.

The smartest thing the hospital did is they rolled everything out by business unit. They made sure that each campus was well integrated and then there was a final assimilation. That was smart on their part, as opposed to saying, “All the nurses have this now, and all the doctors have this, all the ERs can work on it now.”

The solution is pricey. However, the cost of implementation is probably half of what I have been used to in my 20 years of doing this project work. The cost has come down, which they do to be more competitive, obviously. 

I found the opportunity with their technicians to do it almost an about-face between public and private websites in the cloud I just found that amazing. It was almost like it predicted what's going to happen. Of course, the project started a good six months before COVID actually hit, however, it was impressive, they were ready to handle their client's needs well before their clients knew they'd need it.

I looked at a lot of different options. There are 850 different HRS EOP platforms in the United States right now. It took me two years to narrow it down to 150, and then from there really looked at 15. I presented those to the executive board and we further narrowed it down to six.

We're a partner with Workday.

An organization considering the solution needs to first organize its requirements. That was the hardest part for us. That was the part that had to be fleshed out by my executives as to what we really wanted. That took a long time, I'm not going to kid you. However, it's a very important part of the process - especially due to the fact that there are so many solutions to choose from and you really need to understand what you need in order to get to which solution is best suited.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use Workday for recording payroll in the USA.

The most valuable feature of Workday is the ease of use which is overall user-friendly.

Workday could improve by adding other features, such as messaging to candidates and other recruiting capabilities that other new-age solutions have.

I have been using Workday for approximately two years.

There were not many issues with the stability of the solution.

I rate the stability of Workday a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

Our entire workforce of approximately 100,000 people is using the solution.

I rate the scalability of Workday a ten out of ten.

The support is excellent.

I rate the support from Workday a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of Workday is simple.

I rate the initial setup of Workday an eight out of ten.

There is no maintenance required for Workday.

I would advise others to use the solution. It is a holistic tool that does not only focus on candidate experience but on team member experience, it is an end-to-end solution.

I rate Workday a ten out of ten.

I am a consultant. I configure and consult with clients who ask me about solutions, how to use products, how to help them to implement the solutions, how to improve the deployment and performance, and how to give them the solutions they need. Workday is one of the better solutions we can provide.

Workday gives us another option for providing solutions to our clients that they need for managing and improving their business practices.

The feature I think that is the most attractive is the security. But there are other features that are valuable as well, such as the BP (Business Processes) — like the social security business processes — the HCM (Human Capital Management) modeling component, Absence (for monitoring time and attendance), Payroll (for payroll processing), Financial Management (core financial management) and the Benefits module (self service employee benefits management). All of those take care of essential business needs.

In essence, I think that all areas of the product have the potential to improve even if they are good already. At the same time, from one release to the next, Workday makes the effort to improve the product. The company has two updates per year. The product is always getting better with each release. If there was anything specific that I thought of that I would improve, it would be the Benefits domain and the advanced computations.

What clients seem to respond to as being in need of attention and want to see developed for the program is apparent in the community cooperation. Workday uses the community to brainstorm and collect feedback and drive innovation. To work with brainstorming, you go to the community and you create a brainstorm (propose an idea and enhancement), and then people in the community vote on it. You get votes and rankings based on response to your ideas. I think Workday is quite proud of the large percentage (40% or so) of what comes out in their releases comes from brainstorms and client feedback. There are tons of things that people propose and say they want in the product in upcoming releases. Workday does this for the customers and suggestions do get put into the product. I've never heard of something like this being done with any other product.

There are other enhancements that go untended that have been languishing for years. I am interested in one feature now and the development just is not spending the time to fix it. They are good but they are not perfect. You can see that they are trying to meet client needs. Using that as an example, you can only put a certain task in certain BPs. Additional data can only be an action item in a few business processes like Hire, Change Job, etcetera. The idea is that users would like the option for the additional data to be available in other areas.

Another example is the default field in Questionnaires. People have asked that the field not be required as a default. Little things like this you can workaround, but it's the little things that are kind of nice. On the other hand, little things get less attention in brainstorming so they get less attention in development.

I would say that it is a very stable product. 

I think it is extremely scalable if you have the money for it. You can have 5 employees using it or you can have 300,000 employees on it all using Workday globally. Scalability isn't a problem.

The customer service is pretty responsive and there is also a pretty good community. The Workday community is a closed user community guided by Workday but mostly comprised of user contributions. There are Workday contributions, questions, guides, administrative discussions, support — all that sort of thing. Users really invest time to help each other and it is a great support system. No other product has something quite like that. The Workday technical customer support system is in addition to and above-and-beyond that. It really provides a broader opportunity to learn and contribute.

The installation is complex. There are two reasons for this. One is that you need a Workday partner to implement the setup for you. In order to be a partner, you have to have an organization or group of consultants who are trained by Workday to implement the product and support it. It is a closed environment and Workday keeps everything pretty much in check. It is complex in the fact that you have to have somebody — either Workday or a Workday partner — implement it for you.

The deployment will usually anywhere from three months to 12 months or more. It depends on the number of users or the number of modules and how complex the expectations are for the implementation. All the different flavors of how complicated an organization wants the implementation to be — all that becomes a factor in the length of the deployment.

The number of people required for maintenance on Workday varies around the same sort of desire for complexity. You usually have at least one person in-house to watch the implementation and you will have a contract with somebody to supply you with support. That might be a partner contracted for 800 hours a year or whatever the specific terms might be. Then you "lose it as you use it" or you have an ongoing maintenance contract with somebody.

Licensing costs are tiered. When you add different modules, it adds to your cost. For example, you can pay for Payroll functionality or you pay for the Benefits module. The more pieces you add, the more you pay.

I can't say what a particular company may value or see as a true return on investment. I would say that it is expensive — it is the most expensive one out there. In my opinion, you would get a clear return on investment. Different businesses would account for that in different ways.

Our clients like to look at some of the bigger names like PeopleSoft, Ceridian's Dayforce, and maybe a few other major competing products. Workday beats them all. In my opinion, they are leaps and bounds above the competition. Part of the reason is that it is built with modern technology. It has no legacy coding in it at all.

I've been in the HR/Payroll product domain for about 25 years, so I've been involved in the development of Ceridian's applications and other companies as well. I know a lot about other products and competitors.

Workday is a bit different, but I love it. You get used to it. It is like back-in-the-day when HR and the payroll system used to be the determining factor in whether you got to have a company laptop or not.

One piece of advice to anyone considering this as a solution is to implement it properly. Spend the time and do it right the first time. Don't rush the requirements, don't skip steps just to get to a stage of deployment. Do your requirements properly. Consider everything beforehand. Don't leave things till later that you should do now. It will be worth the extra time that you invest. That is really true for everyone and every implementation, but especially for Workday. Trying to go back in after the fact and change things is just really complicated and it is a real pain. Skipping steps to get it implemented is a big thing that we notice that clients do.

We have often had to go back and fix something that a client overlooked or looked past. There's always something changing, there's always something that wasn't done correctly. There's always some tweaking afterward. The more tweaking you avoid by doing it right, the less you pay to get it fixed.

After releases, 99 percent of the time it is great and it will not introduce issues. In my experience, it is really rare for issues to crop up or that those issues are so extreme that a client will have to roll an upgrade back. I find that the releases are really well-tested and well-managed. They have two releases a year and in those two releases, they are usually pretty good at getting new features out there.

On a scale from one to ten with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Workday as an 8. Having had 25 years of being involved in the development of other Ceridian products, the development of some other products and having to work with PeopleSoft as a customer, Workday is right there with the best of them.