In order to know where you’re going, you need to know where you are.
Before Workday designed any AI learning or adoption strategy for its workforce, execs first needed to understand where employees were at both as it related to their skills and sentiments and to identify their needs amid this workplace upheaval.
“It’s not just a technological transformation, it’s very much a human one,” said Chris Ernst, chief learning officer at Workday. “Even though we’re a technology company in Silicon Valley, when we began our upskilling journey on AI, we started with research, and we’ve learned a lot.”
The firm surveyed employees to better understand the barriers to AI adoption. What Workday discovered ended up informing the cornerstones of its AI adoption initiative: Everyday AI.
According to the company, the global focus groups revealed three key data points to build its strategy around:
- 43% of Workday employees lacked time to explore AI tools
- 37% said they weren’t sure how to use them effectively
- 37% revealed concerns about reliability and accuracy
“Once we deeply understood our Workmates,” Ernst said, referring to Workday employees, “their needs, their concerns, their use cases, we went really big on this, and we’ve launched an enterprise upskilling initiative…The goal of this program is for all of our nearly 20,000 Workmates to build the mindsets, the skills, and the habits to use AI effectively every day.”
Mindset. Changing mindsets at Workday involves giving employees more exposure to AI tools and their capabilities to really address baseline fears around how AI will impact their work.
“The mindset piece really is about that fear and that concern,” Ernst told HR Brew. “The way we’ve really been working on that..is through a lot of events around the company.”
The company launched its first ever “prompt-athon,” inspired by the popular Big Tech practice of hosting hackathons, events for developers and teams to work together or in competition to address problems or challenges with a technology or tool.
Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
Skills. To address upskilling at Workday, the learning team created one digital academy for all things AI available to all employees. The content is organized by different personas of users, so employees can learn about AI strategies or use cases based on their specific role or project they’re assigned.
The academy serves more as a choose-your-own-adventure: Employees can identify exactly what they’d like to do with AI, and the platform surfaces relevant training based on different personas, such as “innovator,” “communicator,” and “analyst,” according to Ernst.
Habits. To foster good AI habits, Ernst asked all employees to set a personal AI goal, share that objective with their managers, and check-in quarterly on the progress.
Additionally, instead of communicating from the top down about the AI plans from senior execs, Workday opened up a company-wide town hall to spotlight the work of employees leveraging the tech in important or interesting ways that are really meaningful to Workday’s business.
How you doin!? “All of this is creating the conditions to want to learn,” Ernst told HR Brew. “Our highest performers are twice as engaged with these technologies. We also found that those who are most engaged with these technologies…feel that they have a 13% increase in their sense of having a career path.”
Workday employees are reporting that since the launch:
- 73% found that AI tools make them more productive;
- 50% said it provides them new insights; and
- 49% said it helps them be more creative.
“This is the biggest enterprise learning and development initiative we’ve taken on in 20 years as a company,” Ernst said.