Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), a provider of solutions to help organizations manage their people and money, recently unveiled new Illuminate capabilities in Workday Peakon Employee Voice. New AI features will help today’s overburdened managers by analyzing large volumes of employee feedback and delivering the insights and recommendations they need to make important decisions that help them retain top talent and build highly engaged, loyal teams.
Understanding what employees want and supporting them effectively is critical as organizations compete to retain their highest performing employees and attract top talent. Managers are pivotal here because they play a central role in building strong employee engagement and loyalty. However, as Workday data reveals, many managers are themselves at high risk of burnout. The latest innovations in Workday Peakon Employee Voice reduce the time it takes for managers to surface insights from across the entire workforce. When coupled with personalized recommended actions, the employee listening solution makes it easier for stretched managers to elevate their people and drive organizational success.
The new innovations in Workday Peakon Employee Voice include:
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- Generative AI-Powered Content Summaries: New AI generated content summaries surface and pinpoint key themes and emerging issues from a vast volume of employee feedback across 60+ languages. This enables rapid, informed decision-making so organizations can address global employee concerns, such as workload or burnout – before they fully manifest – fostering a more engaged and productive workforce.
- On-Demand Comment Summaries: On-demand functionality provides targeted analysis of employee feedback by specific department, location or engagement score. For example, it can be used to quickly uncover how employees across marketing, or located in the Madrid office, are feeling. This helps organizations make specific improvements and boost engagement where it is needed most.
- Rules-Based Questions in Moments That Matter: Rules-Based Questions enable leaders to deliver tailored survey questions to employees at any chosen, pivotal moment in the employee lifecycle, such as onboarding and exiting. This generates valuable data-driven information to help managers improve the end-to-end employee experience.
“In the current business landscape, attracting, retaining and engaging top talent is more critical than ever,” said Anne-Sofie Nielsen, Vice President, Product and Engineering, Workday. “Workday Peakon Employee Voice with these new Illuminate capabilities give organizations – and specifically people managers – the insights and tools they need to foster exceptional employee experiences, build a thriving workforce and achieve greater organizational success.”
These new Illuminate capabilities in Workday Peakon Employee Voice are powered by more than one billion aggregated employee responses and an additional 200 million pieces of written employee feedback from across 160 countries. This dataset also gives Workday access to the industry’s deepest insights into global workforce trends, allowing it to uncover critical findings to help shape the future of work. For example, Workday revealed earlier this year that on average, 27% of employees within an organization are at high risk of burnout. It also found that workers who believe they are doing meaningful work feel 37% more accomplished than those who don’t – even when facing challenging workloads.
Workday Peakon Employee Voice gives employees a platform to confidentially share their experiences, expectations and feelings about work. With accurate comparisons, consistent benchmarking powered by True Benchmark™, and robust, real-time analytics, it has helped customers like EQ turn insights into action and drive higher engagement.
“Workday Peakon Employee Voice is a key part of our people strategy, enabling us to directly address the continuous challenges we face in the evolving world of work,” said Andrew Stephenson, chief people officer, EQ. “By understanding the views of our people and being able to take ideas and suggestions from them frequently, we are able to take timely actions to create a truly empowered, engaged workforce around the globe.”
With employees as its number one core value, Workday uses Workday Peakon Employee Voice to garner insights from its more than 20,000 workmates. This feedback has helped inform and shape Workday’s own strategy – leading, for example, to the introduction of a Work From Almost Anywhere benefit and a subsequent rise in flexibility scores. Additionally, employee feedback on the topic of growth led to a renewed focus among leaders and individualized action plans, which helped Workday achieve a 35% increase in the number of employees who said they were satisfied with their growth and career path.
Generative AI-Powered Comment Summaries, On-Demand Comment Summaries and Rules Based Questions in Moments That Matter will be available to Workday Peakon Employee Voice customers in the first half of 2025.
What this means for ERP Insiders
Integrate employee sentiment data with ERP systems to reveal correlations with operational performance. Use integration to align employee feedback with key metrics such as project performance, sales outcomes, or production efficiency. For example, link engagement data with team performance in SAP SuccessFactors or project delivery in Oracle ERP. Enable automated workflows in your ERP that trigger alerts or actions based on Peakon data. For example, if engagement scores dip in a critical department, automatically assign resources to address issues or initiate manager training programs. And use integration to enhance onboarding processes or improve succession planning by identifying key drivers of engagement and performance. For instance, leverage Peakon insights to adjust compensation or training plans directly in your ERP. Tie Peakon data to key business drivers like customer churn or profitability. For example, if low engagement is linked to declining customer satisfaction in a retail ERP system, focus on targeted interventions to improve employee morale and service quality.
Workday’s extensive dataset is a unique advantage. Workday’s vast dataset fuels the development and refinement of its AI and machine learning models and enables it to benchmark performance, identify industry trends, and provide actionable insights that add unique value to its customers. This proprietary dataset and algorithms allow Workday to provide more accurate predictions, insights, and recommendations tailored to its customers’ needs. The scale and diversity of its dataset are difficult for competitors to replicate without a similarly large customer base and years of accumulated data. Competitors face a “cold start” problem, as most lack the scale and breadth of data necessary to compete on the same level. And as more organizations adopt Workday, the dataset grows richer, enabling Workday to deliver even better results through more advanced AI-powered tools. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle of value. Workday serves the financial management and human resources needs of more than 10,500 customers and 70 million users globally, including over 50% of the Fortune 500 and more than 25% of the Global 2000, with a customer satisfaction rating exceeding 95%.
Ensure success when integrating Workday with your ERP. Several ERP systems have established strong track records of integrating with Workday due to their compatibility, technical flexibility, and complementary features. The best options depend on your organization’s use case, but the top ERP systems with proven integration success are SAP (including SAP S/4HANA), Oracle ERP Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Netsuite (Oracle), Infor ERP, and Salesforce (CRM). In these cases, the ERP provider already has prebuilt connectors with Workday to reduce integration complexity. Also, integration platforms (e.g., MuleSoft, Boomi, Informatica) can be used if native integration is insufficient or not available. These common ERP systems have also proven they can scale alongside Workday to support future growth. And they can complement Workday’s capabilities in specific industries (e.g., healthcare, retail, manufacturing).
