A new system requires a new mindset.
I serve as an advisor on a lot of Workday® implementations and the mindset shift is one of the most important pieces nearly every time. It’s not just the technology piece of the transition; it’s how people approach and engage with the system. A lot of times, HR and Finance teams are just trying to recreate their old systems within Workday rather than embracing all of the efficiencies that the platform offers.
As a former payroll administrator who has been on both sides of the implementation process, I want to encourage new Workday enthusiasts by offering a few strategies to navigate the transition and shift your mindset.
Open Up Lines of Communication
What’s the key to any successful relationship? Strong communication. This is what makes Workday such an impactful tool for organizations and is also one of the biggest obstacles as teams make the transition from their old systems.
Most legacy systems are extremely disjointed. I’ll speak specifically to HR systems since that’s my background – when a new employee is hired, six different people have to enter the new hire data in their own separate areas. The same data gets entered six different ways since every system requires a slight variation on the rules. None of these systems talk to each other and no one on the team discusses how the data flows from one process to another.
When implementing Workday, you have to consider the big picture about how HR (or Finance) operates. Teams need to communicate about what is needed in each individual module so they can understand how one is impacted by the other. During my first Workday implementation process, I joined every meeting so I could have and share insights about how what one team said might impact another team. Moving to open lines of communication is a critical component of the mindset shift.
Set Your Pride Aside
Right out of college, my first payroll job required a lot of manual data entry. But no one was going back and checking my work. I took my job seriously and was careful with the data, but I’m only human and I’m sure a few small errors slipped through the cracks. Having checks and balances in place to absolutely ensure data is accurate across the board is one of the major benefits of Workday.
It also causes some of the most strife during implementation. Often there aren’t standard practices in place for data entry and teams don’t have any guides to cross-reference, so when we pull all the different reports together to implement Workday, it can be a disaster of data. I want to reassure you though: it’s ok, no one is blaming you and we can clean the data up. This is typically an issue across the board, not just one individual, so it’s more helpful for you to set your pride aside and help set up better processes moving forward than to point fingers or get defensive. We are all in this together!
Learn to Let Go
I can normally tell what HR system an organization was using previously because they often try to recreate it in Workday. I urge you to be open to making the most of Workday and let go of your old systems. There’s a reason you left them!
One step to letting go is reducing the amount of rules built into Workday. Let the system be as easy as it’s supposed to be and unravel some of the complexities you’ve started to create. A lot of times this means sticking to your module and trusting others to take care of their own. Payroll doesn’t need to make edits in benefits – benefits will modify its own module.
If teams still want visibility into the whole process, we can help create dashboards that provide a bigger picture without setting up a complex web of rules and access points.
We Get It – We Can Help
Like me, most of my colleagues at Syssero are also former Workday users. We have been in your shoes and fully understand where you’re coming from. Making the transition to Workday can be really challenging, but when you learn to lean in and embrace the changes, it will be well worth it.
Whether you’re getting ready to implement Workday or you ran into issues during the implementation process, our team is happy to step in and support you. Send an email to info@syssero.com and let us know how we can help.