In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast, David is joined by Phil Willburn, the Vice President of People Analytics at Workday.

Phil has an outstanding background in the field of people of analytics, and today he and David will be discussing the positive impact the people analytics function is having on Workday’s business outcomes.

In this episode, expect to learn more about:

• How the people analytics function has evolved over time;

• How the people analytics function at workday is structured;

• How Workday democratise their data

• The role of the people analytics function in helping the company adopt its hybrid model

• Phil’s top advice to help HR and people analytics professionals solve the complex challenges organisation face today, and much more.  

Enjoy!

Support from this podcast comes from Workday. You can learn more by visiting: workday.com 

David Green: Year on year, our research here at Insight222 proves that the people analytics function is becoming increasingly important for organisations worldwide, as business leaders across the globe are relying evermore on data to make strategic people-related decisions.

Today, I'm delighted to introduce someone who has seen first-hand how having a clear people analytics strategy can make a huge difference to any business.  My guest on today's episode is Phil Willburn, and he is the Vice President of People Analytics at Workday.  Phil has an outstanding background in the field, and today we'll be discussing the impact that Workday's people analytics function has had on their business, as well as his top tips for building a successful people analytics function.  So, let's dive straight in and welcome Phil to the show.

Phil, welcome to the show, it's great to have you on.  Before we dive in, could you share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and your role at Workday?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, thanks, David, and thanks for having me on.  Really excited and pumped to be here.  I lead people analytics at Workday.  I sit in Workday's HR function, reporting up into our Chief People Officer, and I saw this, David, because sometimes people are confused.  Workday actually also has a people analytics product that's separate, that's on the product side, so I sit in HR.  I've been here for about six years and our team owns kind of normal stuff in people analytics, workforce insights, employee listening and workforce planning.

David Green: So really, people should see you as a people analytics practitioner, you just happen to be doing it at Workday, so running an internal people analytics function for Workday's around 18,000 people; is that right?

Phil Willburn: That's correct and because we have this great technology, I would say that our customers are quite critical of great insights, because we produce this for so many customers.  But also, it's really nice because they're open to using their own technology and using their own insights to make better people decisions.

David Green: You're background's quite interesting before you got into Workday as well.  Can you share a little bit about your time before you joined Workday?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, so I actually had two separate careers before getting into Workday, being in people analytics.  So, my first one, just before coming to Workday, I was a Senior Faculty at the Centre for Creative Leadership, so I was providing executive development, leadership consulting for top global companies.  So, for your listeners, I've a leadership, learning, HR consulting background.  Before that, also sort of related, but sort of on a tangent, my first career was actually working inside the US Intelligence Community.  So, I was an analyst and I taught courses on advanced analytics to various agencies, like the Defence Intelligence Agency, the National Counterterrorism Centre, Open Source Centre and the FBI, and also did some analytics work back for NASA early in my career.

David Green: So, this is beautiful because you're basically combining your analytics background and your leadership and HR background into one role now?

Phil Willburn: When I started my career, I had no idea that this is what would happen.  But looking back, it makes sense.  Who knows what's going to happen as we go forward though, David?

David Green: Well, no, and we're certainly seeing out there that people analytics continues to grow as a function, it's getting more influential with leaders in many organisations that we work with, based on the research I've been doing at Insight222 over the last few years.  And obviously, you've been in the field for a while and attached to it, I guess, through the leadership consulting work that you were doing as well.  Tell me, what's your perception of how the people analytics space has evolved over time?

Phil Willburn: I think actually, we've come a long way.  The HR space used to be the least data-savvy function.  Because of the amazing reports that you guys were producing at Insights222, we can see that the best organisations are blending people data with business data, adding in good research practices and advising leaders to make better decisions.  So, I think we're actually getting a lot closer to focusing on business and people outcomes, which I know you and Jonathan, I mean you guys are obsessed with this, you talk about this all the time!  The whole point of the book is that I do think we're getting closer.  However, there are a couple of areas I think we're still lacking, or not quite there yet from a people analytics function.

David Green: What are some of those things you think where we still need to get better at, as a community, as a practice?

Phil Willburn: I think as a community, we struggle in two broad areas.  First, we continue to struggle to scale the impact of people analytics.  We all know we do great work and when we do that work, it does have impact.  But I'm reminded of some of the RedThread research that pointed out that during the pandemic, something like 80% of organisations weren't getting the full value out of people analytics teams that they'd hoped, and that's largely due to taking on non-scalable projects.  

In a couple of years, Gartner cited a very similar thing about people analytics teams achieving their strategy they laid out and they said one of the biggest derailers is taking on a bunch of ad hoc products.  When I talk to practitioners, to me this is really a crisis of adoption.  We produce so many analytics products and yet we oftentimes have low adoption in our products.  I think if we're going to create scale in people analytics, we really need to ensure our analytic products are adopted and used in an effective way, so that's the first one there.

David Green: Yeah, I think that's really interesting, because it makes us think that we need to put the user at the centre of it and think about, we want people to want to use the products that we're building as well.  And maybe in the past, if we think back to a lot of the old HR technology, we weren't necessarily thinking about the user, we were thinking about the HR programme that we wanted to roll out.  So, I think there's definitely something in that there I think, Phil, definitely.

Phil Willburn: Yeah, and the other thing is about embedding those insights into the way that the business runs their work; as we can get closer to really embedding those insights, we'll work on that.  The second one, I think, the trend that I would say we still need to make progress on is that we've unintentionally broken the link between insights and action.  And what I mean by that is, as a profession, we've been really drawn towards these very compelling BI tools that provide cool and sexy visualisations, which is all good.  I mean, I love them too, but it's quite difficult to then take that, consume that and take a particular action.

Also, I think that's contributed to adoption in analytic tools.  If you view something and then don't know what to do, or not be able to take action, that's a difficulty.  I'll just give you an example.  Here at Workday, we have a people leader dashboard, or a manager dashboard, which every single manager at Workday uses to run their teams.  And so, when a manager can look at a COPA ratio distribution related to performance and then launch a comp review in the same place, they use it more often because that's what they need to do.  Or, if a manager can see a high potential turnover and then launch a career and progress check-in across their organisations, take some action from it, they're more likely to use this as checking in and then taking action, and I think that's an area that we really need to improve on.

David Green: So, Workday is a fast-growing organisation.  I'd love to know, and I think listeners would love to know that are currently building their teams, what does a people analytics team look like at Workday; how have you structured the team?

Phil Willburn: So, let's go back to our mission and then I can talk a little bit about how we structure it.  So, our mission, like your mission before, David, our mission is to help Workday leaders make better people decisions.  So, that's around all sorts of topics.  It could be planning topics, it could be employee engagement topics, it could be sales attainment topics; it's around better people decisions.  And because we want to help all leaders, not just a subsection of leaders, not just our board, not just our executive team, we need to ensure that we're both being strategic with the work we take on, and creating scale with our work.

We have limited resources; we have about 15 people on the team in total, which is I think a moderate-size organisation, but not hundreds of people so that we can touch every single leader, so we have to work to create scale.  In order to do that, there are three things that really have allowed our team to create scale.  We've built kind of a different type of team than maybe a lot of traditional people analytics organisations.  We have a persona-based analytics strategy, so we align every one of our products to a persona and we drive adoption to make sure that product is serving that persona. 

Then, we do create and focus on in-depth enablement practices.  So, whether that's creating an in-depth practice for HR business partners to really understand how to generate a hypothesis, use our dashboards to create and find their insights, to bitesize guides and even high-level overview videos for senior business leaders.  So, that's kind of the three things. 

Then our function breaks down across three areas: analytic products, so we have product managers who manage the roadmap of our products and really align that to our personas; we have an insights-at-scale team, that's really our builders; and then we have a data science and research team, and the data science and research team I think is an interesting blend, because they can analyse, they can recommend, and then they can move their insights into the product.  So, they're not just people that are sitting behind somewhere creating a fancy algorithm, they actually understand what they're doing and then can either make recommendations and/or say, "These insights need to be in the product".

David Green: Really interesting, Phil.  I mean, one thing I think you said, well you said lots of things that are really interesting, but one thing I think was really interesting, it's not just about enabling leaders.  You've talked two or three times, you've mentioned the importance of creating analytics at scale.  We're not going to create scale as people analytics professionals if we just focus on leaders.  We might help leaders and we might drive some very important business decisions; but ultimately, to create analytics at scale, you need to enable managers in the business and employees potentially as well.

Phil Willburn: Yeah, exactly.  We have a roadmap that has things that go to the employees, for example Peakon, our employee voice, our listening platform, is accessible by all employees.  They have their own employee dashboard, they can see how they compare to their teams.  That's helping drive a better conversation in teams.  A number of years ago, we launched a diversity report to all of our employees, so our employees were very curious, "How are we making progress?  Are we holding ourselves accountable and making progress in diversity?"  So, in Workday, any employee can run our diversity report and see the breakdown of the progress of diversity, quarter over quarter, and how we currently stand today. 

So, those are insights that are relevant to everyone, and they also are strategic for us and kind of help us hold each other accountable and drive those kinds of insights to the fringes.

David Green: I loved what you were saying about the persona approach.  Can you tell us a little bit more about how you create the personas for each of the products?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, so first we start with personas and then we start with the products.  So, we know that a big leverage of people decisions is made for our SVPs, so we have an SVP persona and VP-Plus persona, so what does that look like, what do they need, what are the insights they need.  The next persona that we learned, which was interesting and it makes sense, is who are the people who support those decisions for the SVPs and VPs, and those are the HR business partners and COEs, so there's a whole persona that supports the SVPs and VPs.

Then we have our Director population, which runs the majority of our function; we have our People Leader population; and we have our ICs.  So, that's how we mapped out across here.  I think for each organisation it would be a little bit different, but we started with personas and then we can say, in order to get scale we have to say, "What is a product that we could use across the most amount of personas that would drive the insights we want so we're maintaining a few products, but they have depth?" and that's kind of the strategy that we've gone through.

David Green: And I guess different personas may use the product slightly differently, so as you said, it's understanding, okay, we've got a product, how are the personas going to use it slightly differently; and how can we build in all the necessary functionality, information and data to enable them to do that?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, so for example, our VP-Plus and SVPs, they're not excited to see a link and click into a dashboard and look around; we have to be realistic.  So what we actually did with this persona is, we have a monthly digest for them.  So, "In this month, here's what happened in your organisation: turnover is up, it's up compared to your parent organisation.  Your goal for turnover for this year is to maintain a certain percentage.  Your diversity hiring was positive, this is on par with meeting our goals for the end of the year.  The number of people coming to the office is about this percentage, this is lower than what we see across Workday".

So, we have this digest that comes and that is the most consumable thing.  They read this and they go, "Here's where I stand", and if they're going into a QBR, they bring that in.  Or, they can say, "This is really interesting, I'm going to learn more", and there's a couple of options.  They can click right in, click through the links, see our dashboard, they can learn more; or, they can reach out to the HR partner which has the exact same information, because they're in the loop with that alert.  And that's just one way in which we can learn about our personas, what they need, and then build the insights that speak to them.

David Green: Yeah, really important is that kind of two-way way of looking at it.  We're not just throwing products out there, we're understanding how people are going to use them, how they're going to use them differently, and how we need to build the products to drive that adoption that you talked about as well.

Phil Willburn: Yeah, and I want to make this a clear point.  I think, and the way we run our team is, we require every one of our team members to have two capabilities that allows this kind of virtuous cycle.  One is an analyst, so every person on the team has to think critically about the data.  I don't care what role you have, they have to understand the insights and ability to connect those insights to recommendations.  That's a requirement; I think that should be required in every shop.

Then the second is, every one of our team members is a technologist.  You can't just be a researcher without knowing how to convert that research and recommendations into a technology that scales, that supports decisions or embed it in the workflow.  So, every one of our team members has to think about how they embed their insights, their research, their work in our technology, and again that's what creates scales.

When we create that scale and we drive adoption through our products, through in-depth and bitesize enablement, it creates this strong adoption and a virtuous cycle that when we have something, we create scale with it, we then get it out there, it's not filling up our time continuously, we get to move on to new and different problems.

David Green: Phil, could you give us a couple of examples of how this approach plays out at Workday?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, maybe a couple of examples, two examples here.  First was a real short one, which was creating insights in a virtuous cycle around our performance management, our performance enablement.  So, a few years ago, our talent organisation HR partners were searching for deeper insights relating to our performance cycle.  We needed to know about the implication of calibration placement on talent outcomes.  So, perfect research thing, we conducted a pattern analysis and connected outcomes related to what is a sustained success look at Workday, and we emerged with some very specific patterns that revealed talent trends that had a significant impact on performance.

So, what are the trends around consistent top performers; what do we see when we need to consider some action, like a succession plan, or a different role?  So, this is a research project and then what happens, that very next year, we took the research and we embedded them directly in the insights that both HR partners and leaders have to access.  So, instead of producing a deck once a year, our report once a year, we just took those insights, we learned this already, built in the technology; and what that allowed us to do is to create scale by automating these research insights.  Again, I said this before, but it comes from having a product-oriented team, a technology-oriented team, and it really influences, and we've seen it, it influences the way our business leaders calibrate their talent, set up their talent plans and focus on a sustained performance from their talent.  So, that's one short example.

David Green: That's great and I think that's a really good example, Phil, and I think you've got another one around a health dashboard I think you had for hybrid?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, so this one, this kind of hub health dashboard for hybrid work.  So, as you know, and you've stated many a time, this is a hot topic and a trend that's going to continue in the future.  So, this past year, we identified our future work model and our return-to-office perspective.  We actually uncovered that site leaders, those people who are the senior leaders in office locations around the globe, are really the key stakeholders in ensuring people's transition back to more in-person work.  Through our research, we actually uncovered that there are three factors that relate to site health and hybrid work adoption. 

For example, the first one is, who works here?  So, the number of employees who don't have local managers impacts site health, or the number of collocated team employees impacts site health; how people are working, which means how people are coming into the office, how often, which days were most popular; and then, what was the overall sentiment?  For example, is engagement or wellbeing impact by coming to the office and using the Workday office a positive experience?  So again, great research.  We found these key factors, but instead of holding these or just producing a report for each site leader on a given cadence, we embedded this right into our hub health dashboard, we enabled every single site leader and pushed this data out to the fringes, and now we have monthly reviews of sites globally looking at this data saying, "How do we make changes to improve our overall site health?"

So, you can see simple things like, "Let's move the days bagels are available in the office based on when people are showing up", that makes sense; or, "Let's change our desk assignments to neighbourhood seatings"; or, "Let's create watch parties for our company meeting"; or, "Let's create more options for hybrid onboarding, depending on the site location".  So, all these actions we didn't necessarily recommend, but we were able, from learning from the research, get that data out to the site leaders; they made their own decisions and are making sites much healthier today than they were before.

David Green: It's a really interesting topic, isn't it, because you can argue that as the world of work, we're only in the early stages of hybrid working at the moment and you could argue that many companies have only just, well, in the last six to nine months, put their return-to-office plans back into place.  So, this is going to be an area of a lot of exploration and experimentation, I guess, for companies, for people analytics teams in the coming years.

Phil Willburn: And it should be, David, for the business leader too.  It shouldn't be just the G&A functions or the HR functions experimenting; we need to have our business leaders fully own and adopt and realise that they're going to have to lead differently.  And we just found in our case that site leaders, those who are looking our Boulder office or Atlanta office or Dublin office, they have to lead slightly differently and they're figuring it out as well, so we might as well get them the data insights and they experiment on their end and we're going to lend from that, so it's a two-way street; it's HR trying different things, people analytics trying different things; but the business is trying different things and we should learn just as much from the business as we're learning from our own data.

David Green: Yeah, I'd really like to talk a bit more about the work you're doing around employee listening and enhancing the employee experience.  How does your team put the data forward to managers from, for example, the weekly Pulse that you're doing and the decisionmakers to help them take the action that's needed?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, this is something we're pretty serious about here, David.  We're serious about listening to our employees and then putting that data right into the hands of our managers to understand their employees and take action.  So, let me give you an example, and I think you kind of hinted at that.  We've been Pulsing all employees every week for the last four years, and for the last year we've been using our newest employee listening platform, Peakon Employee Voice technology, which has been quite transformational. 

Just to articulate this a little more, we don't launch new surveys as events or fanfare with constant communication; we simply have one routine survey schedule that arrives in everyone's inbox, or Slack, at 9.00am on Friday morning, and we call that Feedback Fridays.  It contains four or five questions each week and is usually completed in less than two minutes.  There is a question rotation algorithm that means that employees are answering different combinations of questions to one another, so that although they only have four questions, we're gathering a huge variety of variables each week so we have no blind spots.

As far as impact, we have an average participation of around 70% each week.  So, this gives us confidence that the data is highly accurate and it provides a real-time picture for our employees; and our managers, when we look at their usage statistics, are accessing their Peakon app or their dashboard on a weekly basis.  So, employees are accessing it and then managers are accessing it, and that's creating a collaborative, problem-solving platform, because we've received more than a quarter of a million comments since we launched on Peakon last year, and almost all of these comments have been replied to, have been acknowledged by our managers, engaging in a process to improve employee experience.

So, when I mean we're serious about this, we've been serious about this for the last four years, prior to the pandemic, prior to the movement, and we continue to see a big investment in this and a big focus on this across our enterprise.

David Green: And just maybe share an example, Phil, because having this data on a regular basis means that as events happen, both inside and outside the company, you're able to see that in the data and respond?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, so during the fall or winter of 2021, our Peakon data, employee listening data, it revealed various teams were battling work overload due to pandemic-induced priority shifts, meeting heavy schedules, and we saw the data pretty clearly over the course of a couple of weeks.  Our employees were losing, or not feeling their sense of accomplishment.  At that point, we had an interesting decision to make.

A typical HR decision will be like, "Hey, this is a trend, let's launch a new HR programme and comms around overwork and not feeling accomplishment and give people tips and tricks".  But there was something interesting happening as we looked into the data.  We realised that there were hundreds and thousands of managers commenting on their teams' reactions saying, "Let me move some work here, let me push some stuff out", etc.  And so we saw managers really reacting to the trends we saw over a couple of weeks.  Managers started to have conversations with their teams, they started to implement targeted and tailored solutions; and really, David, if you think about overwork or too many deadlines or not feeling a sense of accomplishment, that's not something that HR globally can handle, that's something that managers who are in the weeds working, that's really their responsibility and that's something they're most closely connected and more likely to handle at their level.

So, through these bottom-up actions, with no HR programme or intervention, we saw a positive movement over the following month.  So, a number of employees struggling with workload, it reduced by 50% and we saw a significant increase in accomplishment.  So, a couple of things, a couple of learnings from this, employee listening revealed an issue affecting the employee experience; in this case, workload.  And by making this data easily available and accessible to all of our managers, all of our people leaders, and making this tech interactive, as in its collaborative problem-solving, there were many, many small actions that added up to this big change, and this is all without standing up another tiger team or having another wide enterprise programming.  It's really good listening data and good collaborative technology and good managers actually improved this overall thing, without that big HR programme mindset.

David Green: I know that the people analytics team, we've talked about how you've helped inform decisions around the hybrid model at Workday as well.  Can you maybe share with listeners as well what was the role of people analytics in helping the company adopt its hybrid model, beyond what you've already talked about with the site work?

Phil Willburn: Yeah, I think this is kind of the pressing issue of the day: how do we work in a different way in the future, given what happened during the pandemic?  So, we helped in three specific ways, people analytics at Workday.  First, we identified the impacts that all remote work that we had was having on our organisation and employees, what was actually gained and what was lost.  Second, we continuously inserted the employee voice into decisions around what was working.  Just for example, at the height of the pandemic when burnout was really high, our executive team decided to give every other Friday off for about six months to all employees globally, to kind of decompress and reset from that perspective, and that was driven by our listening strategy.

Third, we helped actually shape our Flex Work policy, so we call it Flex Work here at Workday, not hybrid work.  And then we provide a feedback loop on what's working, or what's not working, regarding these policies.  So, those are the three ways we're helping shape our future of work here at Workday.

David Green: I understand you've been on a little bit of a journey at Workday around the Flex Work.  Could you share a little bit about that with listeners, because I know this is something that people find absolutely fascinating, I think?

Phil Willburn: Our journey.  So, like many tech companies, we went fully remote at the beginning of the pandemic.  We were a very in-office culture, so that was a big adjustment for there.  Pretty early on, we saw three big impacts when it comes to remote working: wellbeing, our wellbeing was in some ways being impacted up or down with the pandemic, and also with not being around their colleagues.; productivity, and I'll talk a little bit more about that; and then, connections. 

So, wellbeing, like I said, ups and downs relating to the pandemic and burnout, but we did also see a lot of our colleagues missed their colleagues, and there was this social energy that was lost.  Michael Arena stated some great research that really in the pandemic, one of the things that we lost was this social energy, this energy we get from collaborating with others.

The other thing was around productivity.  Productivity is quite challenging to measure.  We look at focus time, so how much heads-down, non-distraction work are you getting?  That actually increased.  Everybody said productivity increased during the pandemic.  We saw that, but we saw some challenges.  We saw some challenges of onboarding.  So, with onboarding, there's some evidence that our new hires across the globe were taking extra time to make their first contribution when they were hired.  So, it was a mixed bag with productivity.

But the biggest impact, and you've interviewed all of these people, David, so you know this, was on connections.  So, we saw strong within-team connections created, bonding connections, as they're called.  This is also related to the Microsoft study.  However, we saw a decrease in the cross-functional connections, also know as bridging connections, that go between teams.  In fact for us, it was about a 17% decrease in these cross-functional connections.  And lastly, employees said that they felt 50% less connected to their colleagues compared to the pandemic.

So, that was what we were working in.  So, given what we had learned that we were 100% remote, what model was really going to help us move forward in the future?  So, we did what a lot of analytics teams did, we looked at some external and internal research to come up with our perspective, so we know that focus time is actually better from working from home versus in the office so there's a benefit there; wellbeing, people wanted flexibility in their schedule, so it wasn't just about working remote or being in the office, it was about flexibility; and connections.  And interestingly, we saw a significant difference in outside team collaborations when people actually worked from the office, worked in-person, than working from home.

So, there's clearly benefits from, how do we get the upsides of some more flexibility and focus time, while we're mitigating the downsides of that remote work?  So, all of this landed our flex policy.  So, I don't know if "we", but I call it freedom within a framework flex policy, David.

David Green: I like that!

Phil Willburn: Yeah.  Feel free to steal this in the future and just use this.

David Green: Copyright, Phil Willburn!

Phil Willburn: Yeah, just put it on there, right!  So, where we landed, we were asking all employees to spend 50% of their time in-person, either in the office, with customers or with prospects over the course of a fiscal quarter.  And we believe that in-person work is really essential, but it's that kind of flex balance right here.  And we've seen some pretty surprising outcomes from this since we've been doing this over the last year.

David Green: What are some of the outcomes that you've seen from this?

Phil Willburn: Like you said, we're still early on, like many companies, right, but we have to make a stance and we believe that this flex stance, we're getting the best of both worlds; best of flexibility and the best of in-person work.  So, what's been surprising for us, as we've looked over the last year, is what we found is that collaboration with teams outside of their own team, one of the biggest impacts that we felt during the pandemic is actually up 18% compared to last year.  So, since we started this flex policy, we're actually starting to repair our bridging ties that were lost during the pandemic.  To me, that's pretty darn good evidence that an in-person, or a flex policy makes a lot of sense, because our connections are being repaired.

The other thing that was really, really fascinating is that employees had 17% more strong collaboration compared to the same time last year, which means it's not only that they're building different connections cross-teams, but the depth or the strength of that relationship is improving.  And we know that the strength in relationships has so many benefits: onboarding benefits, knowledge-sharing benefits, cultural benefits.  Another surprising result, and I wouldn't have guessed this unless I'd looked at the data; David, I actually want to hear your perspective on this.  Manager one-on-one frequency increased, it doubled this quarter compared to the same time last year.  So, we are actually seeing more one-on-ones compared to when we were full remote, we could easily jump on Zoom.  Why is that?  I'm not sure, I don't know.  David, what do you think; why does it increase the one-on-one cadence?

David Green: Well, you've put me on the spot, so I've got to try and come up with some hypotheses.  I just think maybe one-on-ones are maybe more energising when they're face-to-face, so that would be something.  I don't know how you test that, by the way.  And, I think we're all getting tired of being on Zoom or Teams constantly, whereas I think if you can vary the way that you interact with people, sometimes virtually like we're doing now, or sometimes face-to-face, then it adds a bit more variety perhaps.  Or, maybe there's more reasons to connect because as you said, the bridging ties are being repaired, which we know is so important to things like innovation and inter-team collaboration and other things as well.  So, yeah, but I would guess it's more energising meeting people face-to-face.

Phil Willburn: Yeah, I think you're spot on actually and I think I could test this and then come back to you and either prove you correct or disprove you, and I'd be happy to do that at some point.  But I think you're spot on.  I was really shocked by this, but if you think that employees and managers are now more motivated than ever to share that kind of connection, and you just see it.  Twice as many is just insane for me.  We have a pretty good cadence of one-on-ones here, but that metric was really surprising.

We've also seen our health and wellbeing scores in our employee listening, we're in the top 10% of technology companies, so that has really helped.  And then we're seeing mass team gatherings across the ecosystem, and I really think that's around building social energy that was really lacking in the fully remote perspective.  And we've learned a lot.  So, some of the learnings, it was essential that we articulated the reason why behind the in-person work, around connections, around building social energy, around fostering innovation.

It was also really critical that we allow each function, or the work to decide how it's integrated into people's lives, so we're not mandating, "Sales, you have to do this; technology, you have to do this; finance, you have to do this".  We gave them this freedom and then the ability to articulate it down.  And then, we're continuing to learn and experiment.  I think we're just at the beginning of this but so far, we're seeing some pretty positive outcomes over this last year.

David Green: What I find really inciteful talking to you, and obviously we've spoken a few times over the last 12, 18 months, is that you get to play with all the technology and tools that Workday is developing for customers.  I'm sure this benefits you as a people analytics team and internally, but I'm guessing it also benefits your product team as well?

Phil Willburn: I feel very honoured and privileged to be at Workday because we get great tools and we do get to play with them.  I was just talking about relationships; our product teams are constantly reaching out to us, and this is one of the amazing things about being here, is we're both a customer and an internal resource to other development teams. 

Just one short example, I think one of the best examples of this is the creation of Workday's VIBE Index.  VIBE stands for Valuing Inclusion, Belonging and Equity for all, and it's a true measurement of equity inside an organisation across the major people outcomes, equity in hiring, promotions, belonging, leadership and retention.  This is a product that exists that is part of people analytics, and you can actually measure the internal equity of your organisation.

That actually generated, the regional product generated from a collaboration between Carin Taylor, our Chief Diversity Officer and people analytics.  When she joined about four years ago, she came to me and she said, "I want to measure this VIBE across workday and I want to measure equity and parity in employee listening".  Okay, I go off and I said, "Here's a belonging index that looks at equity and parity between different groups in here", and she goes, "I want to look at it across intersections, globally, and I want to do it across the major outcomes of HR".  I said, "Whoa, Carin, that seems like a lot of work to do.  I mean, I'm happy to do this", but it was kind of like she wants a true measure of parity in the organisation.

We went off and did this and created our internal VIBE Index, and then product came in and said, "Let me take a look at that".  They took a look at it and said, "How about we make this a product", and both Carin and I were just, "Okay, that's awesome".  But even better than that, they took that, created a product, which I think is awesome, and then in 2021, the VIBE Index was recognised by HR Executive as the top product of the year.  So, I think that's pretty cool that innovation can still happen within the HR function that gets pulled to a broader perspective.

David Green: That's really interesting.  So, you're obviously doing some great work at Workday, Phil, and thanks so much for sharing so many powerful examples today, which I know will inspire our listeners.  My related question, I guess, is what advice would you give to HR and people analytics professionals to help solve some of the complex challenges that they're facing in their organisations?

Phil Willburn: I think for me, if you're in people analytics, or just in analytics in HR, or just starting to play with it in HR, there's three things.  First, you need to learn the business.  It's hard to know where you provide value without knowing the business; do you know how your business makes money; do you know about their customers; do you know about the drivers in the business; do you know how they do their planning cycle; do you know how they continuously engage their customers?  All of those things help make HR people analytics insights more applicable, it focuses on the outcomes, David, again something you and Jonathan talk about all the time.

The second thing is, focus on the fundamentals.  So, the fundamentals are what we talked about, like product adoption that creates scale.  I think sometimes, not everyone, we get distracted by all the fancy research and stuff that's being posted, "Look at this fancy connection I made here, look at this HBR article here", stuff like that.  I sometimes feel like we get distracted in this business and until we focus on the fundamentals, we're not bringing the business value.

Then lastly is, there's a certain energy in organisations, and you need to learn where that energy is, where that movement is and then lean into that.  It's not like you have a strategy, you go off and this is your strategy; it's like, what's happening in the business and how can you find that energy and lean into that, and that's where will be your first use case.  That's why I like, again you and Jonathan have gone away from the maturity model of people analytics and really say, "Here are the areas that you can bring value", and then you can say, "Hey, where's the energy in this organisation?" and lean into that particular area, and that actually brings value to the business.

David Green: Thinking broader now, and maybe putting your old HR leadership consulting hat on, what do you think HR leaders really need to be thinking about over the next 12 to 24 months; and in relation to that, what would be your biggest concern and what do you think the biggest opportunity is?

Phil Willburn: Here's my opinion, just my opinion.  I think we need, and you're going to be surprised, we need to go back to the basics.  Do we have a discipline around our workforce planning practice; are we getting the best hires in onboarding them effectively?  Are we taking care of our managers and setting them up for success, especially managers this year?  They've gone through so much burden and sometimes trauma and they've been flipflopped from a great resignation to fully remote to burnout to a lot of shifts in the marketplace and uncomfortable perspective about what the future looks like.  There's a lot of burden there.

The last thing I would say is just keep in mind that I think that our employees, our workforce, has gone through a lot over the last couple of years, and we need to continually focus on the employee experience and not make short-sighted decisions, because in 18 months, the landscape's going to look different, but people remember the decisions that you make.  And so, the companies who navigate this well right now are going to be set up for success and emerge in a really good position in the next couple of years.

David Green: Phil, I really thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, it's been great to hear about all the fantastic work you and the team are doing in people analytics at Workday.  How can listeners stay in touch with you, find you on social media?

Phil Willburn: I think the best way is just LinkedIn, so Phil Willburn at Workday, I think I might be the only Phil Willburn at Workday.  Check it out, I love to connect and just appreciate the time here today and appreciate the great conversation we've had.

David Green: Well, thank you very much, Phil, and look forward to seeing you again in-person at some point this year.

Phil Willburn: Thank you.

David Green: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast with David Green.  It was wonderful to have Phil Willburn on the show and hear how the people analytics function at Workday is helping drive business success.  If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and leave us a five-star rating on your preferred podcast streaming channel so that we can keep producing the show.