About Federation University
Federation University is pioneering an innovative way of delivering higher education. Its experimental model mixes industry experience and new ways of learning, making its graduates highly employable. But its employee experience was anything but cutting edge. “We were heavily reliant on manual and paper-based processes. People and Culture teams were constantly double-entering and transacting work on behalf of our workforce,” says Andrew Henwood, head of employee experience.
After a search for the right human capital management system, the university chose Workday for its excellent software, sector knowledge, and cultural fit. “Technically, it was very much about the fact that it’s a unified platform and a single source of truth,” notes Henwood. “ Workday also understands higher education and gave us a great collaborative experience during our journey of discovery.”
Increasing employee engagement.
With mobile self-service on offer, employees started engaging with Workday from day one. Timesheets were available in the first week, and 15% of the workforce immediately put in timesheet entries on their mobile phones.
New functionality has been enthusiastically adopted. “Within 6 weeks of launching goal setting, we had 80% of our workforce creating their initial goals within Workday,” says Henwood.
Henwood notes that self-service is not only popular with the university workforce but has also halved the number of tickets received by the People and Culture function.
In our legacy systems, teams would regularly deal with 4,000+ tickets. About 50% of those tickets have been replaced by self-service task activities in the Workday environment.
Head of Employee Experience
Enabling payroll to offer proactive services.
Previously, the university’s legacy payroll system had been incredibly labor-intensive. “Just as one example, we used to review every leave booking that went into our payroll system,” says Henwood.
In the first 6 months of operating within Workday, 8,000 transactions disappeared from the payroll team’s workload. Freed from manual data entry, people are now able to provide a more proactive service to the institution. “It’s such a welcome change after being reactive all the time,” says Henwood.
Using AI responsibly to improve decision-making.
Henwood is excited about the opportunities to harness AI within Workday. “The use of AI within the university and our Workday environment is critical to our future,” Henwood says. “The goal is for People and Culture teams to provide rich, robust data to our people leaders to support accurate, well-informed, and timely decisions. We’re moving from being data entry and transactional people to adding value to the university.”
Henwood is also mindful that getting the most out of the Workday environment requires university staff to entrust People and Culture with significant amounts of personal data that AI tools will interrogate. “Knowing that Workday is committed to responsible AI gives us confidence to ask our colleagues to trust us with information about their skills, qualifications, and demographics so that we can employ AI to maximize employee mobility across our workforce.”
It’s extremely important for us that Workday is rolling out AI in a responsible manner.
Head of Employee Experience