Ferring Pharmaceuticals is a research-driven biopharmaceutical company whose mission is to help people live better lives. The right business culture is key in empowering employees to align with this goal. For that reason, Ferring wants to create an environment where people are fully engaged as they work hard and enjoy the freedom to innovate. Achieving a high level of employee satisfaction is a core element of the Ferring strategy.
To foster that productive, engaged environment, Ferring hoped to cultivate a culture of learning and continuous development where employees could connect with new opportunities and interesting projects. It also wanted to gain greater agility in managing its global workforce. Disruption of the normal course of business during the pandemic made these goals more urgent.
A remedy for improving people operations.
Ferring is an enthusiastic Workday customer. Among other Workday applications, the company uses Workday Human Capital Management as the system of record for managing personnel and Workday Recruiting to manage internal and external searches. It is currently rolling out Workday Time and Absence to manage employees’ time. Ferring also uses the Workday Skills Cloud, which infers skills from Workday data—including job profiles, experience, feedback, learning, and certifications—to populate workers’ skills profiles. What Ferring still lacked, however, was a way to connect workers with recommended development opportunities.
The Workday Talent Marketplace helps us connect people with opportunities and drive organization-wide change to create a culture of learning and development.
Global HR Solutions and Transformation Director
Achieving more with people’s skills.
Ferring HR team members consulted with Workday about how they could make greater use of the Workday Skills Cloud. Their Workday Customer Success Manager Laura Oliveira introduced them to the new Workday Talent Marketplace, which uses Workday Skills Cloud data to match worker skills and skill-building interests with short-term projects, known as “gigs.” It can also match workers with recommended learning content and full-time Ferring jobs. Ferring wasted no time joining an early adopter program for Workday Talent Marketplace. The project team established a global network of accountable HR stakeholders, secured executive sponsorship, and rolled out the solution in under eight weeks.
Today, managers create gigs in Workday Talent Marketplace and quickly find people with the right skills or professional development interests within the company. It’s a two-way street, and employees can also proactively pursue their own goals for growth. This allows the company to adapt easily to changing business conditions.
We can now democratize project and learning opportunities, so everybody in the company can benefit from them.
Senior Manager, HR Solutions and Transformation
Fueling professional growth for employees.
Ferring employees use Workday Talent Marketplace to find gigs that allow them to grow, practice, and refine their skills. Employees across business groups—including manufacturing, where people tend to be cautious about adopting new technologies—quickly realized that Workday Talent Marketplace could help them advance their careers and gain positive visibility with senior leaders. “Workday Talent Marketplace is a fantastic way to meet professional development needs,” says Lynn Van Oossanen, senior manager of HR Solutions and Transformation. “It allows workers to gain experience and later apply for internal job roles that might otherwise not have been open to them.”
Navigating to the next normal.
Ferring managers create gigs in Workday Talent Marketplace, review the matched workers presented by the application, and invite employees to participate. By reaching across the entire company instead of only contacting people and business groups they know, they can tackle projects faster, with talent they might not otherwise uncover. Even during the company’s pandemic-related hiring slowdown, innovative team efforts still move forward because internal skills and talent are now more visible. Vivienne Tardieu, global HR solutions and transformation director, comments, “By using Workday Talent Marketplace, we can accomplish new projects and initiatives even though the company has a hiring freeze. The artificial intelligence in Workday Talent Marketplace delivers matches quickly and allows us to move projects ahead without any delays.”
Workday Talent Marketplace gigs quickly involved large teams from all across Ferring and became a model for including diverse voices in global programs.
Global HR Solutions and Transformation Director
Filling talent gaps internally across a global organization.
The soft launch of Workday Talent Marketplace generated intense interest from such business groups as IT and HR, and it is now attracting the interest of R&D. Managers are now posting more diverse gigs than they did in the first days after the deployment. Van Oossanen says, “Internally, we refer to the Workday application as the ‘Opportunity Marketplace.’ This is the first time we can globally match skills needs with internal resources in real-time.”