One of Western Australia’s most trusted brands, RAC, has come a long way from its origins in 1905, when a group of motoring enthusiasts formed an automobile club. With more than 5 different operating businesses—each with customized systems, processes, rosters, awards, and agreements—holistic talent management was challenging. One part of the organization, RAC Parks & Resorts, often employs backpackers and casuals who might only work for a short period and then move on.
Group Executive People Kylie Johnston knew RAC needed a more adaptive and scalable HR platform to manage its diverse workforce. RAC chose Workday to help simplify and unify its myriad of different talent, payroll, and workforce management processes. “We have a lot of stakeholders with diverse needs. Workday seemed to be adaptive and make sense for these,” says Johnston.
Moving to a skills-based organization.
General Manager, Organisation Solutions Alisa Sayer is excited about using Workday Skills Cloud to move RAC from taking a competency-based, domain-specific approach to becoming an adaptive, skills-based organization. “Rather than people following traditional career paths into black-and-white jobs and working only in a particular domain, we want to eventually create an organizational talent marketplace that helps us understand our skills at an enterprise level and enables us to quickly mobilize our people to where work needs to be done,” Sayer explains.
Workday Skills Cloud is embedded with machine learning that empowers RAC to better understand its skills and capabilities. The skills ontology in Workday Skills Cloud is built to handle the volume, complexity, and scale required to manage skills in a dynamic and growing organization. “Workday Skills Cloud is a great foundation on a familiar platform that sets RAC up for a skills-based approach,” says Sayer. “We plan to use Workday Skills Cloud to identify gaps, guide development conversations, and help people develop the skills they need for future career opportunities.”
The functionality that comes with Workday makes us think differently and act boldly to put innovative technology on our roadmap earlier than if we had to bring in a new system.
Lead, People Insights and Platforms
Improving AI use and data skills across the business.
According to Sayer, Workday is also helping RAC’s workforce become familiar with AI tools and is supporting an upskilling drive to increase data literacy. “We’re encouraging people to play with Workday tools such as the Chatbot and dashboards so they can explore and test the value that AI and data insights can bring to the work environment.
“In this tight talent market, you cannot rely on gut feel to improve retention,” Sayer continues. “We need evidence to tell us why turnover is particularly high in some areas and what we can do to reverse that trend. That means getting people confident in using data analysis tools and dashboards.”
The People and Capability team has also introduced a program to uplift data literacy across the organization, rolling out LinkedIn Learning through Workday.
Populated with a wide range of LinkedIn digital modules, the Workday learning platform uses AI to offer people personalized recommendations to improve their data skills based on existing competencies and learning preferences.
Workday has opened a door to help us understand how AI and machine learning tools can apply at work. It means our people will be ready to use more and more of these tools as the technology matures in other systems.
General Manager, Organization Solutions
Cutting through complexity to provide end-to-end visibility.
RAC’s Workday deployment unearthed levels of complexity weighing the business down. “We had more than 20 different ways of assigning and weighting performance goals,” recalls Johnston. “Every single business had customized people solutions to support these disparate processes, creating hundreds of Excel spreadsheets. Workday allowed us to streamline and standardize our processes and templates and introduce self-service for things such as our flexible work offerings. In the first 8 weeks after we launched the functionality, 11% of our workforce made a flex work request through Workday.”
Now that disparate people systems can talk to each other, Johnston has visibility across all of RAC’s businesses and access to rich data, including diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) representation. “The self-identified information we gather through Workday feeds straight into our DEIB programs, enabling us to tailor program offerings to better meet our people’s needs.”
Meeting a transient workforce on their terms.
From using paper-based files, RAC Parks & Resorts now gives new hires access to digital people processes on their phones—a popular move with backpackers. “Even in remote locations where mobile connectivity is limited, our people processes are operating smoothly,” says Lead, People Insights and Platforms, Sandhya Krishnan.
Workday has also helped to centralize recruitment for this part of the business. “Instead of a scatter-gun approach to advertising, with different park locations using platforms like SEEK, Gumtree, and Facebook, we now set ads up in a central website that posts automatically to popular sites. In the first year, Workday processed 1,600+ applications for RAC Parks & Resorts,” Krishnan says. Previously, job applications had to be sent to individual park locations.
Now RAC Parks & Resorts has automated HR processes fully unified with the rest of the organization, it has full workforce visibility.