Why I bet my next beat on Workday

Just about ten years ago, I joined a “once-in-a-lifetime” company, Acorio, on a mission to build inspire and guide leaders to solve some of the thorniest Digital Transformation challenges out there, working on the best workflow platform out there, ServiceNow.

As much as possible, I think we succeeded. We certainly grew, built a company and a culture to be truly proud of, and made about 350 lifelong friends. Oh, and I got to interview both Trevor Noah and Matthew McConaughey via zoom during the pandemic!

I’m so thrilled to announce I joined a team on a mission to create the same kind of magic again (with some familiar faces, including Jen Miller).

But this time, I’m joining a team looking to solve perhaps the hardest challenge facing businesses today: How to unlock the potential of their people.

So today, I finally get to share I am joining my colleagues, John Angele, Matthew Gregory, Brett Schaedler, Joshua Lumbreras, and Jen Miller at Skillcentrix, the first and only consultancy exclusively focused on the Workday Talent Journey. As (at last count) the newest Workday partner, we’re getting ready to lean into the talent journey with the best, most extensively leveraged platform solving those talent challenges today, Workday.

Why focus on the Workday Talent and Skills Platforms? 

For every urgent business challenge you’re trying to solve, talent is the answer.

• Want to scale? Talent.
• Enter a new market? Talent.
• Solve cancer? Talent.

People are the common denominator in every single business problem across the globe.

But, as many of us know first-hand, major enterprises also come with major silos, and getting many multiple stakeholders aligned on the best way to connect HCM with business initiatives is, well, hard.

Then again, to quote Tom Hanks (badly), the hard is what makes it great. Solving the hard questions using the best technology and strategy out there is what creates real change.

The Talent Paradigm Shift is here. 

We’ve certainly seen a lot of change in the employee-employer contract over the last several years.

It can feel like a full-time job for HR leaders to even keep up with the evolving trends in talent. From the Future of Work, to the Gig Economy, to Talent 4.0, to the Hybrid Workforce, to Quiet Quitting, corporate activism, and the need to bring more diverse voices into our teams, the relationship between talent and their companies has been immutably changed in the past decade, which only accelerated over the past three years.

The paradigm shift that changed the relationships between companies and their talent is already here. Unfortunately, buried under the accelerating movements above, and hampered by evolving budget constraints, occasional implementation challenges, and an exhausted workforce, it can be hard for HR leaders to know where to start.

A Deeper Layer of Connection  

The great news is that Workday and other technology partners have made incredible strides in their platforms to work to solve some of the core challenges inhibiting a truly aligned business and talent strategy.

Today, an optimized Skills Cloud and talent journey allows leaders deeper visibility into their true workforce capabilities by going beyond a list of job categories to catalog what people actually do for you.

Which can, of course, accelerate key initiatives from re-skilling and performance management – and critically – help find unique talent pools to support your diversity initiatives.

Layer in industry-aligned accelerators, machine learning, and AI, and suddenly, we have the ability to transform our organizations the way we always wanted to. We can truly solve for real the core challenges that underpin finding, growing, and optimizing talent. At scale.

A decade ago in Marketing, we used to talk about the vision of creating the right message, for the right person, at the right time. Extrapolate that, now, to the employee universe and the panacea would be finding the right role, for the right person, at the right time in their career, aligned to the right business outcomes.

We can do that by having deeper insight into the state of an organization’s talent, and the people who inhabit those roles. By understanding our humans better, we can create a more human, more connected, more empathetic relationship with them at every stage of their career. By knowing your team better, you are better armed to optimize that employee experience.

And people who feel cared about, stay. People who feel inspired will run through walls for you. They will scale 200% a year. They can. I’ve seen it.

In the meantime, I can’t wait to see what comes next for Skillcentrix.

Ready. Set. Go.