Workday builds resilience in a time of rapid growth

Workday, a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance, HR, and planning, has been on a trajectory of hyper-growth: in the past five years, the company's headcount has more than doubled. Because Workday makes software for human resources management, it’s also committed to being a great place to work for employees. 

Senior executives worried that as the company grew, the strengths of Workday’s values-driven culture would start to dilute. People were being promoted quickly at the same time that managers were being hired from the outside. Workday needed to ensure that newly-promoted managers could support career growth for their teams while the newly hired ones could adapt to Workday’s culture.

BetterUp's is deployed to employees via invitation to their work email. After completing an initial onboarding assessment based on the Whole Person Model, employees will be delivered 3 coach matches that they can choose to work with based on their strengths and areas of opportunity: 

As part of its People Leader Effectiveness strategy, Workday partnered with BetterUp to launch a 1:1 coaching program for managers that would help them address three key objectives:

1. Build high trust team environments

2. Enable managers to provide career growth for direct reports

3. Reverse early signs of cultural dilution

Workday knew that empowering each manager with personalized support was the only way to facilitate the level of personal growth needed to meet those important objectives.

In 2022, Workday plans to add 2,500 people to its workforce. A ranking in the 2021 Fast Company Best Places for Innovators and Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2021 proves that with individualized coaching for managers, it’s possible to grow rapidly and maintain culture.