Workday employee engagement: sample survey

Are your HR and financial employees engaging with your Workday tenant? How do you survey them to learn more?

The most important — and often most challenging — aspect of migrating to a new cloud platform is ensuring your teams choose to use, and know how to use, the new technology. Because many legacy systems are cumbersome and error prone, your workers may be used to completing their tasks outside of the system, skipping steps in business processes they know to be previously ineffective, or disregarding training updates as they were formerly not active users of your HR and financial platforms.

Identifying and measuring the rate of Workday employee engagement after deploying your new platform is important to meeting the goals you’ve set regarding your return on investment. One of the main justifications many organizations have around migrating to a new platform is increased usability of their technology, including better analytics and reporting insights, more efficient processes and minimizing errors around daily tasks. If your workers are not using their new technology effectively, then both they and your stakeholders cannot reap the benefits of your investment.

Sometimes job aids are not enough. You might be missing an optimization opportunity with your platform that could make using your new system more engaging to your HR and financial teams.

That’s why we’ve created a sample survey for Workday employee engagement. You can use these questions to measure how well your new cloud platform is being utilized by your workers.

Simply plug the text below into your survey distribution tool of choice and send out to your HR or financial teams to get a pulse check of your workforce and start the journey toward a better return on your investment.

Please note that you can adjust this content to measure the engagement levels of your most recently deployed module. It is suggested to distribute these questions as a survey to your employees approximately one month after your go-live date, again at six months and finally at your year mark. You can also use these questions to develop a new survey anytime you deploy a new module or want to take inventory of how your team is utilizing the tools provided by your system.

The suggested rating scale for these questions is as follows:

1. Untrue

2. Neutral

3. True

Workday employee engagement suggested questions

Suggested survey opening summary

Thanks for taking the time to complete this survey. This should take no more than five minutes and gives your HR and/or finance leadership team important feedback regarding your recent Workday deployment.

General

These questions are to measure the general feelings your employees have toward your organization’s decision to deploy Workday and throughout the first few weeks of your go-live stabilization period.

1. I feel that I had input in my organization’s decision to move to a new HR/ financial platform.
2. I feel that my organization made the best decision for its workforce by deciding to move to Workday.
3. I feel that I had adequate training on my new HR/ financial platform prior to my organization fully transitioning from our legacy system.
4. I feel that I have resources readily available to me to assist if I get stuck or have questions.

Usability

How well is your team using your Workday tenant?

1. My new HR/ financial platform does not hinder my ability to complete my tasks.
2. My new HR/ financial platform has increased the ability at which I can complete my tasks.
3. I can quickly find the information I need in Workday.
4. I have been able to utilize the reporting, dashboard and analytic tools made available to me to assist in completing my tasks.
5. I feel I could explain to a new colleague how to use my new system. 
6. I do not feel frustrated trying to complete my daily tasks in Workday.

Understanding

How well does your team understand your intentions in moving to a new HR or financial platform?

1. I understand the way my leadership wants me to use our new Workday system to complete my day to day tasks.
2. I do not regularly complete my tasks outside of Workday (spreadsheets, email, pen and paper).
3. I do not believe the new system overcomplicates the way I am expected to complete my tasks.
4. I believe the way our business processes are structured (approvals, next steps, etc.) streamlines way I am expected to complete my tasks.
5. I see benefit in the dashboards, analytics and reporting capabilities Workday offers me in completing my daily tasks. 
6. I do not have to return to job aids or reach out to our HRIS/finance team frequently for assistance when I get stuck on tasks.  

Improvement

How has your transformation to Workday positively impacted your team?

1. Workday is a better day-to-day experience for me than our legacy system.
2. Workday has improved the speed at which I can complete my daily tasks.
3. Workday offers a more streamlined process for me to follow when accomplishing tasks.
4. My ability to report on data specific to my job has increased since our transition to Workday.
5. My ability to analyze data specific to my job has increased since our transition to Workday.
6. The workers I support come to me less often with questions regarding our HR/ financial platform now than they did with our legacy system.
7. I feel I have more time now to complete strategic work for the business than before with our legacy system.
8. I feel I am less busy now with transactional tasks than before with our legacy system.

Based on the results of your survey, we’ve provided the following recommendations.

Low ratings in the General section

Your HR and financial teams may feel that they were not provided with adequate training and resources with your transformation to Workday to continue to effectively do their jobs. It’s easy to become distracted with the grittier aspects of the deployment process and pay less attention to how your end user is absorbing all these rapid changes. Alight’s cloud advisory solutions provide system fit-gap analysis, stabilization services and change management programs designed to help you achieve harmony between your new Workday tenant and your workers’ needs. Find out what else we can do to help you course-correct and realize your ROI here.
 

Low ratings in the Usability section

Your team may be experiencing issues using your new tenant due to complex interface design, inefficient business process setup and incorrect security assignments. One big mistake we see our clients come in with is the fallacy that they should design their new Workday system to replicate their legacy system, instead of viewing their deployment as an opportunity for establishing new best practices and operational procedures. Our Alight Tenant Optimizer services include a tenant assessment to diagnose any errors or complexities that may be hindering your team from using your system to the best of their ability as well as access to benchmarking metrics to ensure your business is where it should be compared to others in your industry.
 

Low ratings in the Understanding section

You may have discussed with your deployment partner all the ways you plan to utilize your Workday tenant for bigger and better results, but how well does your team understand this plan once you’re actually live? All those dashboards are useless if your team isn’t sure where to look or how to use them. The right application management services (AMS) partner not only guides your leadership team throughout your Workday journey, but also gives you the tools you need for effective knowledge transfers of the processes you’ve been heavily involved in, to the teams you manage. From expert assistance to full management of your applications, find out  how Alight can help you and your entire team achieve your desired ROI here.
 

Low ratings in the Improvement section

Your can do everything right with your deployment and still feel that you are not effectively leveraging your new Workday tenant several months, or even several years, after your go-live date. That’s because historically your HRIS/finance team may have operated as a static component of your business, serving only to fix any system bugs or work the occasional upgrade. However, as technology continues to rapidly evolve, your team must take on a much more strategic approach to your AMS strategy in order to keep your business operations where they need to be for organizational success. Our Alight Total AMS package includes end-to-end configuration and integration support as well as release management consultation and strategic roadmap planning to keep your business ahead of the curve and continuously improving the experience of your users and your businesses’ ability to meet its goals. See what our AMS leaders have to say about this shift in strategy here.