Workday has a great story. A rise from the PeopleSoft ashes after big bad Oracle came and ruined their party. The values Dave and Aneel brought and put into Workday at the beginning are great. The extreme growth of the company has made it near impossible to keep those values in-tact over the last several years, allowing it to unfortunately only exist in pockets.
If you can find the right team, it’s possible to find a happy home at Workday. While this is often true at any organization, the risks are greater at Workday, as their leadership has done a poor job to hold managers accountable and keep that culture together. This is especially true in the Support organization where micro management reigns.
Leaders and managers are not held accountable. HR has done their best to facilitate feedback sessions within organizations. The ending results end up being nothing, as the leaders who receive poor feedback either push back or never change, and even worse, are not required to by their own leaders.
The leaders of customer support are notorious for extreme micro management. It’s common practice to see the VPs and Directors actively commenting on support cases and internal incidents, often when the case or incident is already under control and being processed successfully by an analyst. When their own people have pushed back to complain that this limits their growth and autonomy, they have been ignored or no action has been taken to try to correct, it’s just the way it is.
There is an extreme lack of accountability and collective team attitude built into Workday’s culture. When things are running smooth, everyone is happy. Hope and pray you aren’t the one who makes a mistake, because the mindset across orgs is the blame game. I was shocked to see common attitudes of “This is X’s fault” in this org rather than “How do we work through this together and prevent it in the future”. This is a cultural problem that stems down from the top.
Career growth and progression are not clear. Culturally the mindset has been to put the manager in charge of facilitating growth and feedback within their own people. This is great when the manager is comfortable having career discussions with their people and meets with them frequently. Given Workday has struggled to coach and train their managers to be successful at this, many managers do a poor job, leaving employees confused on where they stand, and what their future options are, both at Workday and within their existing organization.
