Challenges.
Coventry Building Society, the second largest building society in the United Kingdom, was running an outdated, overloaded legacy system that simply could not cope with business demand. There were many problems. Pay review was conducted using ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of Excel spreadsheets. Processing payments was impossible for two weeks of every month. It would cost more to update the system than replace it. Above all, Payroll was soon to be out of support—the final justification needed for a new solution.
The decision to invest in a new system represented a massive step forward for our people.
Chief People Officer
Product knowledge inspires total confidence.
Selecting a new partner was a huge decision and subsequent investment for Coventry Building Society and as such, the tendering process was extremely detailed. The Workday team was the only one that presented to us and were able to immediately answer all questions posed. The Society’s inclusive selection panel, featuring executive team members, as well as IT specialists, managers and end-users, found this extremely reassuring.
The Workday solution stood out, too. According to Lucy Becque, the Society’s Chief People Officer, “The perfect integration of the security that runs all the way through it, the insights for managers, the amazing front-end user experience, the easy configuration that we can do ourselves. All this made the decision for Workday absolutely unanimous. It was a country mile different to what I’d ever seen before.”
Strong support for the decision continued after appointment. “We did so many demos, and every time enjoyed seeing the reaction from people and their ‘Oh wow’ moments as they saw the difference from our legacy system,” says Lucy Becque.
We decommissioned 23 manual processes on day one, leading the shift away from paper.
Chief People Officer
Transformative from the outset.
On day one, the team decommissioned 23 manual processes, starting a shift away from paper that has revolutionized the way the HR team work and interactions with employees and managers. Employees have found using Workday so intuitive that they have hardly used the guides produced to help them. Processes have been streamlined beyond recognition. Signed and counter-signed forms, for example, have been replaced by a single digital submission, stripping out time and effort. These and other gains are enabling people to be more self-sufficient and productive, freeing management time. It is proving easy to tweak the system to give users new functionality, ensuring everybody has exactly what they need, at all times.
We can now process expenses in Workday fortnightly, rather than monthly, which is great for employee experience.
Chief People Officer
Improved information and decision-making.
The risk of manual error has largely been eliminated, significantly increasing data confidence across the Society. Now, people are empowered to access and manage their data. Managers have the information they need to make good decisions and are authorized to act on it.
It’s also far easier to see trends and patterns across the workforce, making it simpler to track Diversity & Inclusion targets, for example, or quantify COVID-19 absenteeism at the touch of a button. According to Lucy Becque, “We’ve just completed our first pay review. I could literally see in real time what decisions were being made and how the picture was building. Every anomaly was nicely flagged and simplified. It’s been transformational.”
Everybody’s experience has been transformed—they now know exactly where every process is, with no need to waste time chasing, backdating or making interim payments.
Chief People Officer
“Doing things differently and better…”
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated the Society’s response to digitization, driven by the need for all communication, management and engagement to be virtual. For the HR team, Workday has acted as a powerful catalyst for finding new ways of automating processes. As Lucy Becque says, “Before the pandemic, we never had more than 200 people working from home. Then we suddenly had 1,600 people working remotely. With Workday, we could challenge ourselves to think and do things differently and better, rather than doing what was familiar but unnecessary.
You can tell Workday is a system that’s been built from the ground up, not disparate pieces that have been bolted together. Because of this, it has offered us a greatly streamlined and impactful experience.
Chief People Officer