Cochlear’s mission is to help people hear and be heard, empowering them to connect with others and live a full life. At the core of this mission is a culture of innovation. “We must be able to collaborate and innovate across boundaries,” explains Jennifer Hornery, Cochlear’s senior vice president of Global People & Culture.
This imperative was top of mind for Hornery in planning the digital transformation of Cochlear’s people organization. Hornery had inherited a federated structure with disparate, outdated people systems. “All the knowledge was resident in people. There was very little documentation and a lot of manual processes. We had 50 different templates for a remuneration review,” Hornery recalls. “The way we were working was simply not scalable and certainly not able to support Cochlear’s rapid growth.”
As a trailblazer itself, Cochlear has a practice of partnering with other innovators. “Workday was definitely the right partner for us,” explains Hornery. “A leader in HCM technology, with the right solution and strongly aligned values, especially in terms of our mutual commitment to innovation.”
Helping the People & Culture team step into a partnering role.
Workday is helping Cochlear’s People & Culture team to deliver more value to the business. Hornery says Cochlear gained immediate benefits, including efficiency gains from simpler, faster, integrated processes. But the game changer is that Workday allows the team to stop doing the busy work and shift to higher-value work.
“We knew that People & Culture wanted higher-value work. Now Workday is helping the team to step up and partner with the business,” Hornery says. “People are using the rich data from Workday to bring the business new insights. We have granular visibility of our people—who they work for, how long they've been with us, their absences, their work anniversaries. All of this is in the dashboard when you open up Workday.”
Hornery says the visibility Workday brings is also assisting Cochlear’s talent development partners by highlighting skills clusters to support workforce planning.
Being able to see the organization cut and diced in different ways—that is really powerful. I can now stand in front of my board with full confidence.
Senior Vice President, Global People & Culture
Empowering the business to make better people decisions.
Workday has given managers the tools to better lead their teams and support career development. “Having accurate data, presented so clearly in simple dashboards, is empowering for managers,” says Hornery. “People are enjoying having data on demand—at their fingertips.”
Hornery is looking forward to launching Workday Adaptive Planning—and keen to join the 25% of Fortune 500 companies that are already live with Workday Skills Cloud. “I think Workday Skills Cloud will greatly enhance our skills planning and workforce planning capabilities.”
Workday gives us a new lens to look at our organization, which provokes great questions and insights, helping us make good people decisions.
Senior Vice President, Global People & Culture
Using AI to support workforce agility.
As an early AI adopter, Cochlear understands the transformative power of embedded intelligence. The fact that AI and machine learning (ML) are built into the core of the Workday platform gives Hornery confidence that People & Culture will be able to keep up with new talent trends and expectations.
“We’ll need to move increasingly quickly, informed by greater insights about our customers and employees. So it’s important to know that our HCM technology partner is investing in AI and machine learning,” Hornery says.
I’m excited to see how we can use AI to elevate human capabilities as Workday continues to make HR even more intelligent.
Senior Vice President, Global People & Culture