Exploring the core principles of a successful talent philosophy, highlighting the elements that drive employee engagement, performance, and growth.
Chris Ernst
Chief Learning Officer
Workday
My life's work is to awaken the full potential of organizations through their people. I bring to this a balance of sound science, with a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology, and personal growth, with three decades of leadership experience driving business strategy through talent strategy. My goal for this blog series is to engage with you—practitioner to practitioner—around the HR challenges and opportunities that matter most for moving business forever forward.
Talent orchestrators are constantly being pulled in different directions, from workforce planning, to hiring, to development, to administrative processes.
With so many competing priorities, it’s easy to lose sight of our true north and how our efforts tie into an organization’s broader success. The antidote to this? Implementing a talent philosophy, which can help an organization stitch together a unified fabric of human capital, even in the headwinds of change.
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A talent philosophy is a dynamic and deeply embedded set of principles that guides every talent-related decision. At Workday, we refer to this as our People Commitment, articulating the commitment between our leaders and our Workmates to be a business that is driven by values, invested in Workmates, and powered by Performance. Like our People Commitment at Workday, a talent philosophy is a guiding thread that can be woven throughout your organization, helping create one cohesive and aligned team, spanning across your enterprise.
This alignment helps talent professionals meet the highest priority objectives that an organization ties to its workforce. It also enables leaders across organizations to march in the same direction.
Whether your workforce programs are in the early or more mature stages, talent philosophies aren’t stagnant: they should align to your workforce strategy, and grow and shift with the business.
When put together correctly and intentionally, a talent philosophy enables your organization to:
Empower leaders: When leaders believe in the talent philosophy, they become champions for change. They can confidently connect high-level principles to everyday talent decisions.
Build trust and transparency: A shared understanding of expectations fosters trust and transparency between managers, employees, and HR. Everyone is on the same page, reducing conflict and uncertainty.
Maximize employee potential: Employees thrive when they understand what’s expected of them and how they can grow within the organization. A clear talent philosophy provides that clarity, allowing employees to focus their energy on innovation and achieving their best work.
Attract the right talent: A talent philosophy is a powerful magnet for attracting people who align with your values and culture. It ensures a better fit and sets the stage for long-term success.
Pulling all of these objectives together can act as a catalyst to propel your organization’s workforce toward higher impact.
Our People Commitment is a guiding thread that can be woven throughout your organization, helping create one cohesive and aligned team, spanning across various functions.
When we decided to revisit our core talent principals at Workday, our executive committee partnered with the People & Purpose Team (P&P) and Talent Strategy Group (TSG) to roll up our sleeves and spearhead the work together. TSG put together a survey that 12 executives, 26 senior functional leaders, and 5 P&P leaders participated in, along with a 1:1 interview to clarify their responses and add depth to their perspectives. Some of the questions were:
How is our current approach to talent getting in the way of our business goals?
How is our “performance bar” changing as Workday scales?
Can you be a culture carrier if you aren’t delivering high performance?
The resulting data, along with a series of intensive executive committee workshops, yielded invaluable insights and provided a comprehensive view from various levels of management and leadership.
One of my favorite insights from these workshops came in the form of a debate when discussing the relationship between the “what” of performance and the “how” of cultural values. We were asking ourselves: Can an employee be meeting performance expectations if they are a culture carrier, while not fully delivering on business performance? And conversely, can employees meet expectations if they are crushing it on performance, but not being a culture carrier?
This is a classic leadership dilemma, but as a result of the debate emerged an explicit belief: Performance at Workday requires both delivering on goals and demonstrating our values in action. In turn, this belief became an essential factor in how every Workday employee is assessed for performance today.
Our leadership team came out of this exercise fully aligned, establishing a true north for our talent strategy, ensuring we were all heading in the same direction. Sheri Rhodes, chief customer officer here at Workday, explains it best: “With survey and interview data, we could see that leadership had distinct and different views on the current state of talent management across the company—yet were highly aligned on the future state. These conversations were much needed.”
With our People Commitment established, our next challenge was to rethink our talent practices and how to implement these practices holistically through our Workday platform. The goal was to identify consistent, equitable, and scalable talent practices that would drive high performance and enable employees to learn new skills and advance their careers.
It’s important to acknowledge that a talent philosophy, like a blueprint of a house, won’t build itself. It will only be as effective as their integration into your business.
This is where the intersection between a talent philosophy and technology comes to the forefront. Architecting your tech stack in a way that supports your talent philosophy is required for success. You can have the world’s best strategy, but without technology supporting it in coming to life, it will fall flat.
In a recent study by SHRM, it was reported that only 18% of CHROs have seamlessly integrated HR strategies, often resulting in slower profit growth for misaligned organizations. This demonstrates the added value of not only having a strategy, but ensuring it’s leveraged. Infusing your strategy into programs, systems, and technology helps to maximize potential at scale.
Behind any great tech strategy or talent strategy there needs to be a clear talent philosophy, and—in full transparency—we learned that lesson too in formalizing our Workday People Commitment.
When we were ready to weave our People Commitment into our programs, we knew we needed to bring all 20,000 of our Workmates along on the journey. This required:
Ownership: We equipped and empowered people managers to drive goal setting, conduct meaningful career check-ins with each team member, and ensure team-wide compliance.
Accountability: Automated, guided processes for documenting career check-ins, coupled with notifications to senior leaders about key metrics (like the frequency of one-on-ones and goal setting completion rates), ensured that everyone stayed on track.
Transparency: This requires nurturing a culture of trust and psychological safety. Research shows that when employees feel safe to speak up, take risks, and be themselves, they are more engaged, innovative, and ultimately, successful.
Every employee received an overview of the updates and had the opportunity to join discussions about how our values in action aligned to the People Commitment, such as adopting a growth mindset, acting with speed, and having candid conversations.
Our commitment to transparency extended beyond the traditional performance review process. Workday significantly enhanced the visibility of employee goals and progress, openly communicated potential career paths and skill-building opportunities, provided greater clarity around succession planning, and even introduced pay transparency on all job profiles and requisitions in the U.S. and Canada.
We clearly communicated these changes to managers, and we actively engaged employees in conversations that fostered a culture of openness and trust. The final, and crucial, step was to connect these practices back to tangible outcomes.
By empowering people managers to drive goal setting, facilitate meaningful career check-ins, and ensure team-wide understanding of our talent principles, we could measure the impact of our People Commitment on key metrics, particularly employee sentiment around career growth and opportunity. Here are some of the tangible results:
Building a talent philosophy that truly works isn't about crafting a static document; it's about establishing a dynamic and deeply embedded set of principles that guide every talent-related decision. And it most definitely isn’t about taking a “flavor of the month approach,” constantly changing talent practices based on the newest fad or technology to come along.
It requires a multi-year commitment to understanding your organization's unique culture and context, engaging leaders at all levels, and consistently weaving those principles into your processes, technologies, and most importantly, your culture.
By doing so, you're not just managing talent; you're architecting human potential, creating an environment where individuals thrive, and ultimately, propelling your organization toward sustained success. This is the essence of a talent philosophy that moves beyond aspiration and delivers tangible impact.
Read the full story of our work with the Talent Strategy Group today to build your workforce of tomorrow.
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