With over six million daily active users, Slack has fast become the tool of choice to maximise collaboration across the workforce for many organisations. I’m sure half the people reading will have heard of Slack or even have experience using it, and due to its popular success, the demand for Slack to be a more ‘neutral hub’ to streamline workflows has enabled partnerships with Oracle, SAP, Google, Salesforce, Service now and even Workday.
The integration of Slack and Workday is no new news, and although I may seem late to the party choosing to comment on it now, I still find myself quite curious about this joint venture. Why you may ask? As part of my job, I speak to Workday professionals every single day, who tell me about the business processes of Workday and the ins and outs of configuring the system. I also personally use Slack to communicate with my colleagues at Third Republic. As a result, I find it fun to attempt to visualise what Slack will look like when it’s integrated with Workday features, and whether this will potentially open up new roles within the Workday ecosystem for integration analysts.
Slack’s primary purpose is to serve as a messaging platform, and despite the overlapping functions, it’s still technically not a project management tool that can replace services like Basecamp. Personally, I really enjoy using Slack and think it’s a very efficient app in terms of speed, simplicity, and convenience. I find it’s especially useful to communicate with those who are hard to reach across the office. Instead of having to take a long walk across the office, I can slack my colleague in a few seconds: ‘What time is our meeting?’, or ‘Can you send over that important file?’ or even ‘What are the plans for lunch?’.
Convenience aside, when it comes to the technicalities this integration will apparently enable employees to access co-worker information, reference organisation charts, provide feedback to a colleague, check your benefits and even request time off without leaving the Slack application! I personally wouldn’t mind seeing a ‘request for holidays’ button on our Slack app instead of having to use our online HR system which no one knows their login details for. On that note , I certainly see how this integrated functionality will be maximising the investment of Workday for companies.
However, I do wonder whether including new Workday features on Slack would upset those who enjoy using the app for its simplicity. Afterall, Slack was originally intended to be just a messaging function and some people like to keep things separate. By including all these additional functionalities, it can be argued that the sole purpose of Slack is changing. Also, if this integration really is a success then will this mean that over time, users will start to move away from using Workday as frequently which could potentially pose an issue?
I’ve spoken with many Workday Change and Transformation specialists as well as clients who are always in need for a consultant to implement change and training strategy to drive Workday engagement, user adoption, and even re adoption. I had a call the other day with a Change and Transformation director who was on a Workday project recently, who told me it’s a common misconception that companies think as soon as Workday goes live, people will instantly utilise it, explore it, and innately maximise all the features of Workday.
It takes training and educating people about the advantages of Workday for people to slowly come on board. It’s common human behaviour to be resistant to change at first, and it’s a pretty big change if you’re used to physically having company data and information being stored on paper and then having it all digitalised and vanish up in the clouds, the clouds that is the cloud-based platform and the cloud-based solution, namely Workday. So, if user adoption is already a touchy subject for companies trying to drive Workday engagement then it’s probably not the best idea to do anything that’ll encourage users to move away from the platform altogether. What do you think?
To summarise, yes; I’m quite curious to know what the slack interface looks like in comparison to the standard after being integrated with Workday functions and whether it’s had a positive reception for users. As Workday CTO Joe Korngiebel comments, ‘Our partners like Slack are incredibly important in helping our customers maximise the value of their Workday investments’. So on that note, I’m sure this partnership will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. It’s a bit sad, but I’m actually looking forward to seeing what new integrated features they’ll come up with and how complex these integrations will get.
If anyone reading has experience using Slack with integrated features from their HR system, I’ve got questions for you! Do you think it’s a good idea? What are the benefits it’s had on you? How has the interface changed? And how big of a difference does it make?
Share your thoughts with me! 🙂
