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The Pleasanton-based enterprise software company Workday hosted its most recent and largest-ever conference in San Francisco last week, with thousands of attendees from across the range of companies that make up its customer base and target market flocking to the Moscone Center from Sept. 26-29.
This year’s Workday Rising conference was centered on a hot topic across industries in recent years — the future of the workplace amid developments in technology and artificial intelligence.
The event attracted approximately 15,000 attendees, making it the largest Workday Rising conference in the company’s 18-year history since it first set foot into the marketplace from its home base in Pleasanton, according to company officials.
Since being established in 2005, the company has expanded and come to be adopted by a range of companies, including more than half of those currently on the Fortune 500 list, co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri said in a keynote talk on Sept. 27, with Workday itself eying a place on that list by next year.
“The platform continues to expand with 5,000 core customers,” Bhusri said. “But none of this growth happens without happy customers.”
Although the widely discussed advancement of AI has given rise to concerns about what jobs the technology can and will be able to perform in the future, and what will happen to workers currently in those roles, Bhusri and other Workday representatives sought to emphasize the ways in which AI can be harnessed responsibly and in harmony with existing workers.
According to Bhusri and the company’s Chief People Officer Ashley Goldsmith, the well-being of employees is a core value of the company since before its inception that carries into the present day and its future trajectory.
“Employees are always No. 1, and the simple reason is that I’ve never seen a company that has happy customers and unhappy employees,” Bhusri said.
Goldsmith — who is celebrating a decade in her position at Workday this year — told the Weekly that while a number of things have changed during her tenure at Workday and in the human resources realm more broadly, people continue to be front and center at the company.
“We think about technology as supporting humans to let humans do what we do best — and there’s so many things we’re uniquely excellent at that we think technology can help us do some things better than what we’ve done on our own, faster in some cases than we might have done on our own,” Goldsmith said.
“And then there’s work that most humans just don’t necessarily enjoy, and if we can give that to a technology, something that’s highly repetitive that doesn’t stimulate, then great — let’s direct the stimulating things that call for our judgment, our ability to synthesize to pass through life’s filter,” she continued. “Let’s let the humans do that great work, and hopefully let the technology help them do it better and enjoy it more.”
While Workday’s customer base has grown to include thousands of high-profile companies throughout the world, their products are also in use by companies closer to home in the Tri-Valley — such as John Muir Health, where the technology has been in use throughout the nonprofit health care system since being fully implemented in 2019, and amid its inroads into the Tri-Valley with its proposed acquisition of San Ramon Regional Medical Center from Tenet Healthcare.
John Muir Health Controller Jeffrey Smith told the Weekly that officials there are expecting final Federal Trade Commission approval of the SRRMC acquisition within the first two weeks of November. With the acquisition poised to be the health care system’s largest in recent history, he said that he and others at John Muir were already looking towards ways to leverage their current Workday system to accommodate the move.
“We’re working with Workday right now to start adding the bones so to speak or the structure of the San Ramon hospital,” Smith said. “So it’s about 650 employees, and so we’re starting to do the build for that now to bring those employees on when we hope to close that deal out later this year. So that’s going to be a huge component of our success to acquire the hospital and transition those additional employees into the system.”
With John Muir Health expecting to keep current SRRMC staff on through the acquisition and bring them into their own health care system, he added that they are specifically looking toward ways to streamline the onboarding process for a smooth transition.
“Because it’s web-based — San Ramon people, some will probably come to our offices in Walnut Creek for some main orientation and stuff like that — but because of the web-based structure they can access a lot of the things remotely, so it helps reduce a lot of time for the people driving around to meetings, sharing information, those kinds of things for employee onboarding and ongoing training needs and things like that,” Smith said.
Despite its growing profile and name recognition, the broadness of Workday’s customer base and products can make its function somewhat opaque to laypeople. Goldman described the company as an “enterprise provider of cloud-based software for finance and HR.”
“Our goal is to help our customers be successful, thriving businesses with happy and growing employees,” Goldsmith said.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, that has been an increasingly difficult goal to accomplish in the health care realm, where workers have been increasingly hard to retain and recruit amid what Smith described as an “exodus” of talent in the field amid an aging Baby Boomer population opting to retire and an increasingly competitive atmosphere in nursing schools.
“It’s been harder to get more trained people in the door so to speak as well,” Smith said. “Here in our area, it’s a high cost of living area so for some clinicians it’s hard to get into the market if they’re not already here as far as the housing situation.”
He added that attracting talented health care professionals has become increasingly competitive as wages increase and John Muir competes with larger healthcare systems such as Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health.
While advancements and new products at Workday and in the technology industry in general may not have broad, sweeping solutions to address employment and supply chain issues facing healthcare and a range of other industries, Smith said that Workday has helped and continues to help contend with them on a day-to-day basis.
“Usually not-for-profits don’t have the most funding, whether it’s a health care system or a government entity or whatever else,” Smith said. “So whatever you can do for saving money on printing hard copies of things, or mailing stuff out, or those kinds of things that really drag on a nonprofit organization’s financial results and their time and resources.”
“So with Workday for any nonprofit or any organization, that really helps to automate more, helps to give you more information quickly to make decisions faster, whether that’s financial information or employee hours trending or maybe your spend history and what kind of things you’re spending your money on,” he continued.
Smith noted that Workday was also being used to help plan and hire for the new Behring Pavilion at John Muir’s Walnut Creek hospital, which is set to be the new home of the system’s cancer care facilities following a hefty donation from the late Blackhawk developer Ken Behring’s foundation.
“We’re anticipating the cancer building opening in February,” Smith said. “That’s about a $300 million building, so with Workday we’ve been having to set up a lot of different cost centers and departments that are going into that building as well. So we’ve been spending time adding those cost centers and making sure those things are set up to appropriately support the different cancer departments that will be in that particular building as well.”
He added that John Muir will also be leveraging more AI technology from Workday as part of the hiring process for the new cancer center.
“Generally, I think the job description creates generally — and we do have some unique new positions for the cancer building that we are recruiting for and hiring for — but with the AI job description that will save a lot of time going forward as well,” Smith said.
Goldsmith said that while she was optimistic about the future of technology in general and Workday in particular, it would remain crucial in the future for her company and others to listen to the concerns raised by customers and employees about the rapid development and implementation of new technology, and to address concerns in order to foster the trust required for widespread adoption.
“Be conscious of the fact that like anything, there’s always some risks associated with it,” Goldsmith said. “So pay attention to things like what you’re reading on social media, or places where I think we all need to use care that we’re making sure that what we’re reading — and whether it’s a technology at work or something at home — that we’re using things that we know we have trust in.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the Workday official in the top photo. He is Workday co-president Sayan Chakraborty. DanvilleSanRamon regrets the error.
