Levi Olmstead
What Is Workday People Experience? +Limitations, Alternatives
- Published: July 26, 2023
- Updated: April 24, 2024
11,000+ enterprises have invested in Workday as their core HCM solution, giving it one of the highest market shares of any HCM system or HR management platform. In the age of the digital workplace, many companies are exploring new ways of providing employees with better digital spaces, guided experiences, and self-serviceability.
That’s why Workday has introduced its new People Experience (PEX) add-on to its Workday HCM application, helping to power a more people-centric HR experience that provides detailed guidance on HR-related tasks and processes, and enables employees to be more productive.
In this article, we’ll explore Workday People Experience and its capabilities, highlight its limitations, and provide recommendations on more robust digital adoption platforms that drive software adoption through better, more contextual employee experiences and in-app guidance.
What Is Workday People Experience (PEX)?
Workday People Experience (or PEX) is a Workday add-on that enhances the employee experience and drives engagement within its HCM system. It provides a user-friendly UI, personalized in-app dashboards, guided user assistance, and tools to streamline HR processes, improve collaboration, and empower employees with self-service capabilities.
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Capabilities of Workday People Experience
Workday PEX is broken into four major components:
- Workday Journeys
- Workday Today
- Workday Assist
- Workday Help
Let’s explore each capability in more detail:
1. Workday Journeys
Workday Journeys provides teams with the tools to create custom in-app journeys that can be launched via the Workday Today homepage.
These journeys offer in-app guidance to support HCM end-users in the moment of need on HR-related tasks like:
- Improve the experience of everyday people-related tasks like requesting time off, viewing an organization chart, updating personal information, checking holiday schedules, viewing a receipt paystub, etc.
- Improve onboarding process with guided experiences for tasks like reviewing benefits, setting up beneficiaries, ordering business cards, connecting a bank account for direct deposit, adding emergency contacts, setting up 401k, etc.
- Crisis responses or tasks that are infrequently completed like completing a performance review, filing an incident report, finding an employee’s emergency contact, accepting stock option grants, etc.
Workday admins and HR leaders can create these step-by-step instructions with Workday’s no-code Journey editor, as seen in the example below:
2. Workday Today
Workday Today is a personalized homepage inside the HCM that provides a real-time view of tasks, company announcements, product updates, recommendations, and other relevant information. Today presents this information using cards and suggested tasks.
- Cards: Cards help take users to specific areas inside Workday that are dynamic. This can be cards for upcoming time off, remaining PTO, feedback, birthdays, performance review reminders, etc.
- Tasks: Tasks use machine learning to train itself on the tasks an individual performs every day with Workday and then suggest new tasks and processes based on the previous actions performed inside the HCM.
3. Workday Assist
Workday Assist is a digital assistant that end-users can talk with to help complete tasks and find important knowledge and information. Workday Assist can help end-users provide feedback to other employees, request time off, view recent paystubs, view employee details, view company hierarchy, and more.
4. Workday Help
Workday Help provides organizations the tools to build and manage HR-related support documentation and help processes, to deflect HR-related questions.
- HR case management: HR case management provides employees with an IT support portal to ask and resolve HR-related questions between employees and HR team leaders.
- HR knowledge management: HR knowledge base is a built-in internal knowledge base that allows teams to create, organize, manage, and track knowledge base support articles.
Limitations of Workday People Experience
While Workday PEX provides the benefit of being a built-in, native product addition to Workday HCM, it also has its limitations. The most critical limitations of Workday PEX include:
1. Exclusively for Workday HCM
As a built-in experience add-on for Workday, its PEX platform capabilities only work on Workday’s HCM.
For many HR-related processes, employees must use cross-platform workflows – maybe you use a separate tool for performance reviews, managing stock equity, or recruiting and talent acquisition.
While Workday PEX can integrate with a few applications, they are all team communication and collaboration-related (Slack, MS Teams, Zoom, and Google Workplace.)
For building cross-application guidance and support for your entire tech stack, a dedicated digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix is a robust solution to providing consistent, cross-app flows and guidance.
“Although the Workday DAP has only been live for a few months, we’re achieving 94% user engagement and 91% self help search success. This accelerated proficiency ensures we capitalize faster on the great Workday attributes: employee engagement, streamlined people processes, and improved collaboration across the organization.”
Colleen Behnke, Learning and Performance Specialist, Sentry Insurance
2. It's a simple guidance tool that lacks advanced digital adoption features
Workday PEX provides HR teams with basic guidance and help features. Modern DAPs like Whatfix provide HR and IT teams with many guidance and adoption capabilities beyond essential guidance.
With a tool like Whatfix, organizations are empowered with:
- A no-code editor to create branded in-app guidance such as product tours, guided flows, task lists, smart tips, beacons, field validations, and more.
- Embed a self-help wiki that automatically crawls your knowledge repositories, providing end-users a searchable help center UI overlay on any application.
- Contextual workflows based on user role and IF/THEN capabilities to customize your in-app guidance and messaging further.
- In-app feedback to validate the effectiveness of guided experiences and leverage survey capabilities to gather valuable insights from employees, enabling continuous improvements to enhance the overall employee experience.
- Auto translation to quickly provide in-app content in any language, as well as auto-exporting that allows end-users to export guidance and help content in PDF, Word doc, GIF, or video formats to repurpose content across all your learning and development programs like webinars or LMS courses.
- Advanced in-app content usage and overall product engagement analytics to identify precise employee friction areas or drop-offs and to tailor guidance that addresses specific issues within the application, ensuring a smoother and more productive user experience.
Above: In-app employee guidance created with the Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform
Whatfix’s DAP empowers organizations with a no-code editor to create in-app guided flows, onboarding tasklists, pop-ups, tooltips, alerts, reminders, self-help wikis, and more to enable employees to use software better. Enable your employees to become proficient in new applications faster, create interactive process documentation, guide users through process changes, assist employees through infrequent tasks, and provide self-help performance support on your CRM, ERP, HCM, or any desktop, web, or mobile application.
3. Incomplete analytics
While Workday does offer end-user analytics and event tracking, Whatfix PEX only comes with high-level “view” and “completion” event data.
- Views represent the total number of end-users that have seen an in-app prompt or message.
- Completes represents the percentages of end-users who viewed an in-app prompt or message that engaged with the action button or journey.
All other advanced end-user analytics can be added with Workday’s analytics and reporting add-on – which comes at a hefty price tag for enterprises. Many DAPs offer full end-user behavior analytics, custom event tracking, and reporting capabilities built-in to their offerings.
Why Whatfix Is the Best Workday People Experience Alternative
While Workday PEX can help HR admins and leaders drive the adoption of critical people-related tasks, deflect HR case tickets, and create a better self-service employee experience, it’s still quite limited compared to enterprise digital adoption platforms like Whatfix.
Here are a few of the reasons enterprises should invest in a complete digital adoption platform to drive adoption of software applications and digital processes across their digital workplace:
1. Whatfix integrates with all cloud, desktop, or mobile applications
While Workday PEX only works on Workday HCM, Whatfix provides a robust, consistent in-app experience across all your enterprise applications, and on any cloud, desktop, or mobile application.
Any SaaS vendor, from CRM, ERP, HCM, ATS, LMS, ERP, or you name it – to completely custom-built internal or customer-facing applications, Whatfix has you covered with full integrations to create in-app guidance and self-help user support.
2. Digital adoption platform leader with advanced features
Whatfix provides organizations with an advanced digital adoption platform that enables HR and IT teams with a no-code editor to create in-app guided experiences, product tours, task lists, smart tips, field validations, self-help wikis, pop-ups, and more.
Whatfix also intelligently contextualizes in-app flows based on the role and location within the app they were created – reducing the manual effort needed to categorize in-app content. Whatfix has also been named a DAP leader by G2 for 9 consecutive quarters and recognized by Gartner and Forrester as a leader in the DAP space.
3. End-to-end analytics
With Whatfix’s product analytics, organizations can track any custom user action or engagement event anywhere in the Workday application. Whatfix provides analytics on user engagement, in-app content performance, and collects in-app user feedback. Whatfix also provides out-of-the-box report templates like user cohorts, user segmentation, product usage, user dropoff analysis, and more.
4. Automatically crawls your knowledge repositories and syncs all company documentation
Whatfix automatically crawls your organization’s knowledge repositories, helping to curate and integrate all your documentation from across your digital workplace (ie. your Google Drive, LMS, documentation, OKRs, intranet, internal wiki, training, third-party links, video repositories, and more).
With Whatfix, all this documentation is then overlaid on top of any application with Whatfix Self Help, empowering end-users to search for any contextual issue they’re having – at the moment of need.
5. Collect employee feedback with in-app surveys
Whatfix enables HR teams to collect employee feedback with in-app surveys.
With Whatfix’s no-code editor, create branded surveys to gather employee insights ranging from basic employee NPS and pulse surveys, to feedback on your HCM workflows, in-app guidance, and IT support content – without having your employees leave the apps they work in.
6. SCORM-compliant
Whatfix is the only SCORM-compliant DAP, allowing HR teams to integrate and upload in-app guided flows and self-help content built with Whatfix into their corporate LMS to provide end-user training in various modules and courses in new hire onboarding and continuous learning training sessions.
What Is Whatfix?
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that provides organizations with a no-code editor to create in-app guidance on any application that looks 100% native. With Whatfix, create interactive walkthroughs, product tours, task lists, smart tips, field validation, self-help wikis, hotspots, and more. Understand how users are engaging with your applications with advanced product analytics.
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