Workday is one of the better HCM systems out there, in fact, if you look at the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises it is a leader. It’s a fantastic hub for everything HR related and excels at helping organizations manage payroll, benefits, HR, and employee data. I have used it for approving time off, creating expense reports, and completing performance reviews. It makes my life a lot easier to have all of this accessible under one roof.
But how many times do you find yourself going to Workday to engage with a co-worker, discover projects going on in the company, or find out something new and exciting going on in your organization? I, like most of you, probably open up MS Teams, Slack, your company intranet portal, or some other tool and find and engage with coworkers there.
That’s where a dedicated employee engagement platform like Sift can add to what Workday offers. While each has similar features, like an org chart and employee profiles, they are actually very different from one another and are used for different purposes.
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Gaining Organizational Visibility
Org charts in Workday
Workday’s org charts can work great for getting a close look at the people in your team. You also have the ability to print and export org charts in multiple formats.
Viewing org charts
As you can see below, Workday org charts are pretty clean, with name, job title, and location all appearing on a person's card. One minor annoyance is that when you want to zoom out and see the entire org, or just go a reporting level up or down, you have to continually click the arrow at the top or bottom to see the next reporting level. This can be frustrating when you want to see a 1,000-foot view of the entire organization quickly or discover other people not directly in your department.
Printing and exporting org charts
Workday does allow you to print the entire org chart to show all the reporting levels. However, the exported file sizes for very large organizations (especially if you include images) can be large – and you won’t be able to click and dig into an individual’s profile right when browsing.
When exporting to a PowerPoint you have the ability to include photos and see different reporting levels on separate slides. Org boxes can easily be moved around in PowerPoint if you wanted to change the org structure and move people around.
Org charts in Sift
Sift displays org charts a little differently and makes it easier for you to explore the entire organization to draw new connections. It enables you to display and customize the org chart in various ways that are different from the standard view you typically see.
Viewing org charts
With Sift, your view is not bound by reporting levels. You have the ability to collapse and expand org charts by reporting level, but Sift was created to allow for easier visibility into the entire org, not just your immediate team. You can zoom in and out, move around and customize the layout so that team members are displayed at the top, left, right, or bottom of the org chart.
There is also “Simple View” if you want a view that is more like the view in Workday, where you see one line of reporting and can expand to show more.
Customizing people cards on the org chart
You can also customize the org chart cards themselves and show or hide things like email, department, team, job title, email and report count.
Expand and collapse org charts by reporting level, department, or individual
If you want to show the org chart starting from a certain person you can achieve that with Sift by clicking on their profile card and then choosing “start from here.” You can even hide people from the org chart if you like.
Printing and exporting org charts in Sift
In Sift, you also have the ability to export and print the org chart. You can download it in several formats like JPG, PNG, PDF, and SVG.
SVG allows you to edit the org chart and add or remove boxes and change reporting structures in a 3rd party SVG editing tool.
Distinguishing certain departments or groups on the org chart
Looking to highlight people who work in different offices so you can get a clear sightline into who works where? Or perhaps you want to easily see which employees are in Human Resources, Finance, or Engineering? Sift features the ability to highlight the org chart based on these types of scenarios.
Building stronger connections
Profiles in Workday
Profiles in Workday contain basic information about you and can be viewed by other employees. It shows things from your office location to how long you have been working for the company. There is also an area where you can display the following things:
Contact info (email, phone, fax, etc.)
Languages you speak (including comprehension level and proficiency in reading, speaking, and writing)
Education (high school and higher education institutes you attended)
Job history
Skills (can select either pre-selected or new skills)
How Sift displays Profiles
Sift contains all the things you would find in Workday mentioned above, but also displays personal interests and gives team members the ability to customize their profile with background images, record their correct name pronunciation, and write a section explaining more about what they do for the company, as well as a bio or professional summary.
Name pronunciation on Sift profiles
For those who have names that are frequently mispronounced, it can lead to some difficult and awkward situations. In these situations, do you correct the person or just let it slide? Luckily, you can humanize your workforce with name pronunciation right inside Sift’s profiles.
Interests
Ever try breaking the ice with a coworker and know absolutely nothing about them? It happens all the time. Luckily with Sift, you can find out more about everyone beforehand. Now that stranger you have a 1 o’clock meeting with in Operations is no longer a stranger. You can see they also watch Survivor and love playing Dungeons and Dragons in their free time.
Skills
While Workday can display skills, it does not show Skill levels and better understand how proficient someone is with a particular skill. Sift allows you to see if someone is a beginner, expert, or somewhere in between. This can be great for helping anyone find and connect with team members who have the right expertise.
Ability to connect in the moment
Sift facilities faster communication through its Microsoft Teams app and the ability for team members to open a message convo directly from someone's profile page right through the collaboration tool they are using, be it Slack, Teams, etc. This one-click access to collaboration tools helps you bridge the time it takes to find the people you work with, understand them better, and then communicate with them directly to move work and projects forward faster. A recent survey of our users found that Sift saves an average of 38 minutes a week per employee.
Workday, on the other hand, is not a platform that provides direct connections to collaboration platforms. And from reviews, it can also be tricky to navigate and find information.
Better together
As you can see, Workday is great at many different things. However, it is probably not best suited when it comes to a platform that can help you find others easier in the moment, understand your workforce, and more easily interact with others. Want to see how you can enable your workforce to better understand and connect faster? Try Sift for free for 14 days.
Try Sift for free
Ready to start connecting the dots across your organization? Sign up for a free 14-day trial to see how Sift can help you gain transparency across your org and move work forward faster.
