Hungry Jack's stands up Workday for its 30,000 people

Hungry Jack’s is standing up its first integrated HR system on Workday in four phases to better support its people leaders and 30,000 employees across Australia.

Chief people officer Jenny McKie told the recent Workday Elevate summit that phase one - covering “core HR” - was implemented over an initial 12-month period.

The second phase, which goes live this month, covers advanced compensation, talent management and employee surveys.

“This means that our annual performance review and REM [remuneration] review process is going to be in Workday,” McKie said.

Having previously run HR on “spreadsheets and unintegrated systems”, the company wanted to “not just digitalise HR … [but] reimagine it.”

This meant establishing a single source of truth for employee data nationally, and changing how the workforce is managed to improve retention and both employee and manager experience.

“Some of the problems we were facing were establishing a single reliable source of truth, which is crucial for ensuring employee data accuracy, maintaining integrity and compliance, and enabling people development and succession planning,” McKie said.

“We had managers swamped with menial tasks - screening resumes, setting up interviews, doing onboarding tasks, [which was] all taking away valuable time to spend with people they had already employed. 

“We [also] had managers with degrees and leadership traits working as crew, but no clear visibility or mobility paths to promote them.”

Workday has since been set up as the “single source of truth across all of our restaurants, states and systems,” McKie said.

“We’ve now got tools that give our people leaders time to coach and train their team, and we’ve got team members that now have visibility into their career path options.”

One of the immediate improvements was to recruitment.

McKie said that Hungry Jack’s hires about 300 people a week, and intends to open 20 new stores a year.

Application numbers for these roles have increased substantially since Workday was installed.

“The number of applications has significantly increased due to the elevated candidate experience,” McKie said.

“We’re now receiving over 10,000 applications weekly, an over 300 percent increase on what we had previously. 

“Where hiring employees used to take us three to four weeks, we’re now hiring in as [little] as 24 hours, and that includes all of their contract generation, background checks, working rights checks - everything generated and automated in the system, and they’re on the roster. 

“This is giving back such valuable time to our managers to coach, train and develop their team, and it’s all creating a better employee experience, which we know in turn creates a better guest experience.”

With 80 percent of employees under the age of 20, McKie noted that having a mobile-friendly HR system was also important.

“Everyone today has everything at their fingertips on apps, so the expectation is why haven’t I got that at work? That’s 100 percent where we needed to get to,” she said.

“Getting [HR and career management capabilities to] them, mobile-enabled, is super critical. 

“We were losing top talent, so we wanted to grow our employees, not only for them to have visibility into those career path options, but also for us to be able to see them and enable their growth as well.”

McKie - who has been with Hungry Jack’s for over three decades - said she is most excited about the succession planning and career development that is now made possible.

“What we’re really excited about is the 17-year-old crew member who has a real path to a restaurant manager role or perhaps a corporate role, right from their phone,” she said.

“It’s about retaining great people because they can see what’s next. 

“Having the data at our fingertips to manage the workforce and plan for succession planning and growth. 

“I am so excited about this.”