Telstra builds on initial Workday deployment

Telstra is continuing to integrate a Workday human resources system it implemented as part of a digital transformation program that wrapped up last year with other internal systems.

Digital experience principal Melissa Dorey told last month's Workday Elevate summit that the telco’s implementation of Workday replaced “three core systems and then dozens of custom-built solutions”.

Workday was deployed under Telstra’s workplace digital transformation program, and the system continues to be augmented, Dorey said.

The implementation of Workday was backed by a move to standardised HR processes globally, a change for Telstra staff that had grown accustomed to “managing processes in a certain way that fit their needs”.

However, Dorey noted the system, combined with Telstra’s move to Agile ways of work at scale, had ultimately reduced “friction” in the way HR experiences are managed.

“When I think about Workday, I think about the impact of transparent data, self-service and actionable analytics,” Dorey said.

“If we're able to provide those to our leaders, we really have the potential to truly empower our people so they can make the decisions they need in order to grow and drive their teams to achieve great things.

“When we get that design right, they're able to manage HR experiences with a lot less friction. They need less support from HR, our processes take less time overall and that just allows our people to spend more time focusing on customers.”

There is some ongoing work occurring to integrate Workday with some of the telco’s existing systems.

“It's challenging to connect progressive, current day software with something that was built 10 or 15 years ago,” Dorey said. 

“There's a lot to consider and design for. We fell short in a couple of areas. We're continuing to work on those. 

“The good thing is post go-live you can continue to build and iterate, so we're working on some of those priority areas.”

Likewise, Dorey said there had been some work since Workday’s go-live understanding how to feed data from Workday into other systems.

“As the core HR system of record, we provide data to so many downstream legacy systems,” she said.

“It was quite difficult to understand how ‘people data’ was used across all of those systems. So that was also a bit of a challenging component for us. 

“There were a few little surprises at go-live that we've had to address since go-live.”