Workday reviews

Honestly, the last few years since Carl has taken over have been incredibly tough and sad to see. He's been striving to destroy the employee experience at every turn to save a few pennies whilst simultaneously saying he cares and pretending to cry while he announces redundancies. Before he came along, Workday was a fantastic place to work with a lovely culture, since then it's been completely upended and is now just your average American corp where the executives are caricature businessmen who only care about their next quarterly earnings. Carl has been on an aggressive cost cutting exercise over the last few years with multiple rounds of redundancies. So much so that everyone now works in fear of being outsourced to India. I've personally had colleagues who have unknowingly trained their replacements out there before being let go. Morale is on the floor and with it has gone any form of creativity or innovation as no one wants to fail and be sent out the door. Promotions are being cut and employees now have to compete against each other for the few that get granted each year, being force ranked on each occasion. This has led to no one wanting to give recognition and a massive sense of mistrust around each other. Those who thought they had a future here are finding quickly there is none so are leaving in droves, however, there is also currently no backfilling of open roles so those that are left have to pick up the slack leading to burnout and being put into impossible situations with no hope of success. Employees are massively overworked all while some American executive keeps telling you to "do more with less" with the only reward at the end of the year being a round of redundancies. Overall, Workday has become a terrible place to work. They still market "employees" to candidates as a value trying to say they care but please do not be fooled by this, they haven't cared for a long time and while Carl is here they never will.

Workday has taken a dramatic downfall in desirability as a place to work since Carl became CEO with him trying to squeeze every last cent out of the place. We have regular redundancies, to the point everyone jokes about not doing any work in the few months leading up to February (the month where layoffs happen), which is just really demoralising for everyone. People and teams are picked seemingly at random from someone high up in America who has little oversight about the work you or your team do, leaving us short staffed with still the same amount of work to do and higher targets. We get arbitrary, aggressive deadlines from senior leadership about wanting us to deliver AI functionality that is not suited to our users whilst also suffering from no backfilling of roles if someone leaves, which is becoming more frequent. It feels like we’re being set up to fail just so they can have an excuse to make us redundant and outsource us to India. Workday used to have an ‘employee first’ ethos, which they still say they do, but this is far from the truth since Aneel left. It’s now an AI at any cost ethos and that comes at the expense of employees. It’s a real shame as Workday was a great place to work a few years ago. I’m sure it’s still great if you’re one of the people calling the shots, but not so for everyone else. If you’re looking for autonomy in your role, inspiring senior leadership and good career prospects before being made redundant this isn’t the place for you.