Throughout Hette Mollema’s eleven year stint with Workday, he’s seen his organisation grow rapidly. Mollema initially started his Workday career 11 years earlier, in 2011, as Workday’s first sales boots on the ground in Europe by heading up the Workday team for the Benelux. He then moved to the Alps, supporting the Swiss and Austrian team in their next wave of becoming mature Workday regions. Mollema spent six more months in Austria as the company’s managing director — before finally moving back to home soil as Vice President Benelux in February 2022.
“If you would have told me eleven years ago that we’d come to a point where we have 60 million employees within our solution, I don’t think I would have believed you”, Mollema says in an interview with ToTalent. “But I knew that our founding fathers had a real eye for cloud-based solutions — though they thought it would primarily be SME’s using the service. But as you saw the demand for cloud-based solutions grow rapidly, the 60 million suddenly became completely realistic.”
No use in crying over bad data
As European organisations became much more data-driven in recruitment, cloud-based solutions like Workday naturally became the go-to product. But according to Mollema, the reason for any success doesn’t just come down to the software. “We’ve always maintained a viewpoint that companies first need to invest in core data. In their foundation, and in data management. In less subtle terms: there’s absolutely no point in investing in machine learning or skills-clouds if your data is polluted.”
“We’ve always maintained that you need to invest in a solid foundation first — not in so-called point solutions.”
Mollema likens it to building a house. “You don’t start with a fancy kitchen and a dormer”, he said. “You need a solid foundation to build on, or nothing will work. And that’s where I believe we’ve generally been different in comparison to other companies in the HCM sphere. We’ve always maintained that you need to invest in a solid foundation first — not in so-called point solutions.”
Emphasis on skills
With Workday’s skills cloud, the company has successfully built a skills ontology that aims to cleanse, understand and relate job skills data. Skills cloud is built into Workday’s HCM and aims to leverage machine learning to help companies get a better grasp on what skills they truly need. “I think the transition to a skills-driven approach is somewhat of a common trend among our users”, Mollema added. “Whether it’s JustEat or Robeco, we see many of our customers currently investing in that type of tooling. Now I’m no Nostradamus, but in the future, I can see skills-driven labour markets becoming the norm.”
And on retention
Retention’s been another keyword for Mollema and Workday in recent months and years. Whether through the Great Shuffle, Resignation or the Quiet Quitting trends — some organisations are finding it tough to get a grip on what their employees are truly feeling. “It’s all directly linked to employee empowerment”, Mollema said. “Feeling at home within an organisation or a culture isn’t just about whether your salary is right, or getting along with the boss — it’s about a sense of belonging.”
To ensure that sense of belonging is at least talked about, Workday acquired Peakon in 2021. It enables intelligent listening for companies of any scale, by using machine learning to collect and analyse anonymous feedback from employees in real time. The platform lets organisations continuously collect employee feedback and, more importantly, provides a way to turn that feedback into dialog and action.”
“If you don’t view your own people as your number one core value, you can’t pretend your clients are.”
“We have a pretty strong vision on how we manage our own employees”, Mollema continued. “We quite often hear companies make bold statements about how they view customers as their number one core value — but I think that can’t be right. Because if you don’t view your own people as your number one core value, you can’t pretend your clients are. Because your people are the ones dealing with them. Within Workday, we’re very aware of the fact that we’re a tech company, and not HR advisors. But we do know that employees are our number one core value.”
Redefining the business case
Workday works as a subscription model, with businesses constantly having to redefine their business strategy — and Workday constantly having to produce some type of a business case as to why they should be the chosen software provider for any given company. “And I think that’s what makes my job fun”, Mollema said. “Because for us — it’s so useful to go back to a customer after three years and look at what their expectations were at the start, and what the tool has ended up doing for them.”
“The fun is in finding out how the tool helped increase retention numbers or how it filled skills.”
“It makes our benchmark more accurate, while it helps us redefining our own business case. And that isn’t just limited to numbers wherein we show that a generic task that used to take 30 minutes, now only takes eight. The fun is in finding out how the tool helped increase retention numbers or how it filled skills. It’s an integral part of the branche and being able to help organisations make those things tangible, so they can operate and act swiftly upon it — there’s a lot of fulfillment in that.”
