Workday Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

Everyone is super friendly, motivated, collaborative and open Work life balance & employee well being is empahsised Amazing company parties Great benefits (health, dental, gym benefit, pension scheme, etc)

Cons

The coding language that Workday uses has a lot of limitations

Pros

Fruits in the cafeteria. Clean and neat office space. Work life balance. IT help-desk is very helpful and efficient.

Cons

First of all "Great place to work" gimmick is mainly a BS. Company is not on par in terms of benefits with other large tech companies around (like Google, FB or MS). Culture and work conditions varies largely depending on the department and team you are working at. I've seen examples when the whole teams were leaving their jobs in a course of less than 1 year. It's just shows an example how extremely unhappy people... can be at the "Best place to work". The sad part is that nothing was done on the higher management side to correct the situation. Instead managers report how everything is "great", "positive" and "amazing" which totally contradicts reality. So depending on department/team it can be a good (I wouldn't call it great still) or bad to terrible place to work. Therefore if you are looking to join Workday ignore this "Best place to work" - it really means nothing, it's just a job at an average company nothing more. Also I should note that there is a lot of hypocrisy on different levels. On the lowest level managers and recruiters can lie straight in the people's face and give them fake promises (while knowing they are fake). On the company level good example is that company claims that they promote internal mobility (and there are a lot of talks about it from HR and management) but in reality recently they changed rules increasing minimum required length of stay in the team before people can transfer to another team. Before you could transfer after 1 year of work, now you have to stay at least 1.5 year. Also transferring process isn't simple: they don't make a difference between internal and external candidates. Which means internal candidate would have to go through the same set of interviews as external. So if you were thinking that you can get to random team in Workday and hope that you will be able to transfer to a better team/project/department later you should understand that: 1. once you are in you are locked (in potentially horrible place) for 1.5 years 2. even after 1.5 years passed you will have to go through the same process as if you were applying for the job externally. Point 2 means that being in Workday gives you no advantage in getting to a good team/project over the external candidate. Paint 1 means that you would have a DISADVANTAGE over external candidates b/c you would be locked for 1.5 years and people from outside are not. Given the above: 1. Be VERY careful when applying for the job. Best if you know someone who works in that team or department and can tell you how things are. 2. Don't trust what recruiters say. 3. Remember that it would be more beneficial waiting for a better job opening to come up rather than applying to a random job opening in Workday. Special notes about technologies: Workday has a proprietary piece of something (full of bugs and unpredictable behavior) named Xpresso (XO). They call it "programming language" but it's really not. It is some sort of "platform" where App Developers define business logic by clicking checkboxes and picking items in the listboxes in the web browser (that's correct no coding involved). For the whole day... Every day! Read the other reviews - people described it well there. Basically if you spend couple of years in such project (while not doing any real software engineering on a side) you will hardly be able to call yourself a software engineer and therefore would not be qualified for an adequate position in the market. Read the restrictions on transferring to another team above and you can see that it's a dead end if you don't escape early.

Advice to Management

1. Align to the core values, not just claim them. 2. Look at the attrition rates across departments (it's easily measurable metric) and start investigating what is happening in departments with high attrition rate. Based on that start taking actions. Some directors and managers would have to be fired I'm sure. 3. Technology wise: get rid of Xpresso. Yes I know a lot of things dependent on it but just like it... makes your people noncompetitive in the market it will make Workday noncompetitive. It's already visible that "developing" using XO takes more man-hours (i.e. more expensive) than developing using programming languages. The more XO apps produced every day the higher cost it would be to get rid of it later. Kill XO before XO killed Workday.

Pros

Genuinely some amazing people Great place for graduates to get on the ladder Shares are a great investment plan Good benefits Ok Salary Internal mobility to get away from the proprietary language Agile coaches to advance teams

Cons

Ruinous middle management in some teams. Policy of 'owning your own career' while well intended at the top, is get out of jail free card for middle management to not do their job. While there are some amazing people, rapid growth led to the original culture becoming diluted. Poor work / life balance. Proprietary language limits external career opportunities. Incidents of bullying and bad managerial conduct... are not dealt with.

Advice to Management

Middle management: Work hard to make your teams lives easier, don't make your team work hard to make your life easier. Be honest. Stop giving yourself excuses and be better. Senior Management: Cast a cold eye on the reality of things, take action and drop the enforced positivity policy.

Pros

They treat the employee as best as they can, really good work-life balance, and amazing benefits!

Cons

Working on a proprietary technology that is technically a "mess": not easy to maintain, not easy to develop with.

Advice to Management

Dedicate more time to let developers improve the existing codebase!

Pros

Culture is great, all colleagues supporting each other, good work/life balance

Cons

It's not necessarily a CONS, however you need to be flexible and agile to enjoy working here :-)

Pros

Great culture, relatively easy to maintain Work/Life balance Good range of benefits offered

Cons

EU team is very dependant on US in their decisions Management team struggles to break out of the reactive approach Base salary is below market level (company is trying to compensate by amount of shares granted annually)

Advice to Management

More focus on growth challenges, scaling

Pros

I've heard and seen people from other teams over-working and rightly complaining about their work-life balance. I've read a couple of bad reviews referring to the security team in the US. That is why I'd like to state how different is my experience instead, within the security team in Ireland, since - as some have pointed out already - it depends on the team you work with. I work in Security in Dublin, Ireland which... is divided into different branches: Security Engineering, Risk Mgmt, Security Operation Centre. My team is absolutely awesome. Our direct manager is great. We have: - 1-1 meetings every week and they're always very helpful. - team sync meetings to keep each other updated on progress (since we often work on distinct projects while collaboratinf with only 1 or 2 others in the team but not everyone) which are very useful. We are: - encouraged to propose change and innovative projects - given time to work on PoC the above ideas - collaborating with other teams to improve the internal security assets. Whenever there is a problem, we always do as much as we can to mitigate it rather than closing our eyes and ignoring it (as done in some other companies). Not only my own manager but also all the others in Security in Dublin are friendly, respectful, approachable, supportive of bottom-up ideas, of work-life balance and of advancing team member's knowledge and career. My job is extremely interesting and varied, since we balance between securing loads of different technologies and developing our own security tools plus often running internal pentesting. Even though it is hard to find senior sec people we have never lowered the standard in the hiring interviews. My manager also gives each of us clear goals for promotions: if met you're in, otherwise out -which is absolutely fair. Finally, I've never experienced any sexism at all - which is great nowadays. Indeed, our org and the whole company is full of inspiring women. We even have our own women@workday global group and local ones, which are all fairly active and full of useful initiatives. Not to mention: - perks, snacks, fruit (piles of berries, figs, mangos and avocados), benefits, bonus, stock - dentist/optician/massage on site - facilities to work and for entertainment (playstations, xbox, nintendo, table tennis, pool table, etc) - employees clubs well funded and supportive - help meeting other colleagues while exercising (many are sport-based) and having fun - giving&doing program - you get money based on the time you spent volunteering for a charity, which can only be used for further donations + your donations to a charity are doubled by the company every time - the nice people around you wherever you go: in the corridor, kitchen, etc. and all the nice people in the security team in Dublin.

Cons

Since in my org the majority of managers are based in Pleasanton, US, there seems to be a bit of a disconnection between the teams over there and us.

Advice to Management

Rather than having frequent and numerous awards within our group under the CIO, it may be worth to have less but more carefully evaluated people/ projects to reward. This would allow to also focus on each of them more so to justify the judges' choice.

Pros

- Work life balance - Leadership - Product - Location - People - Culture

Cons

- Too much red tape around PR/ Marketing

Advice to Management

- Keep being authentic and transparent. It's much appreciated