Supernova Award Category
The Problem
Adobe faced an extremely competitive market in attracting, developing, and retaining the right people. Adobe’s shift to new business models in the cloud, new workforce expectations with millennials entering the work world, and global expansion coupled with mergers and acquisitions strained the legacy human resources system implemented before 2000. Consequently, Adobe set forth with a modern, cloud-based, mobile-ready, and analytics-enabled solution in order to improve transparency and transform the employee experience.
Adobe’s challenges included:
- Enabling globalization. The new HR system would have to serve as a catalyst, not a hindrance, to achieving global scale.
- Reducing dependency on IT. The People team needed to make changes, build reports, and configure business processes without depending on IT. They required a system that was lightweight, adaptable, and scalable without expensive and disruptive upgrades and customizations.
- Improving overall employee experience. Employees expected consumer-grade experiences like mobile and social with enterprise-class infrastructure.
The Solution
Adobe went through an extensive vendor selection process with both the incumbent legacy vendor and other core HCM solutions. The team had a mandate for a cloud-based system for core People Resources. With the incumbent vendor offering its solution at little to no cost for the software and the potential disruption of a long-term technology partnership with a new vendor, the decision to go with Workday was not taken lightly. The decision was not easy.
Donna stated her mission, “This was not a cost savings exercise. People are our greatest asset, and this was an exercise to transform the employee experience.”
Adobe’s implementation partner, Deloitte Consulting, worked with the Adobe team to complete the Workday implementation in less than nine months and Adobe achieved a go- live on January 12, 2015.
The results
When compared to other HR Core implementations, Adobe achieved major gains such as:
- Fostered significant employee engagement. Drove adoption with 88 percent of all employees and 99 percent of all managers logging in to experience Workday, and 25 percent of all employees completing their profiles. With the previous system, it was rare that managers logged into the system directly.
- Increased access to reporting functions for leaders. Prior to the new core HR system, Adobe had one person on the team whose whole job was reporting attrition and hiring data. With Workday, leaders have self-service access to reports about their organizations.
- Enabled democratization of data and insights. All leaders can look at organization charts on any device to identify and address issues around staffing, talent, and diversity.
- Propelled digital transformation initiatives across the employee life-cycle. Workday facilitates Adobe’s career development by making it easy for employees to create a rich profile by importing information from LinkedIn and by improving the cross-organizational visibility of talent. Now, 25 percent of Adobe’s open positions are filled with internal talent.
Metrics
Implementation: Adobe began the journey in 2011. The company started implementation in spring 2014 and went live in January 2015. Adobe’s ability to go live in nine months for a company of its size is in the upper quartile of efficiency for implementations.
Adoption: 88 percent of all employees and 99 percent of all managers logging in to participate on Workday, and percent of all employees completed their profiles.
Career Development: 25 percent of Adobe’s open positions are filled with internal talent. According to Donna Morris, “We now have a much richer talent pipeline with clear visibility into valuable internal talent. There is no doubt in my mind that this will help people develop in their careers.” This transformed employee life-cycle is key to embracing the modern employee contract.
The Technology
Workday Core HCM including Benefits and big data analytics.
Disruptive Factor
The implementation of any major core system requires significant planning, resources, and budget. The success of Adobe's implmentation of a cloud-based, mobile-ready, and analytics-enabled HCM solution able to support global expansion while attracting and engaging top talent in and of itself is disruptive. However, the executive buy-in for the project and Adobe's engagement strategies make this project truly disruptive.
Executive buy-in. Donna earned internal support from CEO Shantanu Narayen and CFO Mark Garrett. Internal alliances with Matt Thompson, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field Operations, also helped with implementation success. In this case, C-suite engagement indicates a preparedness for digital transformation and an understanding of disruptive forces.
Engagement: For go-live, Adobe launched an employee photo day program, which created a fun and enjoyable reason for employees to update their profiles with new headshots. This creative approach encouraged employees to take a LinkedIn import to update profiles. The goals were to improve adoption and gain user engagement.
Shining Moment
On the day of go- live, Donna had the Board of Directors’ compensation team up and running the mobile application. The executives were engaging and interacting with real-time data — and discussing their findings with each other. “They were pulling it up, interacting with it, looking at it. They were able to see their organization, in a very visual way, very quickly,” said Donna.