Name: Frontline First: Reimagining Drury Hotels’ Frontline and Operational Efficiency with Workday
Uploaded: 2025-10-30T17:26:04.819Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 8 s
Description: Frontline First: Reimagining Drury Hotels’ Frontline and Operational Efficiency with Workday

Transcript for "Frontline First: Reimagining Drury Hotels’ Frontline and Operational Efficiency with Workday": Alright. Hi, everyone, and welcome to our looking forward with Workday webinar, frontline first, reimagining Drury Hotels' frontline and operational efficiency with Workday. I see a lot of people starting to trickle in. Go ahead and drop in the q and a where you're joining us from today. We're so excited to have you. Today's webinar is part of our looking forward with Workday webinar series designed to give you insight into how your organization can do more with Workday, including additional ways we support how you manage your people and your business. As always, we may have a few forward looking statements, so please note that this is under our safe harbor agreement. We do have a couple of standard housekeeping items before we jump in. First, we are recording this session, and it will be available to you via email within forty eight hours. So please be on the lookout for that. Orte uses the Goldcast platform, which operates most effectively when using Chrome. So if you are experiencing any issues at this time, please ensure you are using Chrome in your browser. If you have any technical issues during the event, please notify us using the q and a function. You can get even more out of the webinar by using the tabs in the top right corner of your screen. The docs option has links to valuable and related resources. And, of course, our q and a is where you can submit your questions. We will leave time at the end to answer any questions live, but we do encourage you to use the q and a function throughout the webinar today, and we will respond as quickly as possible. And then finally, please complete the four question survey at the end of today's event. Alright. With all of that out of the way, here is a quick look at our agenda. I'll start things off by covering Workday's investment in the frontline and the momentum that we are building. We will then see a live demo that covers our full frontline life cycle from planning and recruiting to onboarding all the way to scheduling and forecasting. We'll then spend the rest of our time speaking to our amazing customer, Drury Hotels, to dive in and learn a bit more about their frontline operations and their workers' experience. Alright. We have some amazing speakers here with us today. I am Rebecca. I'm on our product marketing team here at Workday. I'm joined by Alan from our product management team, Richard from our solutions consultants team, and then Ryan from Drury Hotels. Thanks everyone for joining. Alright. Let's jump into some of our frontline momentum that we're starting to see here at Workday. Our Workday advantage is simple. We provide an AI driven worker first solution that truly works. Workday Illuminate is people centered AI that is impactful, reliable, trustworthy, and accessible, meaning workers, managers, and HR leaders where they are and empowering them to do their best work every day. To further enhance the user experience, our solution uses conversational natural language processing for a seamless end to end customer experience. With our new frontline agent, which you will get to see here in shortly, a critical workforce gap is filled in seconds with a natural conversation, factoring in availability, qualification, and cost, not in twenty minutes with a frantic phone call. Through real time data from millions of frontline workers, our commitment to AI continues to be a win win for both workers and the company's bottom line. Our continued frontline in AI investment is positioning us to take on the biggest battle yet, the fight for talent. We all know it's a competitive market, and retaining frontline workers can feel like a real fight. With annual turnover at a staggering 73% in logistics, 81% in retail, and 87% in quick service restaurants, it is crucial that organizations are meeting their workers' needs in an innovative and engaging ways to stay one step ahead. This isn't just a business problem. It's a people problem. Frontline workers are looking for a better experience. The solution to retention lies in meeting workers' needs. Half of all frontline workers are ready to quit their jobs in search of a better experience. But here's the powerful upside. Engaged workers are 1.6 times more likely to innovate faster than competitors. By focusing on engagement, we can not only reduce turnover, but also drive businesses forward. In frontline industries, change happens fast, which is why Workday supports frontline workers and managers at every step of their journey to engage, empower, and meet people where they are in the natural flow of work. With Workday, organizations can count every worker and make every worker count throughout the entire frontline worker life cycle. Only Workday offers a plan to hire, contract to retain to reward process to manage the entire frontline life cycle. So data flows seamlessly across HR, operations, and talent management. It starts with planning for who they need to hire. Then we help them attract and onboard new people quickly. While they're working, we make it easy to track their time and pay them correctly. We help managers optimize their schedules fairly. And finally, we help them upskill and retain their best people so they don't leave them for a competitor. This unified frontline worker life cycle management helps frontline organizations improve operational efficiencies, provide exceptional productive experiences for part time, full time, seasonal, and contingent workers, and unlock trusted insights for faster data driven decision making, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Now let's talk about the incredible scale of Workday's investment in the frontline workforce and how we can help you meet your workers' ever changing needs. Workday continues to build momentum in this space with over 32,000,000 workers across the retail, hospitality, and manufacturing industries using our solutions. This slide shows you just a sample of some recognizable customers who use our frontline solutions to seamlessly manage their workforce today. While we are incredibly proud of our customer growth, we are focused on building solutions that drive tangible results. In addition to hearing about Drury Hotels' frontline success, I wanted to quickly highlight some of the ROI additional customers have seen using Workday to manage their frontline. First is Hy Vee, a large Midwest grocer with over 75,000 employees. They have seen a 50% reduction in time spent scheduling their employees through demand forecasting. Second is Lore Group. Based in The UK with over 1,500 employees, they have cons consolidated 22 systems into one single HR and workforce management system. Third is lifetime. With over a 150 locations in US and Canada and over 19,000 employees, they have seen 50% reduction in overtime cost and over a $1,000,000 in annual labor savings. And lastly, I would be remiss if I did not mention some of our amazing new acquisitions. The addition of Paradox gives Workday an AI powered talent acquisition suite that helps our customers more efficiently find, hire, and onboard every type of worker, from the front line to the back office, across full time and contingent roles. DailyPay strengthens your connection with your workforce by empowering them to simplify and optimize their working lives and easily manage the money that they make. And lastly, sauna will provide workers with a truly reimagined AI native platform offering proactive, personalized, and intelligent experiences, including enhanced learning capabilities. These acquisitions further our investment and commitment to giving frontline workers the experience that they deserve. And with all of that, I will pass it over to Richard who will show our frontline products in action. Thanks, Rebecca. I am going to go ahead and share my screen. What I wanna do is I wanna go through a little bit of, some of the most common tasks that maybe a frontline manager and a frontline worker will do inside of Workday. I wanna start from the perspective of the employee. And, again, I I wanna show you both the mobile perspective and the, web perspective as well. So starting from my mobile phone, I did, again, just wanna share some of the most common tasks. A lot of us do, you know, most of our day to day activities on our mobile device. Starting on the home page of the Workday mobile app, this is an app where the worker can come in and, you know, update their address, view their benefit information, view their payslip, you know, time sheets, schedules. All of it is in one single application. It's not, you know, connected behind the scenes through integrations. It is truly one employee record, one app. On this worker's home page, he does have access to, you know, clock in for the day. So we have that mobile time clock. He can see his schedule. We'll drill into a couple of those of those details in a sec. He's also got some announcements. Year end is approaching. Right? W two season is approaching, so we can push out those sensitive announcement to those workers to make sure that they're making their updates. He's also got a list of his most used apps, and we're using a bit of machine learning here to surface what the worker might be inside of Workday to see. For example, if it's payday, maybe he wants to go to the benefits and pay hub to view that information. And then the last thing I wanna highlight before I drill into some of these is a timely suggestion. Now in this example, we are presenting the worker with what we call as a journey. And think of a journey as a curated, workflow or a curated guided path. It's open enrollment season, so I thought, you know, I would throw in a a guided path for open enrollment. And, I do wanna show you what that looks like, but I'll I'll come back to that, before before we we finish the employee experience. I can show you what that looks like. I wanna start on, benefits and pay. Pay kind of being the reason we probably all show up to work every day. You'll notice that, that benefit enrollment needs attention, but I wanna scroll down and show you the the the most recent pay, kind of showing the worker what his take home pay is. Again, kind of, seeing what's important to that worker. If I drill into the most recent pay, the biggest number on this screen is the take home pay. Most hourly workers, frontline workers, they care about what's gonna hit their bank account. Of course, if they wanna drill into the detail and kinda see the gross to net calculations, they do have the ability to drill into, this digital payslip and have the ability maybe to drill into, hey. What were my pre tax deductions? What were my post tax deductions? The the the user experience is very consumable, very easy to use, not something that requires a whole lot of training. You'll also notice that the worker has the ability to download a PDF, maybe a more, a standard or old fashioned version of a payslip if they're applying for a loan or need the information for something else. They can just download, you know, a a a PDF payslip version of this digital payslip as well. The worker also has the ability in this example to request pay on demand. Now pay on demand, also known as early wage access is something that is is starting to become more prevalent, especially in the frontline worker, industries. And with Workday's pay on demand, your, workers do have the ability to maybe request their paycheck early. And this is gonna be based on the hours that they've already worked for the week. So, this worker is eligible to request up to a 196. And if we drill into that question mark, we'll show the worker, hey. You've worked eighteen hours so far that are eligible for requesting pay on demand, and we're allowing the worker in this example to request up to 55% of their earnings. Now these are all settings that you as an organization can determine. You can determine how often somebody can request pay on demand and how much can be requested as well. So just another feature that's included with Workday payroll, that you can take advantage of for that frontline population. Going back to, the homepage here, I did wanna drill into our our schedule. Again, when we when we think about the mobile adoption here at Workday, once our customers start including things like payroll, time tracking, scheduling, that mobile adoption just skyrockets. People are more more inclined to download the Workday mobile app, more inclined to be in the app daily, and, of course, more inclined to see those, company announcements or maybe career, mobility opportunities by coming into Workday every day. So I'll drill into the schedule for this week and and let's say, you know, today this worker is scheduled to work, as a sales associate at Location 288. He can drill in, see any details or notes that may have been left by, the scheduler or the manager. And he also has the ability to see any other workers that might be scheduled alongside the same time as he is. Maybe something that's important for this worker is to determine, hey. Who's the shift supervisor that is, scheduled during my shift in case I'm running late or I need to call in or send a quick text? They have the ability to see that information. Toggling over into next week, you can also give your workers the ability to have some flexibility in their schedule, by giving them a few different options. For example, let's say that, you know, something came up next Wednesday and this employee here, Ben, is no longer able to to work this shift. He does have the ability to open this shift, meaning he wants to forfeit this shift. He's asking somebody to cover for him. That is an option you can give your workers that can, of course, go through an approval process or what we call here at Workday is a business process. You can also give your workers the ability to swap shifts. So when we swap a shift inside of Workday, we are going to present a worker with a list of eligible and qualified employees that can swap the shift. So if, you know, if I'm a skilled tradesperson, I'm not gonna be able to swap a shift with somebody unless they have the same skills or certifications that I may have. So let's say in this example that Kevin, and Ben have talked it over and and Ben wants to swap his shift with Kevin. So again, Kevin is eligible to pick up that shift from Ben. And in exchange for that, Ben is gonna pick up one of Kevin's shift. Again, we are only seeing the shifts that Ben is eligible to pick up in this example. So once we kick this off, it will go through a, you know, custom business process. In my demo environment, first, the two workers have to agree. Yes. We're gonna swap shifts, and then maybe it goes to the manager for that final approval. But you could decide, hey. As long as the workers, you know, agree, maybe the manager just needs to be notified. We don't necessarily need them to, to, approve that shift swap. Now going back to the schedule, the shift is still noted as pending. It is still on Ben's schedule. He's still responsible for that shift. But, again, it is it is now pending. A couple final things I wanted to show you here is an open shift board. So I mentioned earlier that your employees have the ability to kind of forfeit a shift or post something out, you know, for coverage. But in addition to employees doing that, your managers also have the ability to enter, open shifts. Maybe we need some overtime this weekend or we need some additional hours work. Again, the workers who come into this open shift board are only gonna see the shifts that they qualify for. Now in this example, we we know Ben is a sales associate, but he has the ability to work at Location 288 and at location, 44. So, again, giving you flexibility, especially in a retailer hospitality where you can share workers across locations. The last thing I wanted to show you is going back to some employee first scheduling methodologies. Rebecca mentioned upfront about, you know, the the the competition for talent and trying to meet your workers where they are. You do have the ability, first of all, to give workers the option to request maybe unavailable time. These are non, you know, PTO eligible employees. They can tell you, hey. I'm unavailable or I have a doctor's appointment on this day. They can also update their work availability. So if they are students or part time workers, they can tell you when they're eligible to work and scheduling will will respect those require or those availabilities. And then the worker also has the option to enter, his worker preferences. So he can decide, you know, do I wanna be on call? There are some jurisdictions across The US that require the worker to opt in to to be an on call. The worker can also decide, hey. Although I'm a full time employee or I'm a part time employee, I prefer to work thirty five hours a week. And and maybe, you know, although I've told you I'm available to work, you know, Sunday through Saturday, I prefer to work Monday through Friday. And these are options that they can put into their preferences. And whenever possible, we will meet those, preferences, and and I'll show you what that looks like when I log in as the manager. In addition to, you know, preferred hours, preferred days of the week, the worker can also choose their preferences around roles and maybe locations. So we saw earlier that this worker can work at multiple locations, but they, in this case, are telling us that they prefer to work at Store 88 or Location 88 in this example. So wanted to wrap up that by showing you again some of that, you know, employee first scheduling, type of methodology. Going back to my home page, I did wanna complete, or go through this this open enrollment journey as we call it here in Workday, or here inside of, the Workday app. Again, it is open enrollment season. In fact, Workday ourselves, we just kicked off our open enrollment, this week. And the way that we started here at Workday is with a journey, a curated workflow of, hey. Here are the changes that are coming this year. Here is maybe the plan summaries, the premiums, the the the max out of pockets. All of the detail maybe that you wanna send your workers ahead of time prior to open enrollment actually kicking off. And inside of this journey or or this curated path of of steps, you can insert things like knowledge based articles. You can insert things like video. So if it's a message from your CHRO or from your benefits team, your workers can view that information again so that once open enrollment actually kicks off, you know, they have all of the information that they need to get started. You can even embed the task for, you know, starting open enrollment or viewing elections right into this journey as well. Any Workday task or to dos or knowledge based articles can be embedded into this, this journey. Now this worker does have a task already in his inbox, telling him that, you know, open enrollment has begun and he can go ahead and get started. Again, in the task, there are just some additional details maybe linking them out to, the carrier websites in this example. And I'm not gonna go through the whole open enrollment process. I just wanted to show you what this looks like, especially from a mobile phone. I know I'm a person who does my open enrollment usually on my mobile phone because it's pretty quick for me to do that way. And in this example, my open enrollment starts with a tobacco use. You know, if you if you have a surcharge for, tobacco users, that can be the first question. Right? Because that's gonna dictate what premiums are shown to the employee. I'll go ahead and answer no in this example, and now I'm brought to all of the eligible, benefits that I qualify for. So as of right now, this is, what we call is a passive enrollment. So the worker already has a projected total monthly cost, and the worker can also see their, their their details of what they're enrolled in today. So, again, I'm not gonna go through every one of these. I just wanna show you one example. But medical, dental, vision, any sort of plan that you offer at your organization, you know, maybe pet insurance or, even those, company paid plans like group term life, The worker is gonna be able to see that information in their enrollment screen. And then since it is a passive enrollment, they do have the ability to either, you know, say, hey. Yep. I've already selected Aetna. I don't need to do anything here. But they can drill into the details. For example, if they want to waive this type of coverage or maybe they wanna drill in further and say, alright. What is my my employee only cost? What if I add a dependent or my family? What is my co pay drug cost? All of this information that you can add into the enrollment process so, they have the details that they need. One thing I also wanted to mention on here is we do also have, benefit plan dependencies. So if this worker enrolls in a high deductible plan, of course, they're automatically eligible to enroll in an HSA plan as well. So it's a little bit dummy proof where we're not gonna have allow your workers to enroll into plans that maybe they're not eligible to depending on a contingency of another plan. So, you know, maybe once I'm done with that option, I can confirm and continue. There is a little pop up that'll show up and say, hey. You haven't submitted your open enrollment. You know, you you basically just reviewed one of the many options, and that again is is just keeping your worker up to date with what's going on. So, again, didn't wanna go through the whole open enrollment process, but wanted to show you what that looks like, especially from a mobile device, just because it's it's a lot easier for us to do things this way, nowadays. Now I want to before I leave mobile, I do want to toggle over as a manager. Again, a lot of times employees are using mobile, to do things like view their schedule, view their time. But also there is an option for your managers to do some quick tasks on their mobile devices just like your employees. A lot of times our customers want their managers on the floor or alongside their team, not in the backroom, you know, reviewing time sheets in a laptop. They do have the ability to, you know, drill into Workday's mobile app and see the information that is relevant to them quickly. So on this home page for this manager, the first thing I see is I have four people who are late or have not begun. And that's a good example of Workday time tracking and scheduling working together. Right? The schedule will dictate what's supposed to happen, and time tracking is showing what has actually happened. I can drill into the card as the manager to see who are those workers that, maybe have not clocked in or are running late. And it'll take me right away to my attendance dashboard where I can see how late a worker might be. Let's say that, you know, Ben actually isn't late. He just forgot to punch in, and I I don't want this to be a missed punch that I have to fix later or wait for payroll to email me about this missed punch, I can go ahead and add a clock event right for my mobile phone. So by default, Workday will, default in the scheduled start time. You can, of course, change it and say, hey. He he didn't come in at eight. He came in at 08:05 or whatever that may be. And, again, just a quick way of saying, alright. I fixed this. I don't have to have this show up on a missing punch report later. I don't have to wait for an email from payroll. Or or let's say somebody is actually running late, like Terry has not been. He's over an hour late. I do have the ability to call or text the worker. Of course, I'm on my mobile phone. And this is using the information that's on the worker profile. Again, we respect the workers' privacy, so they do have to set this up as as being publicly viewable inside of Workday so that a manager is able to see, you know, maybe their cell phone number, and have them, be called. So this is my list of workers who are not checked in, and then I have, of course, a list of workers who are, you know, checked in or clinched in for the day. So all quick visibility that I can see from my phone. Going over to the overview tab, these are things that are gonna affect me today. Is anybody off today? Is anybody on vacation that I need to be aware of? I also have this note that was pushed down from the operations team, so the manager knows what he's walking into for the day. On the schedule itself, I have a a little bit of a of a of a simple breakdown. I have a sales department or team, and then I have a support department. Right? You can think of this if you're in, hospitality, maybe the front desk or maybe, if you're a restaurant, this is my front of house, back of house. You can have, you know, all your departments set up. If I do need to make a change to a schedule, for example, Kristen's supposed to come in at ten, maybe I now need her to come in a little earlier. I do have the option to make those quick changes on the fly on the mobile phone. So, I didn't wanna spend too much time on mobile from a manager's perspective, but did just wanna give you a little bit of flavor of what they can do on their mobile device. So toggling over to the web, I'm still logged in as this manager. I wanna show you some similar functionality on the web by going over to, what we call is our time and scheduling hub. And and it brings together all things kind of workforce management related time, absence, scheduling. We can see some quick tasks there at the top. We can see any, pending approvals that might be sitting in the inbox. And then that in and out board that we saw on the mobile phone, your managers also have the ability to see that on the web in addition to seeing any workers that may have missed a meal or a break, especially common in California, and other jurisdictions across The US. But if you wanna track which workers may have missed a meal, you can see that information on here as well. Let's, move over to our schedule. Again, just a quick, overview of what we're seeing here. The way that I have this schedule built is kind of by location being my highest hierarchy. And then as we saw on our mobile phone, I have my two departments, sales and support. Just just a little bit of a generic example. On the schedule itself, I'm gonna see those schedule notes that we saw on the mobile phone. I'm also going to see workers who I might share across locations or maybe even share across departments. So Gavin Lee is a good example here who I borrowed from store forty four. So he works at store forty four, and and I'm, you know, kind of responsible for store two eighty eight. If I drill into one of those shifts at that other location, I don't have access to do anything. Right? I am not the manager of that location, but I do have access to edit and maybe change, my specific shifts. So a a good a good way to see that it's one employee record, even though they might be shared across locations and departments. If you have rules around minimalist minimum rest periods or maximum hours in a week, we will respect those rules because it is one employee record across the board. We're also gonna see things like time off or absences. Juan in this example has a time off. This could be extended leave, vacation, sick time. Again, a good example of the Workday solution all working in one place so you're not accidentally scheduling a worker when they're not supposed to be working. Those open shifts that we saw from the employee perspective, we can also see from the manager's perspective. I have an alert here showing up as well, letting me know that I've scheduled the worker into overtime. So in Workday, we have what we call our our, you know, kind of warnings and errors. And a warning is just like an FYI. Like in this example, I've scheduled, a mix into overtime. That's not necessarily gonna break anything or stop anything. It's just letting me know I have a worker who's gonna be working overtime. You could set up, you know, hard stops, those errors that say if you have a worker working more than seventy hours in a week, maybe that's an error. We're not gonna let you publish that. So you have flexibility of building those types of rules into the schedule as well. In addition to that, you also have, real time productivity metrics. So in Workday, you do have the ability to say, hey. Here's what my labor budget is for the week or what my labor target is. Workday will then calculate what you've scheduled. Of course, we have the workers' pay rates. We know the hours that you've scheduled them. And then we're gonna compare that to our actuals, and our actuals are coming in from time tracking. So as as punches are being entered, we can show you your actuals, and then we can project out into the future. So we can say, hey. If everything continues according to what you have planned, you're gonna end up, you know, $200 over budget. So here's where you can allow your managers maybe to to make changes, offer voluntary leave or or voluntary time off. A a good representation of of workday, time tracking, scheduling, and compensation all working together to give your managers, this visibility. Now in addition to, you know, kind of making sure budget is healthy, making sure your workers are staffed, sometimes managers have to make quick decisions. So let's say Amit has called in and said he's unable to make his Saturday shift or he's sick, something came up. We do have a flexible UI where the manager can just drag and drop and move this to another employee, and it will respect, some of those rules. Right? If I drop this on an employee that I'm gonna push into overtime or I'm gonna violate a minimum rest period, it'll it'll give me that conflict and not let me do it. Now instead of dragging and dropping kind of aimlessly here, I can also leverage AI and have Workday recommend a worker for me. So, instead of, you know, doing the drag and drop, I can ask Workday, okay, who can I replace emit with? Workday is gonna present me a list with workers who are qualified and available. That's kind of the first criteria to make it to this list. You're qualified for this position. You're available for this position. And then Workday is gonna rank those workers based on a few different criteria. So, for example, if I hover over Angela, and 93% is not a bad match, we we meet everything except for those worker preferences. So remember when I showed you the worker preferences, where they say, hey. I prefer to work thirty five hours a week. So, yes, we give this shift to Angela. It is it is a cost minimization for us. It's cheaper for the day, but it doesn't align with her her preferred weekly hours. Where if we are to give this shift to John, you know, it's it's also less expensive for the day and it aligns with those worker preferences. So a really good example of taking the needs of the business and the needs of the worker and balancing those out when we're making these decisions. Now the last thing I wanna show you before I transition back to, our our our fireside chat is the way that this can work using our frontline agent. So I'm gonna show you this from a video perspective just because it leverages a few different cell phones here. But what we could do, and and this is something that we have customers already using today is we can leverage SMS to do a whole call out process. So for example, a worker can text a number, and say, hey. I'm sick. I'm not able to come in today. The agent will look to see if that worker is scheduled, and and it'll say, hey. You're scheduled to work today. I can submit the sick time on your behalf. Do you want me to do that? Yes. The worker doesn't have to log in to Workday to submit the sick time. The agent is doing it for them. And then on the other end, we will send an SMS message to the manager as well and say, hey. Alec has requested sick time and there is a shift that he is working. So that list of workers that we saw, suggested workers, is the same list of suggested workers that we're now offering the manager, but the manager doesn't necessarily have to log in to Workday to see it. Now the manager could respond to this and say, you know what? Don't cover the shift. I don't need the backfill. They can use natural language. They can also respond and say, post it to the open shift board. So as opposed to offering it to one of these workers, maybe we just wanna post it to the open shift board. Or the manager could say, hey. Offer this shift to Emily. Then continuing kind of this vignette here, Emily gets a message and lets her know, hey. One of your workers call one of your peers called out. Do you want to accept this shift? So this is a great example of using a agentic AI to free up the manager. As Rebecca mentioned upfront, it's not a twenty minute process to kind of fill in a a a a a somebody to come in and cover. This is all done through SMS text messaging using mathematical AI and agentic AI to complete these processes. So that's all I wanted to show you from a demo perspective. I do wanna save the majority of our time today, tossing it back to Alan and Ryan to go through, some of Drury's specific, details. Brilliant. Thanks, Richard. That was awesome. Still good to see our products in action. Okay. So welcome to the Farsight chat segment, everyone. My name is Alan Steers, part of the product management team here at Workday. And we're so thrilled to have Ryan Schlimpert, CIO of Drury Hotels, take the time out to join us, really drilling in on Drury's frontline journey with Workday. So welcome, Ryan. To get us started, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role, leading the team there, and paint a picture for us of Drury Hotels. What makes the company and its culture so unique? Sure. Happy to. And first off, thanks for having me. Happy to be here. I'll start out with Drury. So we've got, about a 150 hotels across 27 states. And I'd say we really differentiate with an award winning team that delivers great service, and we also have great value. And so we've got amenities including a big free breakfast and an evening event that we call 05:30 kickback that includes a big spread of food and three free drinks for everybody. And we're unique in that we're family owned and we build, own, and operate all of our hotels. So that's very unique in the industry and allows us to be very consistent and work as one team across all those hotels. In regards to my role, I'm responsible for everything technology, from websites and apps to infrastructure and security to install and and managing Wi Fi and security cameras and more at the hotel level. And ultimately, our IT team's here working hard just to try to help our team be great at what they do and deliver great guest experiences with the smart use of technology, I like to say. And Workday is a big part of that, so happy to share. Brilliant. So every big transformation starts with a why. So let's talk about your Workday journey. Walk us through what was life like before Workday? What systems were you juggling, and what were the biggest challenges or pain points your frontline workers and managers were facing every day? Sure. So the biggest thing when we started looking at this transformation was we had some serious security and business continuity concerns with our legacy ERP system. So we kinda knew we had to do something. But then we also looked at just our broader ecosystem. On the HR side, we had quite a few different systems that was fractured. And so we had our master data management and our old ERP. We had Kronos for timekeeping, Halogen for performance and goals, success factors for recruiting and onboarding. We had benefit focus for managing benefits. We had a doculivery to deliver w twos and those sorts of things. You know, numerous spreadsheets and manual processes for things like expense reporting and budgeting. And so we had a lot of places for our team to go to understand how to do things and get things done both from an end user experience, but also from our corporate team managing that. And so we had different vendors, different upgrade cycles, different integration environments, reporting environments, security, data models, interfaces that we had to learn. So we just spent a lot of time on that. And then last, I'd say, in all those, there's very little self-service. And so a lot of the team to get things done and they had to ultimately call somebody at our corporate team to do it. I think that paints a pretty good picture of the before. Yeah. That definitely paints a a really good picture of before. That's a lot of systems to juggle. And, you know, with that before picture being so clear, it sounds like you reached maybe a critical point where change management was just necessary. When you looked at the market, what was it about Workday that made you say, hey, this is the partner we need to solve those big business problems and maybe those specific frontline challenges too? Sure. I think one of the things, you know, midsize company, we've got a lean team, and we really felt like consolidating a variety of those different tools I mentioned across HR, accounting, and our procurement, our supply division would be very effective for us to really shift that time spent pushing and pulling data between systems and managing all those to actually optimizing one system with one platform to build reporting and integrations and business processes. So we felt like that'd be very effective in not only from that management side, but the end user side. Way less places to go, less user interfaces to understand, so just a better end user experience. And then as an ex developer, that one line of code was really important to me. I just saw a lot of the fractured, kind of, by acquisition platforms that we were looking at beyond Workday, and it had to piece things together. You weren't sure what was integrated or what data models to use in different areas of the system. So that was important. And then lastly, I just say with Workday, it felt like the team actually enjoyed working there. And we're a big culture company. We're big on doing the right things for the right reason and being good partners. And it just felt like Workday, had a great team and and that was attractive to us as well. That's that's great to see your developer experience coming across into some of the decision making as well with PowerOne. So let's fast forward to today. What does a day in the life look like now for a hotel manager or frontline team member? How are they interacting with the system, and what's the feedback you're hearing directly from them? Sure. We just saw a little bit of a day in the life, I think, from Richard there. But certainly managing the team within the platform. So the managers are in there doing helping with onboarding, posting positions, transferring positions, managing merit and pay, all those sorts of things. But also now expense reporting, managing inventory in the hotels, and actually ordering the replenishment items they need through Workday. And then the financial reporting and the p and l's in Workday that are very drillable so that they can get down and see if they see an exception or anomaly. They can drill down and see the data behind that that's causing it. So it really drives some good business acumen for our managers. And then from the frontline perspective, you know, we've got all the a lot of the things you just showed that clocking in and out, requesting time off, checking their vacation balances, you know, updating contact information, checking their pay, direct deposit changes, and on and on. And the team's able to do a lot of these on their own, whereas before they had to call somebody to do it. And I love the open enrollment example that Richard just shared because before Workday, we would have had to have people around the computer, limited computers in a hotel. Right? So housekeepers, maintenance team, etcetera, would be, huddled around and now they can do that on their phone. And ultimately, you know, our our team member expectations are evolving. They wanna be able to do these things on their own, not be constrained by manual paper based processes or having to call people, and Workday is really helping us to do that. Alright. So that's a great segue then talking about when you are at a desk. And by definition, right, frontline isn't about being at a desk. It's it's like not at a desk if you look it up. How critical has the mobile experience been? What has putting all of that capability into the palms of their hands done for productivity and engagement? Yeah. This wasn't something that was really top of mind when we were looking at the conversion, but has been certainly a a big win, once we got there. And a simple example is just in the mornings, we'd have a lot of folks lined up clocking in at our clock in station, and now they can just go to the area of the hotel they need to go to work and clock in on their phone and and get started with their day. And similar to my comment about the changing expectations of the team, not only do they want self-service, but they wanna be able to do it at the ease and convenience of where they are and what they wanna do, and mobile unlocks that for us. So then bringing all of those systems together and investing in that unified platform, which is made up of what we call SKUs, right, that cover everything from recruiting and onboarding to time and payroll. How has having that single source of truth impacted your key areas? So I'm especially curious about employee retention, internal mobility, and and even compliance. Sure. And when I think about this, I think myself and our our leadership team really think about technology as a key enabler of team engagement. If they have easy to use effective tools that make their jobs easier and helps free them up to do what they really got into hospitality to do is supporting our team and supporting our guests. You know, that can really drive a better team member experience, better engagement, and ultimately better attention. And then you, you know, when you talk about compliance and security, that's that was a huge focus for me of just having one security model on a platform that's built from the ground up with security in mind, and one place to really ensure the right people have access to the right business processes. Really helps me feel like it it simplifies things and make sure data is secure and helps me sleep better at night. Yeah. And to sleep better at night, change management must have been a big part of the journey. So how did you actually approach engaging and, you know, that that change management, training across Drury with the frontline? Sure. Yes. This it was certainly a big undertaking and there are a lot of concerns as we went into it just to make sure we got it right. And I think a few things that helped is being very intentional about the team that we put into place, both of our partner implementing, with Workday doing that for us, but also having the right team internally. And so we were very intentional about who are the SMEs in these different domains to make the decisions about how to configure things and how things need to be, but then also giving them the right stakeholders to help with testing and help with, decisions and those sorts of things. And I think that really helped us catch some things that one person might have thought was a good idea that would have been quite painful if we would have rolled them out that way. And then I think also just being thoughtful about how we phased it. And so we went live with the HR side of things, but not all of it. So we followed up with learning, and then we went live with financials, and we later came and did reporting and added planning and then pecan and prism. So we kinda staggered these things with what we felt like we could manage at a given time and what the team could absorb. So I think that really helped us. Yeah. It's great to see you leveraging so much at Workday across the board. And, you know, bringing it back to the mobile app, I'm curious, was there any hesitation from the team members about using the app maybe on their personal devices? And and more importantly, how did you build the excitement and drive such strong adoption? This one's I don't know that I have great advice of what we did special because we really didn't have to push this all that hard. We didn't force it on people. It was we kind of released it and let them know about it, and we had options for people to do things without it. Right? So they needed to clock in our our tablet station to clock in, they could do that, or their managers could do things on their behalf still. But as we continue to educate the team and and they started to see others using it and seeing the benefits, it was really a lot of organic adoption. So I'd just say we just basically announced it, educated people on what's there, showed them some of the benefits, and it kinda spread naturally. Brilliant. I love that word organic. Anything organic in the software world is always a great thing that we welcome. So let's zoom out of the the operate to the operational and financial picture. A huge part of hospitality management is labor scheduling. So how has Workday given your managers better tools to build schedules, control overtime, and and manage labor costs in real time? Yeah. So this is a big strategic focus for us right now. Looking to make sure that we're staffing our hotels and having the right people in the right place at the right time, but not too too many people in a place at the wrong time. Right? And so we're currently using some reporting out of Workday, and we're using time tracking, and we have some labor standards that we do outside of the system. But we're really looking to use some of the things Richard shared to mature in this space. So we're piloting Workday scheduling, and we're also evaluating labor optimization, as well as adaptive planning and other reporting capabilities in Workday to really bring together forecast, schedules, and budget information all together in a way that makes it easy for our managers to staff effectively. And we see really three big benefits there. The some of the things he shared around the shift swaps and online schedules, you know, just that team flexibility and improved user experience is big. Being instead of posting a piece of paper on a break room wall and texting it out and all these texts back and forth, doing that all within the system, we think, is is powerful, and our teams that are piloting are really appreciating that. But then it's the improved bottom line. So today, I mentioned some of those reporting that we have, but it's all backward looking. So did you screw up yesterday? Okay. That's good to know. I can adjust going forward. But with some of the things Richard show, we can see, okay, if if I schedule like this, here's the impact of my budget given the forecast for the next two weeks. And so that that's really helping drive different conversations about maybe we should think about this this time frame in the afternoon a little differently and staff it a little differently to make sure we're meeting our budgets. And then lastly, just efficiency with some of the auto scheduling capability. It just helps our team not spend so much time building that schedule. And ultimately, it should be more compliant, more effective, and more in line with budget. And so we think there's a lot of wins by doing this and look forward to getting this fully rolled out. Alright. Yeah. So good to hear that you are realizing those savings, you know, across your overall labor budget in the organization. And thinking even broader. Right? We do often focus on the HR side, but hotels run on complex supply chains. Are you seeing any interesting uses of mobile technology, perhaps integrated with Workday within your supply chain? For example, how do teams handle things like inventory and procurement on the go? Yes. So we have a supply team, as I've mentioned, that's really purchasing things central. We've got warehouses we manage to kinda centrally bring that in and then the hotels order from us at corporate, and we're pushing that, you know, delivering those things out. And we also purchase for all of our construction, so we're we're renovating or building new hotels. So a lot of stuff in our warehouses, and we're really making great strides with Workday's new releases in the last year or so to better manage our inventory, better have managed our procurement processes. And we've recently really improved our digital integrations with vendors with how we manage the inventory in the hotels and the warehouses, and then simplified how the hotels can order from us. So that's really helping. And then we're also looking within the warehouse to actually use mobile devices to manage picking. And so when the the team decides to go pick a product and load trucks, today we have voice activated picking. So they have a headset telling them what to do. But with Workday's new enhancements, we're gonna be able to move the tablets and and streamline that. And we all also have team members, frontline team members in the hotels. We've simplified inventory management at the hotel by being able to do that on a mobile device as well. That's brilliant. So look, I love digging into the how. Every implementation definitely has those moments. So is there a specific configuration or unique way of using Workday, maybe a business process that you designed that your team is particularly proud of? The one that jumps to mind is our planning system. This, again, wasn't kind of the forefront when we went forward with this transformation, but we did have a very arduous schedule our budgetary process is all spreadsheets pulling together a bunch of data. The team spent a bunch of time on it. And so even some of our toughest graders on technology have said that this is an awesome upgrade and and really transformative and helps shift the team from all that manual work to actually spending more time strategically evaluating the budgets and making sure they're effective. So this has been an incredible incredible transformation. Looking back on the journey, what are your biggest lessons learned for all the leaders today in the audience thinking about a similar project? What's the one piece of of advice that you would give them? Yeah. So for us, I think it's been really effective to have a small team within our IT organization that supports across HR accounting and our supply division. But regardless of how you're structured, I just encourage everybody to be intentional about that team organization that I mentioned earlier, but also post implementation. There's always gonna be those things that sounded great in the the analysis efforts that you get live and are are a little bit rough, and you're gonna wanna go spend time optimizing those. So making sure you're budgeting and planning for those. And then I also think it's very important our our IT team that's supporting this is very embedded in our business team. So they sit in the same areas with HR accounting and supply, and they go to their meetings, and that partnership, I think, has really been critical for us. Brilliant. Look. With with six minutes left on the clock, right, I'm eager to ask you one question. Everything we're hearing about nowadays is AI. Right? And when we look at what's next on the horizon for Drury Hotels, How are you thinking about the new technologies like Workday's AI and the new frontline agent capabilities to continue elevating your employee experience? Yeah. So we're like I mentioned, we're exploring scheduling labor optimization, very interested in Paradox and how that can improve the candidate experience. And then just really keep an eye on the agent development and looking at how that can streamline things. We feel like we've done a lot of work to get on a modern platform and utilize a lot of the capabilities and so just excited as Workday starts embedding AI and more of those to to make us really change how we work. So, looking forward to that. Brilliant. Ryan, look, it's been an absolute pleasure having you alongside the Workday team today. Thank you for all of those key insights that you shared. My pleasure. Okay. So now we have some time on the clock, four minutes left to go to some q and a. I know the chat's been active with questions and responses, but let's see if there's anything to answer or echo here on the the mic. Rebecca, are there any questions you'd like to pitch to Ryan or I or take yourself or or maybe distribute across the team? Yeah. For sure. I think we've been pretty active in the q and a, which is great. One question that came in was around our frontline agent. I know we've kind of hit on this quite a bit, if it's available to you now. So our frontline agent is actually a part of our early adopter program at the moment. We already have customers live and using it, and you can expect this to be g a 26 r one. So in just a couple months, which is really exciting. Let's see. We did get a couple last minute questions come in. Let's see. Ryan, I think this one can go to you. As you added SKUs through phase x, how did you approach updating and addressing your FDM? I'm sorry. Can you help me with FDM? Let's see. I'm actually not sure. This was from Cal. Cal, if you wanna elaborate in the chat, we can try to answer that. In the meantime, another one I think this one might be to you as well, Brian. You got a lot of questions coming, which is great. What impact did the implementation have on the staffing within IT and HR? Was there a reduction in FTEs? Was the TCO for HR reduced? Yeah. That's a good question. It's it's a little bit challenging for us to answer because we implemented in late twenty nineteen and into 2020 when our industry was hit with a major curve ball with COVID. And so we our team changed during that time, so it's really hard to compare apples to apples. But I think as we look at it now, we're confident to say that we've been able to scale our hotels without adding additional team members in some of those places. And on the IT side, basically, as I mentioned, we took a lot of time pushing and pulling and managing all these different vendors into one platform. So we have a similar sized team, but that team hasn't gotten smaller. But largely, it's because we now have an evolving platform that we can continuously be updating and Workday is always adding new features and functionality we can take advantage of. So to be able to stay up with that, we've got about the same size team as we had before. But again, it's now more optimization and moving the business forward versus just keeping the lights on. Awesome. Love to hear it. One more for you, and I know we're, getting to the end here. Ryan, how did you drive engagement with your hourly staff to use Workday? Guys, I mentioned a lot of that was pretty organic and we we made it not forced. Right? They could do things in other ways. But ultimately, the the education, having good training out there for them to walk them through it, having our managers equipped to answer questions and help them through it, ultimately, was a pretty organic process. And, you know, I just checked yesterday. We have over we have over 6,000 team members, and we had over 6,000 people log in to Workday in the last month. And the majority of that was on the mobile side. And so I think we've got great adoption, and, it's just part of their work day. No pun intended. Love it. Love it. Alright. Let's close out with one more question. So Cal did follow-up, FDN meaning foundational data model. So as you added SKUs through different phases, how did you approach updating and addressing your foundational data model? That'd probably be a good question for, for the team that's involved in the day to day here, but that's not really been a major concern for us because it's all one data model. I know that we're using Prism now to bring in additional data and supplement some of the data within Workday, but, I don't know that I have a good answer for that one because I I think it's kinda all there and part of the core. Now there are some acquisitions like planning that was a little separate. So we had to work with them as workdays continued to embed that into the core platform. But overall, that hasn't been a major issue for us. Awesome. Well, we are right at time. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Thank you to our presenters, and really thank you so much, Ryan, for joining and sharing your Workday story. We really appreciate it. Yep. Happy to be here. One. Thanks. Thanks.