Name: Rethink How Work Gets Done: How 7-Eleven, Inc. is Transforming their Frontline Experience with Workday
Uploaded: 2026-05-11T19:16:16.448Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 32 s
Description: Rethink How Work Gets Done: How 7-Eleven, Inc. is Transforming their Frontline Experience with Workday

Transcript for "Rethink How Work Gets Done: How 7-Eleven, Inc. is Transforming their Frontline Experience with Workday": Hi, everyone. Welcome to our looking forward with Workday webinar. Thanks, everyone, for joining today. Our webinar today is rethink how work gets done, how seven eleven inc is transforming their frontline experience with Workday. I'm starting to see some people trickle in. If you would like, you can kinda throw in the q and a where you're joining us from today. I am joining from Atlanta, and we're so excited to have you. Alright. 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 webinar is under our safe harbor agreement. And before we jump in, we do have just a few housekeeping items. First, we are recording this session, and we'll be making it available to you via email within the next forty eight hours. So please be on the lookout for that. Workday uses the Goldcast platform, which operates most effectively when using Chrome. So if you are experiencing any issues, please ensure you are using Chrome. If you have any other technical issues during the event, please just notify us using the q and a function, and we will do our best to assist you. And our q and a function is where you will also submit any questions that you may have. We will leave time at the end to answer a few questions live, but we encourage you to use the q and a function throughout today's webinar, and we'll respond as quickly as possible. And finally, please complete the four question survey at the end of today's event. Alright. With that out of the way, I would love to bring our speakers on stage just to show their face. Welcome, everyone. I am Rebecca Rodebaugh. I am on our Workday's product marketing team supporting our workforce management products. I'm joined here today by Richard and Catherine, both Workday solution consultants who will be showing you some live product demonstrations. And finally, we have Andrew Gossett, who is the director of Workday's global workforce strategy, and who will be moderating our fireside chat today with Rachel Allen, head of talent acquisition at seven Eleven. And you'll hear more from these folks as the webinar continues. Here is a quick look at our agenda. I will start things off by covering Workday's investment in the frontline and the momentum that we are building in this space. We will then see a live demo that covers our full frontline life cycle from high volume hiring and recruiting all the way to scheduling and forecasting. And lastly, we will spend the rest of our time speaking to our customer, seven eleven, to learn a bit more about their frontline operations. Alright. So I know many of you are well aware of our presence in this space, so I'll keep this brief. But before we dive into our vision around the frontline workforce, I just wanna level set us in how we serve this critical segment of the workforce. And as you can see, we support organizations, operators, and frontline managers and workers across the entire frontline life cycle. From strategic workforce planning to high volume recruiting, intelligent scheduling and labor forecasting, and finally, all the way through to core operational necessities of accurate time tracking and pay. Instead of stitching together this journey with 10 different tools, you get one single platform with AI and automation woven throughout. So the experience feels cohesive for your people and controllable for you. It is this end to end data connectivity and comprehensive approach that is already winning in the market. It has led to tremendous success landing leading companies in complex verticals like retail, hospitality, transportation, and manufacturing. We are proud of our progress. And as a company, we are placing a big bet on the front line. Our vision is clear. We intend to be the fastest growing frontline technology provider by the end of this year. And we're investing from both a product and a go to market perspective, centering on where we win today and where technology is going tomorrow. We are going to market with a unified bundle from the user experience down to our data core that point solutions and legacy providers with a fragmented architecture cannot compete with. Workday is built on a unified data core, a single source of truth that connects that connects our, point solutions to a unified schedule and hiring to your bottom line in real time. On top of this foundation, Workday AI automates high friction tasks like cutting hiring cycles from weeks down to just minutes. And we combine this with the industry's most complete application layer across core HCM, workforce management, payroll, and talent, plus our trusted partner network that extends value instead of merely fill filling product gaps. But an architecture diagram doesn't tell the whole story. The real power is in how that unified approach translates into a tailored experience for the people actually doing that work. So what does this look like? We need every stakeholder exactly where they are with the specific tools that they need to succeed. For the worker and candidate, we provide a frictionless consumer grade experience, whether they're setting interview schedules, picking up a shift via text, or accessing their wages instantly. We make their lives easier to drive retention. And for the manager, we unburden them from admin. We use our AI agents to automate the heavy lifting of hiring and scheduling, turning them back into people leaders. And lastly, the operator. They get real time visibility into labor costs and demand, allowing them to steer their business with precision. And to show you exactly how we're achieving these outcomes in a true live environment, I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to Catherine and Richard for a demo. Hi, Brad. My name is Catherine McMahon. I am an ATM solution consultant in Azure by Kinstad, and I'm gonna take us through the cabinet experience agent. It's really truly revitalized to the frontline experience in a couple of different ways. The first is conversational applied. As we know being in the frontline workspace it's really important for candidates to be able to have a mobile first approach when not only looking for careers but applying for careers as well. It's also personalized engagement. Really having a high touch experience for the candidate so that they not only feel valued but they also feel like they're well communicated with throughout that process. And then finally automated scheduling. Having the candidates be empowered to be able to self schedule their interviews. As you can see here on the left, utilizing our AI agent Olivia all through the mobile experience. So let's go ahead and jump into our demo. So I thought what better way to start our presentation to look and see how seven eleven, one of our customers, is utilizing their AI agent. So we're gonna go over here. Right now, we're on our candidate and experience agent, and we see that they have personalized theirs as Rita. Now what's amazing about the personalization is that customers can make sure that their brand and their culture are coming through through this experience for the candidate. One of our customers, Chipotle, they named their AI agent Avocado, like avocado, so play on words. And And so we've seen customers really have fun with this. So as we interact with Rita, we see that she's introduced herself and says that she can help us look for different roles within the organization. Alexei, before we go ahead and start our application, we have a couple of questions about seven eleven such as the culture. So I'll write in tell me about your culture. Amrita is going to give us a response and there's one or two ways that she can respond. The first would be through natural language processing or she could respond via contextual. A lot of our customers take a hybrid approach and so utilizing the LLM and the contextual so that they have those personalized responses. And you can see here that she's provided text telling us about seven eleven's amazing culture. What's great about Rita is Rita is 20 and that means that candidates as they're engaging with career sites outside of business hours can ask her items like this about the culture, about benefits for example, to be able to get a look and feel of the company before they go ahead and apply. So we can see here really easy to be able to not only have a text but it could be a video too within some of the the personalized responses. And now she is also bilingual. So I could say speak to me in Spanish. And she's gonna go ahead and change how she is speaking to me. I'm not gonna move forward talking in Spanish. So unfortunately, I don't know it, but as I can say, back to English. And you can see right there in real time how she was able to go to communicating with me in Spanish to then reverting back to English. So truly bilingual. And she supports over 100 languages. And so that's a short experience of how seven eleven is utilizing our candidate experience agent. Let's go ahead and let's look in a demo environment since we're not applying to seven eleven now unless they are accepting applications for one day just to be a part of the bring your own cup and sign me up. So we're gonna go ahead here and see how AI our AI agent, Olivia, is gonna take us through this process. Now in the interest of time, I've done some of this just so that we can see just really the breadth and depth that our AI agent, Olivia, can help us with. Now first and foremost, we can make sure that the candidate has accepted our terms and it's up to you on where this is brought into the process but in our example, we have this right at the top. Now let's say a candidate looked at the terms and declined. Well, that means that the conversation with our AI agent would then halt and it would stop and not move forward. We accepted the terms and it's asking how can it help us? We let her know that we're looking for customer service jobs and she said amazing where would you like to work. We inputted Chicago and she was able to find 11 recommended jobs within the Chicago region. We were able to look at the job requisition, learn a little bit more about the position, and we are going to go ahead and apply. Now this job requisition is going to come from your ATS and in our example of course utilizing Workday recruiting. Now as we scroll down, we're putting in our first name and our last name. Maybe there's anybody from Philadelphia that might be a Philadelphia Eagles fan. I put in Cooper Gegine here, and it asked us for not only our email address, but for our phone number as well. Now when we think about the frontline experience, of course, there might be some applicants that don't have an email and that's fine. They can go through this whole experience just via text through their mobile phone. As As you can see, Olivia will ask, how do you prefer you be contacted moving forward? And we simply put text message only. Now what we're gonna see up next is the ability to ask questions through this application process as well. So think about some of those questions that you have attached to your job requisitions. Those are automatically going to populate here in our AI agent to make sure that we're screening the candidates correctly such as are you at least 18 years of age available to work on the weekends or how many years of work experience do you have? And we see we went ahead and we answered those questions. For a resume, we went ahead and we skipped because as we know in the front line industry, those candidates don't have a resume. However, if you are hiring for corporate, then somebody could definitely upload their resume here as well. We could do EEO. That's voluntary, of course. And that's asking how else that we can assist you. Now based off of the way that we have answered the questions, Cooper has great news. He's met those minimum qualifications and is ready to move to that next step for a thirty minute phone interview. And this is something, as I mentioned before, that I can and get can do on the desktop or on mobile. And Olivia has searched for the free and busy time with your hiring managers and your recruiters to make sure that they are scheduling time that is available. We easily selected one of the times, given it a two, and then it's asking if there's anything else that we need help scheduling with. So really easy to be able to apply and schedule utilizing our AI agent. And then to close this out, I just have two slides here to share. This, as I mentioned, within our conversational apply, this is an experience to be able to have all with on your mobile phone. No logins, no password. It is a very simple application experience. And then I included here just an SMS text example when you see the interview scheduling that came directly from my mobile device and you can see that I answered number two here within that slot. And then of course, all that rich information that we had during the application process would grow and build that candidate profile within Workday recruiting. And with that, I'll go ahead and stop sharing and pass it over to my colleague. Thanks Catherine. Alright so from interview scheduling to shift scheduling, I wanted to talk a little bit about Workday's workforce management and I'm gonna focus primarily on what a frontline manager might need to do especially because it's Monday morning. It's about the time maybe frontline managers start getting emails about submitting and approving their timesheets. So I'm gonna jump into the software as that frontline manager, again, some Monday morning tasks. The first thing they see, awaiting their action is some timesheet approval. So of course, the manager does have the ability to do this inside of Workday right from their inbox. You know, we're all kind of accustomed going right into our notifications, whether it's Instagram or, Workday. We're alerted of the things that need our attention right away. And and without having to navigate, you know, very far, we can see all of the details of the time sheet. We can even see that there is an alert on this time sheet. Now that could be something like, you know, this employee was late. This employee has overtime. Our our customers determine what those alerts or those exceptions are. Now, of course, for a manager that's got multiple employees, probably approving timesheets in their inbox is not the most efficient way. So I'm gonna toggle over to our time and scheduling hub, which is really a dashboard that brings together all of the items that might be important to this manager. From time tracking to scheduling to absence, on this dashboard, we can see the items that need our review, such as, you know, time off, that is sitting in our inbox. And also what I like to call is my in and out board. Who is punched in, who is not punched in, or who's not, you know, on the clock already. These are, dashboards that are also available on mobile. So if your frontline managers are using their mobile devices, it's really easy to see, you know, who who's maybe not on the floor, or or where I need them to be, to, you know, start working. Going back to, you know, approving timesheets again, it is still Monday morning. I wanna show you a more efficient way to approve timesheets outside of the inbox. We're looking at our timesheets for last week. By default, we're gonna look at, the the, the the managers direct reports. And Workday is making it very easy to surface the the the, items that this manager wants to pay attention to first. So first of all, we have these workers that have four alerts. And again, these alerts can be, hey. This is a worker that was scheduled to work, doesn't have any time. It could be something more critical, like this worker is missing a punch. I'm sure that rarely happens at, you all on the call when you have frontline workers, that punch. I'm sure you all rarely have missed punches. But if you do, it is really easy for this manager to come in and make changes. Let's say, for example, Amanda wasn't late by over five minutes on Monday. The manager can easily edit this punch, change that 08:15 to 8AM. If it is an actual late or tardy, Workday can also track and accrue, attendance violations such as points. And those points can lead to disciplinary action, using Workday's, you know, talent, toolset. If the worker does have a missed punch, I can do the same thing. I can enter that miss punch time, directly into this time block, or I can ask Workday to auto fill from a scheduled out time. One of the benefits of using, you know, time and scheduling inside of Workday is both of them live in the same place, and they can both communicate and and give me the information. I will auto fill that from my out punch. Workday will refresh the screen, and now Amanda has moved down to my workers without alerts. So navigating through, you know, your time sheets, fixing errors, approving time, really easy to do, from both mobile and web. Just wanted to show you what the web experience looks like. One other final thing I wanted to talk to is work based scheduling. So when Rebecca started our our call today, she talked about how we can eliminate some of the, you know, admin work that a manager might have to do. And one of those items is using workday scheduling where we can actually forecast what your sales or what your labor demand is going to be for any given week. So, for example, this is the current week. We this is, what our schedule looks like for, you know, this retail location. And Workday has generated a forecast for us that said, this is where we're gonna see, you know, your spikes throughout the week, but also throughout, you know, anytime, in the day. So in my demo environment, I am forecasting in one hour increments. However, you have the ability to also forecast down to the fifteen minute increment. Workday will take that, forecast whether you're tracking customer, you know, foot traffic, online orders or transaction sales, any type of metric that you want to forecast, how many slurpees you plan to sell at any given time of the day. Workday will take that using machine learning and generate a forecast for you all, which will result in, what we call is labor demand. So, you know, throughout the day, this is the amount of individuals that you are going to need to be successful. Now once that is done, and let me move forward here to maybe a week in the future where we don't have, a schedule. All the manager has to do, right, we have the forecast, we have the labor demand, all the manager has to do is generate a schedule. And even this part, the manager doesn't necessarily have to do. We can schedule this to run, and and the schedule will just be presented to the manager so they can make any final tweaks. Along with those final tweaks, they may want to change some of those things that are important to them. For example, our scheduling solution is really good at balancing both the needs of the worker and the needs of the business. The manager can say, hey, you know what? This week, I'm going to lower the importance, of schedule consistency. We have a very busy week coming up. Schedule consistency is not gonna be something that is is super important. Same with the worker preferences. We allow workers to say, you know, the the amount of hours they prefer to work, the days of the week that they prefer to work. Doesn't mean that they're only ever gonna get their preferences whenever possible. You know, we can try to meet that. But this week, maybe it's not possible, and and we're gonna go ahead and change what is important. Now the manager can generate the schedule. So we've taken our forecast, which is powered by machine learning to learn the trends of the business. We've generated a labor demand based on, some of the rules within this organization, and now we're using artificial intelligence to generate a schedule that, again, aligns with the needs of the worker and aligns with the needs of the business. Once the engine is completed, creating the schedule, it will give itself a score and rate itself on a few different items, that are important to this organization. Now the schedule has been generated. It, of course, still is in draft mode. We can see that Monday is Memorial Day. Doesn't mean it's necessarily an off day. We still scheduled workers on, shifts on these days, and all the manager really has to do from here is publish the schedule. So very quickly in the last, you know, eight minutes, we were able to review our time sheets, generate a schedule, to make the life of this frontline manager a lot easier. So with that, I will toss it over to Andrew for our fireside chat. Thanks, Richard. Thanks all for joining us. I'm Andrew Gasted. I'm responsible for our workforce management products here today. But we've just seen those, and you're not here to hear from me. So I'd like to introduce Rachel Allen, who leads talent acquisition at seven Eleven. I'd like to take a little bit of time to give maybe a deeper level introduction into Rachel, what seven Eleven does. So, Rachel, could maybe you start with a little background on your role at seven Eleven, how long you've worked there, maybe a few fun facts about the company. Sure. Happy to. Excited to be here. And just real quick, you're able to hear me. Yes? Yes. Okay. So I'm actually one of many boomerangs here. We we see we we tend to see that a lot, but I was here for my first round around, 2010 to 2015. I recently I guess it's been a few years now, but I came back at the 2021, which was just after the acquisition we had of Speedway. So 07/11, we celebrate a hundred years next year, which is incredible, and we are very much looking forward to that. We are, built on a lot of history of firsts. We were actually the first convenience. We were initially an an ice house, and our founder decided, you know, we wanted to provide our customers what they wanted, where, and when they wanted, and there came the convenience industry. We're also first ever to to sell to go coffee, and we are a large global brand. We have over 86,000 locations in 19 countries and, areas, and very well known globally. But where I'm gonna be focusing our conversation today is specific to US and Canada. And within The US and Canada, we do have over 13,000 locations. It's a mix of both franchise and corporate locations, but we will be speaking to the corporate locations specifically in these conversations. It's great. I think you could say you probably power the way work gets done delivering daily caffeine to the commuters, as a a first mover, but then setting the trend for the industry, keep everybody think that's. fair. It's a fair statement. That's great. But you you didn't just pioneer, those. You've also pioneered how you manage your workforce. We know that retail is very complex. Being able. to keep up with the daily demands, the high turnover, being able to meet workers where they are. Mhmm. As you face this complexity, as you took on Speedway, you reached a tipping point in your organization where you decided, you know, what what you're doing now maybe isn't what you wanted for the future. Mhmm. Can you talk to me maybe a little bit about what caused that change and what what set the stage for you needing to look for something like Workday to meet your future needs? Sure. So within retail, change is always happening. So that doesn't make us any different than anybody else in retail. I think what added a little bit to our complexity story was the fact that we were still going through an acquisition integration. So we're talking two totally different tech stacks, two hire two different hiring models, two different operating models. So that definitely did add to the complexity. And when you scale at that size, it does highlight maybe some of the inefficiencies and the fragmentation and just it there's it highlights when you are operating out of two different ways it can it can slow things down. But when we looked across the board, regardless of the banner, there were still some very common themes that we were seeing especially in the hiring space of our frontline employees and and that is regardless of banner, it was slow and it was manual. And that by being slow, we were losing the war on talent because our competitors were getting to our talent first. If you don't get to them quickly within the front line, they've moved on down the street to someone else. Because of that we also saw a lot of drop off and no shows which was not unique to us. That was common across the board when you were looking at any anyone trying to hire at the frontline level. But because we were in in our opinion too slow, our our drop off, was was quite high at the time and then I'd already mentioned this that the high competition. So everyone was going through this war on talent and trying to get to the talent first And if you're if you're moving too slow, that's just not happening. So, yes, we had some added complexities because of an acquisition integration and, again, the two different tech stacks and the two different hiring models and the two different operating models. But we we saw some consistent themes when it came to hiring around it was manual, slow, we weren't getting to the to the talent fast enough and, it was resulting in a lot of drop off, candidate drop off. You know, have having two separate, experiences both for the candidates, but also for your internal teams, definitely adds a lot of friction, and we've seen that over and over with our customers that we work with. How did that acquisition of Speedway surface opportunities to further align your total technology stack, whether that be taking a look beyond, your recruiting into scheduling or maybe your use of the mobile app within the organization? Well, I think you touched on it. The user experience, spoke to a need for a consolidated, simple experience whether you are the candidate or you are the employee using it. So we had very real examples of our employees literally switching between two different systems. And then from a candidate experience, depending on the location you are applying to, you had two very different experiences. And so I think the acquisition really highlighted that. But even if that acquisition hadn't happened, there were still some consistency opportunities and the other things that we needed to solve for, it still existed, but this helped us to understand and put some concrete definition around some of the business problems we were trying to solve for. Yeah. That that's key. Focusing in on the business challenges and then using the solution to meet those rather than a kind of force fitting a tool, and then then searching, you know, being the the hammer searching for nails. Yeah. When when when you make your purchasing decisions, you know, a lot of our customers will debate going with something that's maybe best of breed, has a few features that maybe Workday doesn't versus going with the unified platform approach. How did you consider that trade off, and, what ultimately. drove your decision to choose the consolidation model? Yeah. That's a great question. So we were very clear on we didn't wanna be chasing a platform or a technology and the the I call it the shiny object problem. Right? You see the shiny object and you wanna go after this cool new technology when you really need to make sure you understand what you're trying to solve for. And for for us, we were trying to pursue outcomes. So, ultimately, in the end, what are the outcomes that we want to see and then backed into what is the right technology that can enable and support our strategy as a whole and the outcomes that we're trying to see from this. And it was also we wanted to have I think strong partnership is more important than the technology itself quite honestly, and something that really came out of this for us is, working with a strong partner that was understanding of where the greatest strengths are and where you you called out, like, some technology will have a few things but maybe not some others, But a partner that understands where maybe there there could be a better partner solution and they help bring those partners together to bring a unified solution altogether, and that's what we found with Workday. So while we did leverage Paradox, which at the time was not a Workday company, so we we leveraged Paradox for that frontline hiring. It was actually Workday that introduced that partnership because they had that strong partnership already. And so I think that's more important than anything more important than the technology is having a strong partnership with someone who will think through the solutions you need for your individualized problems that you're trying to solve for. Yeah. Absolutely. I know our our teams always enjoy connecting with your team, you know, further refining our scheduling road map and our forecasting, making sure that we can meet your needs, and, you know, also recognizing, right, you're no one's going to have everything out of the box day one that you might need. Exactly. We're definitely loving the partnership to to move on that journey together. You you spent a lot of time to make sure you did the change management correctly. We know in the front line, change management is not necessarily easy. Can you tell me a little bit about what you did to empower your store leaders to own this shift in system landscape, during that time? Yeah. So I think that's a missed opportunity for a lot of implementations that happen is that change management. And, unfortunately, chain the change management strategy can sometimes end up being just a communication timeline and calendar and breaking apart the different audiences that you want to communicate to often after the fact versus understanding your change management strategy from the get go. And one of the most important parts of understanding that is who are your key stakeholders and not just, you know, the leaders, but also the end users and making sure you provide a voice to the person this impacts the most. Nobody likes for things to feel like something's happening to them. They wanna feel like something is happening with them, and so that's something that we were very, focused on with this rollout is we made sure we were connected with those that would be impacted the most, and for us, that was our store leaders. So we wanted to make sure our store leaders had a voice and what the solution was, versus for us making an assumption on their behalf. And when you do that, you also create this this pull instead of a push. They we leveraged our store leaders to help share their story, after we did do some pilots of how it impacted their world and the difference that it made, and they brought other store leaders raising their hands saying, okay. When am I next? It's my turn. I wanna go. And that's because we were very intentional of bringing the the folks that are impacted the most into the loop, into that feedback loop from the very get go and building out a very strong change management strategy that, yes, includes a communication plan, but a communication plan is a small part of an entire change management strategy. Yeah. And we were also very intentional of a a strong, post go live support system as well to make sure that everyone that was impacted felt supported and heard all the way even post implementation. That's it's always a positive signal when you see the next group raising their hands to go. They they must. have experienced, you know, some benefit to make it feel like it was worth it to them. You know, what what maybe manual work disappeared, or what type of savings did the manager see moving to that single system, and how did that build trust with you and your team? Yeah. That's a really great question. So there there is the the majority of savings that we saw was in time, and that hits the bottom line. So for us, it's a vicious cycle if a store is slightly understaffed. So if there's one person missing, other people have to pick up the slack. And then you've got other employees that start to get frustrated, and then ultimately it can impact that customer experience. And that hits the bottom line for us. So this was a a business challenge that we needed to solve for, and the main thing that we wanted to give back to our store leaders was the time to do the right hiring, to hire the right people. And up till this point, they there there was hardly any time to do that. So the immediate impact that we saw is we went from over two weeks to hire to less than three days. And for anyone with frontline workers knows that two weeks is way too long. And that was a huge impact in itself. We also noticed that we saved over two million hours collectively across, across all the stores. So a few minutes here and there for one store is not that great, but when you scale that across an entire, an entire foundation of all your stores it it that adds up fast. So maybe what felt like just a couple of inefficiencies in time when you take it across the board that really adds up. So we were able to save over two million hours a year for our store leaders and then we we were fast, we got faster and that was, if you remember, that was one of the biggest things we were trying to solve for. And by solving for speed, we inadvertently solved for quality. So when you're the first one to get to the best talent, you solve for quality which therefore actually impacted our attrition, believe it or not. So we saw a big decrease in the number of hires that we needed to do the following years after implementation even though the number of positions that we had hadn't really changed. So by speeding it up, getting to the talent faster, we also increased the quality of talent we were hiring which decreased the attrition that we had been seeing. So there was a lot of really great success stories there. And then we also on the on the workforce management scheduling side of things, we were able to consolidate over 5,000 locations to one single platform. And again when you just see a couple of inefficiencies here and there that can compound quickly. So by moving to a consolidated platform you free up a lot of energy and time. A couple of what I would say happy accidents or some other positives that we came out or that came out of this that we didn't necessarily expect, but probably maybe should have if I think back on it. But we were able to decrease our recruitment marketing dollars, quite a bit because prior to having a consolidated solution, we had to use nationwide campaigns from a recruitment marketing perspective. Once we were on a consolidated platform and solution, we could be very intentional of the campaigns we needed specific down to a store whereas before we just had to go nationwide and so now we're much more strategic in our recruitment doc recruitment marketing dollars been too which is really great. And then the other one I already mentioned was the was the quality of hire, which led to lower attrition was was something that was a really great outcome from this rollout. I mean, anytime you can reduce the volume you have to bring in, and I think yours was even in the tens of thousands of workers that you did not have to hire by reducing those, those attrition numbers, absolutely gives time back to the managers. I do wanna to touch on some other key feedback you had from the managers in your rollout of something this broad, consolidating into systems. You have something called hundred days of summer within 07:11. Could you maybe tell the audience what that is? Get them maybe excited for seven Eleven day for the, the in store opportunities there. And then what did that mean for your change management planning around that key initiative? Yes. So for us, that's our seasonal hiring. So a lot of retailers, it may be during the holidays. Us, it's the hundred days of summer and that is, starts with Memorial Day and ends with Labor Day. So we made some assumptions of what our end user would love to see from us and initially when we built out our our timeline, we were like, great idea, we're going to implement this right before the one hundred days of summer so that our store leaders will have this new amazing solution to help them staff for the 100. And I actually had something called an in store experience. So everyone here does actually work in a store to get that in store experience, and it was time for, with our all of our leaders have to do it on a I think every two years, you have to go back into the store. And I happened to have my in store experience, and I was talking to the store leader and I was so excited about this great new solution that we were gonna roll out in April so that she'd have it in time for the hundred days of summer. And she said, oh please no. You you guys have really great intentions but everyone tries to roll everything out right before the hundred days of summer thinking it's going to be a really great help for us. But we have so much going on right before and it's gonna if the adoption will be low, it'll be hard to get people on board because their their time and attention is split in so many different ways and really good point. Right? And that just, you know, we we I mentioned we had, you know, listened to the voice of the end user of what they wanted to see in the solution. Something that we hadn't asked upfront was the timeline. And so by we made a timeline thinking it was gonna be very helpful and then learned maybe we need to change, and I think that's something very important through any rollout. You build and design based on the information you have at the time. However, should new information come into the picture that you didn't have a time at the time originally and that impacts what your outcome's going to be, you need to have some agility and be able to pivot. So we did. We pivoted. We, you know, we we purposely missed our deadline. So we did not roll out in in our, designed timeline and that's okay because it was what was right for the business. So instead of rolling out right before the hundred days of summer, we actually delayed on purpose until October. I bet you won a lot of champions and friends internally. Bought a lot of credibility for that. It did. That actually helped a ton with the credibility, earning a seat at the table as being a strategic business partner versus, you know, the policy person in HR trying to, you know, push down the way things need to be because of the way we think it is. And instead, we're seen by the leaders of the business as that true partner, which then opens up the opportunity to to do a lot more when you've built that credibility and earn that seat at the table. Yeah. So it that's a really good point. It really did help us there too. And that that's something I bet a lot of our audience is looking at too. Right? If you're in HR, that's always one of the key questions. How can I become a strategic partner to the business? I'm not just administering processes, but I'm actually help shape the flow of decisions. You were actually able to do. that and expand not only your team's role and influence, but getting a seat at the table to move upstream for the decisions. You know, you were able to deliver 2,000,000 in savings. You were able to have huge reductions in time to fill, also offering efficiencies in the consolidation. When you got that seat at the table, can you talk a little bit about what that looked like and maybe even some pro tips for the team to look at, for, you know, ways they might position their savings in a way that adds to their strategic value to the business. Mhmm. I think the most important thing you can do is speak in the language of the person that you're you're you're trying to partner with. So when it came time to speak to the CFO, for example, you're talking dollars. And when you're talking to your chief marketing officer, maybe more anecdotal stories. So it makes a difference in the approach you have, speak the language of the business and ultimately tie it into the strategy and the bottom line period. Unfortunately, HR has, you know, earned the reputation over time of just being policy pushers, and it's unfortunate because I think we are one of the most strategic partners a business can ever have. So I think something really important is speaking in the language of the folks that you're working with, tying it into real business solutions with real numbers and dollars, and anecdotal stories, and I think that makes the difference. Then honor that seat at the table and and take you know, really understand how important that value is and don't take advantage of it. So you worked really hard to get that seat at the table. The way you keep that seat at the table is continuing to be that honest business partner who genuinely is trying to bring the company forward together. And that's important because trust takes a lot to earn, but it does not take a lot to lose. So once you do earn that trust and credibility, you have to make sure you're you really take care of it. Yeah. Absolutely. You were able to influence the expansion after your success with Paradox into other product areas. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how that was able to lay the foundation for the team to be more receptive of expanding over to scheduling? Yeah. I mean, that's exactly why they were open to it is because we were able to deliver the real results that we said we were going to and earned that credibility. And it was little moments along the way that added up that you even pointed out. It was listening to the voice of the end user. It was bringing that you know, surfacing to leadership where that made sense. It was being okay with adjusting what our schedule was to what made sense for the business. And then because of that and then delivering very successful results, then we were invited into the conversation of what else next versus us having to even raise our hand for it. So then the business was like, okay. Well, what else can we do? How else can we lean into the technology we do have and leverage the technology we do have to optimize other areas versus just the hiring? And something I'm really excited about that we talked about when you when you mentioned the the scheduling piece of it is laying that foundation is gonna be key for us to to move that internal mobility talent. So we want we want to be able to seamlessly and easily at scale be able to use our workers in multiple locations, not just the one in which they are that's where their home store is. And, that's something that we we need to build a foundational technology to to do that correctly, and we now have the opportunity to do so because we showed the how successful using the technology in the right ways for the business can be. So now we can find some even greater efficiencies in in running the business like talent mobility across stores, which we're really excited about. Yeah. We're we're excited to see, if my local seven eleven have great workers and, seeing them across multiple. stores. Right? Just the friendly faces further along. When you build something like that agility in the ecosystem, Yeah. a lot of our audience also is very interested in keeping up with compliance, particularly in the, the the space where you might have high turnover workers that are on entry level jobs. A lot of the capabilities are heavily regulated for scheduling those workers. How do you add more agility to keep up with things like trade pay transparency or different state and locality PTO policies that might arise. I think it all goes back to having the right foundation and building correctly. And, again, you build something based on the information you had at the time. And if new information comes into the picture, it may mean, you know, needing to peel back some of the things that you've already built and relaying that foundation versus always trying to understand maybe a workaround or a Band Aid. And when you do have a centralized solution that is built for agility, then you're ready for a change when it happens versus reacting to it. And so I think that's why it's so important to have that built into whatever design solution you have because everything changes all the time. That's the only thing that doesn't change. And you need to be able to change for the business needs quickly, and I think it all lands on what is that foundational groundwork that you have so that you can do it. And for us, what you're trying to monitor, in the hiring space, where you you covered it, pay transparency, and now also some AI laws in in what that looks like. And when you have a centralized place where you can make the adjustments that you need that can feed to everything, that is way more efficient and effective versus a manually updating, you know, location by location, which when you're not on a consolidated solution is on is usually what that means, a very manual process to adjust based on laws that come. So when you have when you build in agility to your foundational platform, you have the opportunity and ability to adjust when those changes are thrown at you on a pretty regular basis now, like a lot of the compliance piece. And that's a that's a that's tables that you the compliance is compliance. You have to be compliant. Like, it's not like we can push back on, oh, I don't feel like that one. So you have to be able to deliver on that compliance, and setting up the systems to enable you to do that makes your lives so much easier. Absolutely. And and we did wait this long to specifically say AI. I think that's because we're really focused on the business outcomes. A lot of what we've already looked at has been. enabled through AI, machine learning, and the underlying foundations that we've built. But as we look at AI moving towards automation to intelligence, it's no. longer theoretical. It's operational. Mhmm. It's your daily. business, and it's changed the way that work gets done, not only for us at Workday, but also for our customers. How has AI changed the way that work gets done specifically for you across the portfolio that we've just looked at? Yeah. So we automated, over 95% of our hiring process at the frontline space, so it's changed things quite a bit for us. But we were very intentional on, again, chasing outcomes and the business problem that we were solving for. It was never to replace a person. And very much we want to make sure that we are freeing up the energy of our people so that they can focus their time in places that really matter. And so that's what we've done, and that's what AI looks like for today for us. So we are already seeing it, especially within the hiring. Where we're excited is to introduce agents at a greater scale. I think something important to remember though is that can get out of control quickly. So what is your how do you want to orchestrate all of that? All of the agents need to talk to each other and work fluidly with each other. Otherwise, you're duplicating efforts and you may have multiple agents doing the same thing. So this is a situation where while I know it feels frantic and everybody's going faster than everybody else, sometimes there are some places where you want to slow down to speed up, and I think this is one of them. Make sure you're you have a enterprise understanding of how you want to work with your agents, how that's orchestrated in a, cohesive manner across your enterprise, whatever that is. And we really think of agents when agents are going to be entering, we want to consider them more of of, kind of an FTE in in understanding the way that work gets done. So we've always had strategic workforce planning and when you look at and all the ways that work can get done, you've got part time folks, you have full time, you have contingent labor, you have consultants, you have different ways and way in which work gets done. Being added to that mix is going to be agents and so you need to be thoughtful of what that looks like and how you have visibility to the different agents you have and what those agents are doing and make sure that you are thoughtful around how that enhances the employee's experience and the way that the work they get done and how they can use, maybe that timing set that time saved to focus on areas that have always mattered that maybe we just haven't been able to get to. The work's not going away and the focus is not on, you know, how do you not have people and you can have agents. I think it is more how do you partner with the people to enhance their work. I think being human is going to be a superpower for folks in the world in the era of AI. Humans will always have to be the ones with the judgment and the final decisions period and agents should just be helping to enable them to do so not replacing that. So I think that's something that we're we're trying to really be intentional around our design for that as we move into more the more agent era. We we definitely recommend all of the HR teams have a strong opinion and communicate. it on, Agree. how the business outcomes function with agents. Maybe they don't own the technology stack at the end of the day, but you do own the business outcomes, and that's been a unique approach that we've enjoyed working with you on. It is still a way in which work is getting done. So HR needs to care, HR needs to have a point of view, and HR needs to partner very strongly with the rest of the business around their intentions of using, AI in different processes. Yeah. Agree. Absolutely. One other thing that I think would be a good pro tip to dig into a little bit more, you got a lot of time savings. What was your plan for that saved time? Yeah. So I actually wish we had done a little more planning around that. That's actually an area of opportunity. That time can move That time can go away pretty quickly because there's a lot that needs to be done. So it it absolutely enhanced our our in the store leader experience, and they they did have more time to focus on key areas that matter more. I I wish we'd been a little bit more strategic on exactly what that was and intentional of it, but even without that, the it it still had really great results and they were able to focus on on how to, in the end, provide the better experience for our customers. And for us, you can't forget our customers our candidates are our customers. Right. So it was really important for us to make sure that they had a great experience so they they continue to come back to our stores as a customer. So, I think when you are when you when you are designing something that is going to have significant savings and time, be very intentional of of where you want that time spent. The business needs to get what the business done, what the business needs to get done, so, ultimately, it worked out great. The the time saved was put into really great areas of focus. It may just have looked a little bit different store to store and, actually, maybe that's okay too because you do need to localize every solution to what's the best fit for that location. So in the end it probably worked out great, I but I would recommend being thoughtful around where you want that time dedicated if a big focus of a of a solution is is time savings. Absolutely. Alright. I know we're about at time. I wanna leave it with one question before we answer a few questions. Looking ahead, the next two or three years, how are you thinking about your workforce platform as a foundation, not just for what you've been able to accomplish today, but what's next for seven eleven in the future? Yeah. I think it's a little bit of that slowdown to speed up and getting that foundation right where it comes to the orchestration of agents because agents are coming in, and we also need to figure out, we want to be very strategic around how that foundation supports more of that skill based hiring. There's a lot of talk around that. Right? And then we're really excited about that talent mobility. I mentioned talent mobility across doors, but take it all the way up. I think with the with the consolidated solutions we have in place, that gives us even greater visibility to talent mobility and development at all stages of the company, not just at the frontline place. So, yeah, I think that's where we're really focused is is partnering with the business strongly, again, starting with that business challenge and how can technology or AI perhaps in enable those solutions, but also making sure that we are taking the time to orchestrate, strategically across the enterprise but with you know, instead of just moving too quickly. Absolutely. Rachel, I wanna thank you for your partnership. I wanna thank you for taking the time to speak with the audience today. Congratulate you on all of the achievements that seven eleven has been able to realize under your leadership. Definitely looking forward to the years to come and our continued partnership there. We do have a few questions, some of them specific, but we'll we'll get into that and see what we can answer that hasn't been resolved by our moderators. One question is, how long have you used Paradox, and what was your biggest lesson learned from doing the implementation of Paradox? Yeah. So I joined, I mentioned, at the 2021. So we were we and I didn't give context around this, but we changed our model in '22 of how we did hiring, and a business decision was made first around holding our store leaders accountable to the hiring. So that decision came well before we introduced any technology, but then that's how we got down the path of, okay, well, how do I enable my store leaders to be successful in this new approach to how we do our hiring? And that's where Paradox came into the picture. We went live, in October '23. And the biggest lesson learned, I would have to say, is is that the the lesson around the change management and connecting the what we were solving for to the the the business strategy. And it was really great that the business decision came first and foremost, and then we were able to support that business decision with the technology versus trying to get people to buy in on a shiny shiny object. So, you know, make align to the strategy and then letting technology enable that vision was a really successful learning from this implementation. Excellent. Next question is, do you use any pre hire assessments for your frontline workers? And if so, how does that fit into your automated process? We do not right now. So not able to expand on much on that. We do use assessments in other areas, but we currently do not at the frontline. Alright. And I think the last question we have time for here, what was your overall project timetable adding in, Paradox with delay. your recruiting hub deployment? Oh goodness. So we went on the journey of trying to decide a solution, for the frontline hiring in '22 and went live in '23, but we started building in the '23, and we were ready to go live in April so that, you know, it was pretty pretty darn quick. And again the whole reason that we didn't go live at that point was because of, aligning the timeline to the business needs. And then it we didn't go live on, the recruiting hub with with Workday for all of that until 2025. So we've only been in Workday Day across all banners. So we had a different version of Work Day, on the Legacy Speedway side prior to that, but all of us moving into a consolidated solution and platform didn't happen until the beginning of 2025. So we actually went live with this frontline solution with two different, technology stacks, engineering as the engine behind it, and then brought, everyone on to Workday. What was really great about that change management wise is our stores had already gone through the biggest part of their change. Their experience didn't change when we did all move into Workday. So that actually helped in the overall change management plan as well. That's great. Well, thank you for taking time to answer those additional questions. Thank you to the audience members for your participation, and I'll turn it over to Rebecca to close us out. Awesome. Thanks so much, Andrew. And thanks again, Rachel, for joining us today. We are at time. Just real quickly, I wanted to highlight that we do have an in-depth demo, a Workday Live happening later this week that we really encourage you to join that's about the same topic. And with that, that is all I have. Thank you everyone for joining. Be on the lookout for the email in your inbox and have a great work day. Thanks.