Have you ever wondered about the transformative journey of a globally renowned organization? Meet our guest for the day, Wendy, a prodigal daughter of sorts, who narrates her intriguing passage from Ceridian to another ERP provider only to return with fascinating insights to share. Wendy takes us through Ceridian’s metamorphosis from its humble beginnings as Day Four Europe to one of the fastest-growing regions with a dynamic customer community. She shares anecdotes of remarkable people she's worked with and the awe-inspiring growth.
We then shift gears and delve into a heartening discussion about mentoring the young and restless. Illustrating this with a touching personal story of mentoring a remarkable woman, Kashmita, the dialogue centers around creating that right mix of security and confidence for our future leaders. We underscore the importance of failure as a steppingstone and the role of mentors in shaping careers. In addition, we discuss the need for a strategic perspective while adopting new HCM technology. Wrapping up with a focus on Dayforce HCM and AI, Wendy highlights the multiple benefits it offers including scalability, innovative onboarding features, and intelligent nudges for scheduling. Don't miss this enlightening conversation about organizational growth, women empowerment, and human capital management
Check out more of the Focus Cloud Group Podcasts and chats on your favourite media players!
Youtube, Spotify, Apple, Google!
Have you ever wondered about the transformative journey of a globally renowned organization? Meet our guest for the day, Wendy, a prodigal daughter of sorts, who narrates her intriguing passage from Ceridian to another ERP provider only to return with fascinating insights to share. Wendy takes us through Ceridian’s metamorphosis from its humble beginnings as Day Four Europe to one of the fastest-growing regions with a dynamic customer community. She shares anecdotes of remarkable people she's worked with and the awe-inspiring growth.
We then shift gears and delve into a heartening discussion about mentoring the young and restless. Illustrating this with a touching personal story of mentoring a remarkable woman, Kashmita, the dialogue centers around creating that right mix of security and confidence for our future leaders. We underscore the importance of failure as a steppingstone and the role of mentors in shaping careers. In addition, we discuss the need for a strategic perspective while adopting new HCM technology. Wrapping up with a focus on Dayforce HCM and AI, Wendy highlights the multiple benefits it offers including scalability, innovative onboarding features, and intelligent nudges for scheduling. Don't miss this enlightening conversation about organizational growth, women empowerment, and human capital management
Check out more of the Focus Cloud Group Podcasts and chats on your favourite media players!
Youtube, Spotify, Apple, Google!
So, wendy, you went to Ceridian, yeah, and then you had some time out from Ceridian and you went back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I went in because I love global payroll. I went into another ERP provider's ecosystem for about five years and that's actually when there was a bit of a transformation journey at Ceridian. So, for those that don't know, ceridian actually sold everything that wasn't focused on day fours to a company called SDWorks, and so there was amazing team members who still are at SDWorks, great friends and old colleagues of mine that moved over to SDWorks in that transaction. Ceridian took its name out the market for about two years while that transaction was bedded in, and what Ceridian organization at that point was called Day Four Europe. There was about 50 people in the UK, there was about 250 people in Mauritius and they localized the platform. So they started building UK payroll in readiness, built the support team, built the infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Some of the most amazing people in our business are folks that have been here for years and years and years. Emma Dickinson, I think it's about 20, 22, 25 years. I need to double check with her, but she's a long time payroll guru, you're doing my whole life as we do.
Speaker 2:We love Emma, but she's a payroll guru. We kept amazing, amazing people to really work within the technology of day fours to really localize it, and that transaction happened 2016. I wasn't in the space of Ceridian at that point but I was able. When I came back at the beginning of 2019, I was able to take all the understanding, what I saw from the ERP space and some of the limitations, and when I saw the tech, I went, oh my God, this is amazing and genuinely the technology and amazing people and they were looking to build here in EMEA and EMEA was.
Speaker 2:It was predominantly in the UK. It was seen really as a services, part of the business, so delivering implementations, and we took that business and now we've got about 1,600 people across EMEA. We're one of the fastest growing regions. Our customer community is the most thriving and it's been a wicked, wicked ride for the four and a half years that I've been doing it with the team. But, as you and I have spoke many times, when you hire amazing people, it really comes together and so it's been really exciting. So when you came back.
Speaker 1:What did you initially do when you came back? What was your role when you came back and how was that developed? How was that story kind of developed?
Speaker 2:So when I first came back, the day before I came back, I thought I was going to come in and report to the CRO, and the day before I was ready to join the business, there was a restructure and I reported directly to Lee Turner, our president, who is incredible. So, if you've not seen Lee in action, she's incredible. She's so inspirational and I'm really lucky because I've got David, who is the founder of Day Forest, who's a co-CEO and chairman, and I've got Lee Turner, who is just the most amazing leader in technology, and I love the fact that I have a male and female co-CEO. I love the diver. In fact, we've got 1% diversity across all of our management team globally between men and women, which we're super proud of. So, yeah, so I reported directly to Lee.
Speaker 2:I started off where I was meant to lead a sales team. I had two people. We went through a whole growth journey of building out this organization and then, by the end of 2019, I looked after the region, so it was a vice president of Sweden and Europe, and then we launched into the regions Around about 21,. We launched the three regions, so we had Americas, apj and Amir, and I always think we're one big global work family. So I do like the whole global nature Because we're all one team really driving value for our customers, and I love the fact that Team Amir was region of the year last year. So, yeah, I became manager director officially in September 21. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, and that was around the time when I started hearing about this product.
Speaker 2:Dayforce yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It takes a while to educate people that Subridion isn't the old payroll legacy company and actually this is new technology that's coming out in this market for the first time really, because some of our early adopter clients were as early as 2016. And we've got like WH Smith is a fantastic organization. Helen and her team do incredible things. There was a lady called Wendy Shryard who I went really closely with. She's incredible, so shout out to Wendy too.
Speaker 2:But we went full platform on WH Smith. They had early adoption of workforce management, which is a real rich area of our technology. As you know, there's new things that are joining all the time and that we're launching within the system all the time, like Wallet is the newest innovation, career Explorer is going to be the next new one in Q4. And so actually, with WH Smith and their experience of using dayforce, it was the best change management perspective for them when they launched actually full platform across all HR time and pay and all the talent benefit elements as well that can come, because people were already logging in for a shift and clocking in and clocking out, and so it was really easy for people to book their holiday then and to be able to look at their pace.
Speaker 1:Do you know off the top of your head the retention percentages for WH Smiths and how they've used dayforce since they implemented?
Speaker 2:I don't have that data. That's a really good question, but I don't have that data hand.
Speaker 1:Because that's a pretty big client, isn't it? And I know another one of your clients is Costa as well.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and we've just renewed as well, which we really celebrate our retention. So Jonathan Crickle, incredible people leader. Andy Ratcliffe, who looks after people's shared service for Costa Coffee, and I had the privilege of celebrating with them and I carried Okibo on the Thames last week as their retention party. I think all this was happening, it was.
Speaker 2:But we love our customers, we love the partnership that we have and, in fact, lauren Dent runs our HR user group, so she's our HR leader for the Amir Dayforce user group. Guess where I used to work. Did you work at?
Speaker 1:Costa. I used to work at Costa. What did you do at Costa? I used to mop the floors, did you? Yeah, I did yeah. So when I was going through college and we never had any of this stuff right, there wasn't even an online app or anything like that but I used to do shifts and what I used to do was I used to mop the floors, doing nights, and then, after I'd finished mopping all the floors, then I'd serve the coffee until the morning and generally finish about six. And would that have made a huge? Would I have done more if I was able to access my money instantly? Yeah, absolutely I would have. I wasn't able to. So it was again. You was waiting until the end of the month, and I think I was what? 18 years old, 18, 19 years old then and I didn't have any money, but I'd worked all those shifts and had to wait for my money to come in. So I can wow.
Speaker 2:I think they're an amazing organization and I took Naomi in when Naomi was over what we liked to do with our customers, especially when I've got my exact team in time and we literally will go and see customers. Or I think in March, david and I did three major cities in three days and saw I think it was about 15, 16 customers over the three days, so it was a bit of a whirlwind tour. He thought it was a holiday. I was exhausted by the end of it, but he's an incredible, incredible co-CEO and we really enjoy going out and seeing the customers in their environments. So Matthew Hayward will tell the story about the time that we were sitting at Acosta, having Acosta at Dunstable Not Dunstable, it was Toddinton service station.
Speaker 1:I know it. Yeah, I know it, I know it well.
Speaker 2:And we had a meeting there. I met with their operations director Nikki. We met, we walked the floor, we asked the general manager for the service station. We asked people that we would. How do you use it? How do you like using it? I love that stuff.
Speaker 2:And David asked a really fascinating question around how does Matthew operate the business and what does he measure? And he went well, funny, you say that, dave and he pulled this printout of a report which is how he manages all of his forecasting and his accuracy levels. The only time it's not on point is when someone manually changes something. So he's super proud of his accuracy, but he pulls out this report. And he said well, funny, this is how he did. Dave was fascinated and he was like no, do you mind if I take a copy of this so that I can share it with my innovation team?
Speaker 2:Got him on a call with David Lloyd literally the following week. He's our head of data and so he was on a report. David flew over to Sydney. He was doing a meeting in Sydney. I get a phone call saying do you mind introducing the CFO from this organization in Sydney? It's very similar to motor Would you mind connecting the dots. So this chat flies across the world.
Speaker 2:We have an introduction meeting between Matthew and this chap and it's all about sharing insights and we call it the Matthew report. It's now being built in day forces. He's looking at it. He's like that's very similar to my report, but we're doing that to try and help all of our customers, and that's the idea of sharing and how we take it really seriously. A great idea is a great idea. It could come from someone who's a barista, or it can come from someone that's actually working and using the platform. And so the listening forums that we have within our customer success, the way that we're bringing the community together, those are the things that we genuinely drive in the innovation. It's so exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sounds it, sounds it Obviously a good salesperson. Right, you're obviously a good salesperson.
Speaker 2:I am actually I would say I'm quite good at recognizing great talent. I think that's my superpower.
Speaker 1:Okay, Do you consider yourself? Do you consider yourself a people manager or more of a sales leader?
Speaker 2:I actually see myself as a people servant, so I'm here to support my team to do brilliantly well in the work they do for their customers.
Speaker 1:Okay, Good answer.
Speaker 2:I didn't know. I feel like I'm doing an exam.
Speaker 1:It's like an interview, so experiences of being a woman in sales and tech, do you have any advice for other women in the same space? Do?
Speaker 2:you know, I think that's a first and you're a father of a daughter and I'm a mother of three sons and I have lots of friends that have girls and what I find is and I've had a number of these conversations actually girls when they're at school, in primary, they're sassy, they rule the rules, they're not shy. Some are shy in different personalities, but you know, girls are sassy and then they seem to go through their teenagers and that sass becomes insecurity. And I've had these conversations around. You might have all of there's a job, there's a skill set and as the woman you might have 98% of the ability to do that and 2% I'm not sure, need to learn and they won't go for the role, whereas you have a chap like my eldest who's got 98% ambition, 2% skill set and will go for the job anyway and win it right Because he's cheeky like his dad.
Speaker 2:So that is like, I think, some of the things that we need to change, and that's probably how girls are educated and how they're brought up, like if they want a car, get them the car. Don't necessarily get them the doll. You know it's that whole thing around change doesn't just happen over a generation, it's a consistent drive to do and I think that knowing that kind of level of security, it's about really empowering young men and women actually, because you don't want it to flip too much that it's all focused on women and empowering women and supporting women in their growth journey has to be for me, I'm fair right and I'm a mother of sons, so I want to know they have equal chance, same as anyone else, and the right person gets the job right. So I would say, if I looked back at my 21-year-old self, I'd say you know, be brave, go for it. If you want something, go, make it happen and talk to as many people get mentors.
Speaker 2:You know there's an amazing lady who's a Mauritius Kashmita. Hello to Kashmita. She's based in Mauritius. We did a listening group at the start of the year with a whole ton of different groups came together and I really wanted to learn. And she started talking about something and she was just sharing a perspective and I thought this woman's incredible. She's incredible talent. I'm like do you have a mentor, do you have someone that you work with? And she's like, no, is that one? I'll volunteer if you want, because you know she's incredible talent, she could be a future CEO. And it's like, just help it. And so she was and I've got the privilege every month to have a conversation with this woman and we look at what are you doing in your career. She's been recognized in the business for the work that she's doing. She's celebrating her own success on the work that she's doing for her customers. She's got an amazing career ahead of her. It's sometimes just having the confidence to do it and having the conversations to actually just recognize. You know this is something that's going on.
Speaker 2:Maybe try a different perspective, but I think it's really important in my role, I think it's really important to see others be super successful and it really for me. I always say mentor is a circular thing. I get as much, if not more, from those conversations and what she gets from me. So but I do think it's really important that it's balanced so that men and women both get the same opportunity. And when you're young you don't know, right. So it's like actually they've got to learn, they've got to have a safe space to fail as well, because that's how they'll learn best. So it's like how do you create an environment that is okay for them to fail and then pick them back up and support them actually on okay, what did we learn from that and how do we grow? And that's the stuff. I love that stuff. That's like soul food for me personally. Soul food.
Speaker 1:Soul food for me.
Speaker 2:That's the stuff that genuinely, I get up every day and I'm thinking like the team and our customers and where we're going, and no organization is perfect. I think the way we lean into things when bumps happen is something really special, right, and I think it's because David and Lee have got this amazing culture that they're driving For me. I see it as a real privilege to dovetail behind that and support this region and and you know our customers, you know, sharing their experience like they did last week for us is just that.
Speaker 1:that's to me is the most powerful when you've actually got a customer on stage telling other potential customers about how your system change their ability to do certain things within their organisation. That's the most powerful thing.
Speaker 2:And then our partners being excited about how it's going to change their business and drive value for you. Like that. We're doing our work well, which is why I like the day for us. They knew very kindly supported us at the day for some conference and it was a pleasure.
Speaker 2:And it was a thank you back to the team for all the great work that they do. It's an internal thing, but it's there. It's got partners there. It was an amazing day. We had customers saying thank you on stage Like it's an educational thing for the team. But more importantly it's to show them together in the hard work that they do. They're doing incredible things in this region.
Speaker 1:All right. Any advice for business leaders looking at the HCM technology right now. What do they need to consider before? Before thinking of moving In fact, we probably should have had this conversation before right. So us looking at different HCM technology for Focus Cloud. What should we be really considering before we go ahead with this project?
Speaker 2:So, before you do anything, you want to think about where you're at just now and where you want to take the business. Because actually, the technology, what you tend to hear all the time, is that people will lift and shift. So if a process was this way, they lift it and they shift this into this new technology, but think they're going to get the same results. Transformation means change, right? So if you want to grow and build your business up, sometimes you need to think in a different way and be more efficient with how you're driving those processes. So what's your organizational chart? Be really clear about what your org chart is. Who's going to own the system? Who's going to own the sign-off processes for governance? Right, because you don't want everyone being able to access changing like oh, holidays, text-to-to approvals or actually somebody could change that and just say, well, for this particular group, one approval, right. So you want controls in your business. So have a real clear view of who's going to make those decisions within your business.
Speaker 2:Get your data Good, clean data and start working with good, clean data, because if it's going to be impacting your payroll, you want to make sure that your data is right and that you've literally got one source of truth there, and sometimes data sits in different systems. It's hard to get that out, right, and sometimes it costs you money to get that out. Depending on who your providers are, some of them will give you a PDF, which means something has to key it in, and that takes time. So you can always do a data audit and an audit process within your business to make sure you've got the right controls in place. Look at what are big things going on, right? So if you've got an implementation time frame and you're doing Excel which is really exciting, because that's actually something brand new in our market which is super exciting Right so accelerate Tell me what you know of accelerate.
Speaker 1:It's the super quick way of going live Right.
Speaker 2:With standard processes.
Speaker 1:Which is not a problem for us actually, because this was as part of the sales process. I was asked this question and I also asked some various people who I know within the ecosystem. So what am I actually going to get? And what I was told was that Dayforce has certain ways of doing things which you can configure to your way of doing things. What a great thing about us is. We don't have any ways of doing things, so this is so you're going to get best practice out of the 10.
Speaker 1:Just going to get best practice out of the 10. Best practice out of the 10.
Speaker 2:And actually there's no capex cost because it's there's no capex cost to it the way that we've rolled the sign. So that's a real game changer in this market Because normally there's an investment, you have to go to your board and get signed off for those things. This means that actually a different area of the market can access market leading technology and not have to worry about what the cost model looks like. And if we can show and demonstrate value and savings for you all the way through the journey, you get best practice out of the 10. But you can change it, you can grow it, you can evolve. When you go global, you can add more countries.
Speaker 1:The organization will grow with Dayforce, so Dayforce will be the system, the central system for us, and any changes that we make will be certainly be made in Dayforce first, and then we'll work around those changes, because we're just, you know, someone will ask for a holiday. At the moment we have an internal system which we're changing, of course, but it's pretty simple. Someone can walk over, you know, to my desk or their manager's desk and say, look, I want to take a holiday next week, is that right? And it'll be yes or it'll be a no, and we can do that through the system, yeah, which is obviously going to be accessible in Dayforce now as well. But that's how box-standard and basic we are as an organization. So we want to be, we want to have more processes, but having a tier one system like Dayforce implemented is going to allow us to change the organisation along with those system changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also when you start growing. So that's great when you walk across the office, but when you've got 10,000 people across, your organisation worldwide.
Speaker 1:I've already lost my hair with 100, 10,000.
Speaker 2:But when you've got that, because your organisation is going to continue to grow and so if everyone's just walked across their own offices locally and they're all owned, then it gives you controls, it gives you visibility, it gives you that opportunity to do it and, more importantly and the bit I love about it is when people are new in the organisation, they can feel part of the organisation before they even start. So the onboarding elements there's a real richness in onboarding so that people feel like, as I remember, my team was having this conversation with a client yesterday and she said my team best onboarding experience ever. Actually it was a system going Wendy, wendy, wendy, don't forget to get the past, don't forget to book the computer system. Don't forget to send a welcome letter, don't forget to introduce them to the wider team, don't forget to set a sign, a buddy, all those nudges of like Wendy, do it, do it. And it shouts at me. So if I don't like, if I miss it the first time, I'll get it the third, fourth, fifth time. That it's you're late.
Speaker 1:The phone will go in the middle of the night, exactly, and then it will say don't forget, do you?
Speaker 2:know something. It's like, literally that's the sort of power about, but the system, I just act out what the system's telling me to do. Now, if that's across every people manager, how great are your people going to feel, irrespective of you know, one people managers skillset versus another Right, and so it's that level of consistency that you start to then see makes people really feel part of your business.
Speaker 1:Something that we found. We found it in the past on boarding.
Speaker 2:You're going to really love it because you can be videos in, you can make it really interactive, you can do a message. Their team could be all in there as well, because, again, you've got the org chart in there. Who are the important people for them to know before they start. What questions did you miss during the interview process? So it's it's. It's really, really powerful and then, as people are growing in your organization and they're being promoted, you can bring it back on so that they start onboarding new learning areas that might help them, to you know, be successful in the new role. It's really powerful, really powerful.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to it. So in this day and age, obviously AI is a big part of any tech at the moment. What's the roadmap for dayforce with AI?
Speaker 2:Well, we've got AI already in the technology and we've got those algorithms in there to be able to support and drive those nudges and those intelligent nudges and being able to build a schedule and project the forecasting. We've got that already in the technology. This question came up last week. Actually we did, yeah, and it was fascinating because we were doing a lot with chat GBT. Now we've not launched it right, because we'll never launch anything until we do fill thorough due diligence. Right. We're really we're first for Gartner for compliance. We're keeping that right. So we always go through thorough checks before we launch any piece of functionality.
Speaker 2:But the chat GBT thing is really quite interesting and Fadi, who heads up all of our global support, he's a big fan. So actually what we built is we built it in dayforce so that our support team can be able to use chat GBT to be able to navigate and get documentation, to be able to support with our customers, right. So that's really interesting to see how that's rolling internally. And I don't know where's the future Future could be. The dayforce writes your job description I want to hire for this role and dayforce GBT maybe is going to write the job description and have a catalog of job description. Who knows where it's going to go, but I think that is an interesting direction.
Speaker 1:We're at the early stages of AI, really aren't we? And if you think forward, think five years. Where that's going to be in these systems that can already do amazing things. You know, where are we going to be in five years? It's crazy, isn't it?
Speaker 2:You always need again the governance piece around somebody who's controlling the algorithm, right. So it's kind of fascinating. You're always going to need to have that level of rigor and control and guard rails, and it is. It's going to save a ton of time if you can get, like the AI automated in such a way that it drives a lot of that transactional work. But then just think, if you've got more time, that you're less time doing that and more time focusing on support and strategy, people management, all those things how great your people going to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you should see employee engagement go up through the roof, right.
Speaker 2:Well, and you can do that dayforce too. It's very cool.
Speaker 1:I know it's something that we do at the moment and part of the new search for a different HCM technology. That was an imperative part for us to be able to keep that. So, yeah, really looking forward to what it brings.
Speaker 2:Well, the other thing is that new dashboards that we're going to be releasing will have like Burnout, and it has the World Health Organization Burnout Index. It's like 15 different indexes, I believe, but it tracks cynicism, it tracks Burnout, exhaustion, those things. So actually, the system is going to be actively using AI to see how people are interacting with it, so that those nudges point you in the right direction, maybe where you need to support.
Speaker 1:What are some of the most exciting projects or initiatives that your business is currently working on at the moment with your customers?
Speaker 2:With our customers. Well, every customer, we love every customer. I'm excited about yours as well. That's exciting, right, Because whether you've got 100 people or 100,000 people, right, it's exciting to see the progress that they make. But we've got some amazing. Actually, there's an area in Paisley where I live and I love the fact that on one corner you've got Pure Gym, on the other corner you've got Costa Coffee, on the other corner you've got a WHW. So I'm like customer, customer, customer right, banking organizations like love our customers, whether they're in manufacturing. I saw, I saw NG Bailey. They celebrated a milestone.
Speaker 1:One of my old customers when I used to do many years ago when I used to do engineering and construction recruitment, ng Bailey.
Speaker 2:NG Bailey. Yeah, rob Smith's fantastic. He's fantastic CHRO and they have really quite a complex deployment. They're a complex organization and for them and their team, a lot of their team, will come along to our community user groups and the forums and things. It's so exciting to see them. But again, you can be the biggest customer, and our biggest customer here in Amia has 450,000 employees across the corner Wow 450,000?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but all of them really matter in how, because all of them have got great ideas and how we can make the tech better. So we love our customers.
Speaker 1:I like that in all the posts, in all the posts. Does that come from you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's true, though it's true Like hashtag we love our customers. Hashtag we love our partners right, because without our partners we can't make great customer experiences right. And so, when you're, that was one of the things that, you know, worried me when I came back to the organization because, as we're starting to build the business up and start sharing the power of what Dayforce can do, when customers are in Germany, they're in Austria, they're in Israel, they're all over the world. You know you need partners that can help with local language, with time zone, with, you know, understanding compliance in those regions. You need that to be able to scale, and so we've been really building our ecosystem truly from the end of 2019. We started on board in with partners to help us there and we've got really quite a unique ecosystem because it's really inclusive.
Speaker 2:We love the inclusive nature and they all think they're team awesome, which I love Because everyone can be team awesome. Some state of mind I've been told but yeah, no, we do. We love our customers and every one of them is really important and as long as we keep the governance and checking in and understanding how they're using it and the power of how they use the technology, you know we want to stand by the promises that we make. We want to genuinely make work life better for their team.
Speaker 1:Wendy, I really appreciate you coming in today. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. I'm sure that you would be happy. If anyone wants more information about Serenian day, force to reach out to your sales team. Yeah, sales team Really good bunch of guys, by the way.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:And we've covered so much, I feel like we need to do another episode. I'd love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So like like, if you would like to see another episode of Wendy coming in. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. See you sooner or later.