Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

Here are some insights on Workday drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation management vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Workday and six other vendors in seven categories, five product-related (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two concerning the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each of the seven categories to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on data derived from our benchmark research on total compensation.

Workday provides total compensation management via its Human Capital Management platform; it ranks second in this Value Index. The vendor is a Value Index Leader overall and in all five Product categories, Usability, Manageability, Reliability, Capability and Adaptability. The product does an excellent job aligning compensation with business strategy and providing visibility throughout the entire compensation planning process.

Workday Compensation performs well in the Capability and Adaptability categories because customers can manage very complex compensation plans and packages with minimal IT support. The product enables a range of analyses, such as determining the cost of adjusting salaries, managing different grade structures and job levels across geographies and configuring eligibility rules based on job profiles and other talent profile data. The product also can automatically trigger plan applicability or individual package changes based on a change in worker status and employees can see their total compensation on an array of devices at any time.

The vendor would have performed better in the TCO/ROI category with stronger business case and ROI support tools to help potential customers understand the value of an investment. Performance in the Capability category was strong but would improve further if users could immediately bring compensation history into the decision process. Support for seeing compensation progression over time is a critical guidepost to determining salaries and bonuses and ensuring top employees stay with the organization.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of total compensation management software in the industry. You can learn more about our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool here. Participating vendors can learn more about how to use the Value Index here.