Workday is partnering with Slack and “actively partnering” with Google, Microsoft and Facebook, the company announced last week.
The partnership with Slack, announced March 21, will let customers access Workday from within the Slack interface to access co-worker information, give employees feedback or request time off without having to leave Slack.
“While work is becoming more transparent and collaborative, teams are more distributed than ever,” wrote Joe Korngiebel, Workday’s chief technology officer, in a blog post. “Employees will be able to engage with HR in a way they haven’t been able to before. Without having to move to another application, they will be able to resolve many of their questions and issues in an intuitive and familiar way.”
Korngiebel also said that Workday will add additional functions across the Workday application suite, and while he didn’t specify what those might be, it’s clear Slack is just one of many partners Workday is opening its opening its platform to.
“Many of our customers are embracing applications like Google Cloud, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Workday by Facebook to help fuel new ways of working and collaborating — and we are actively partnering with these companies to further the future of work,” Korngiebel wrote in a separate blog post.
Workday’s recent announcements focus a lot on the concept of an “open approach” to innovation, and Korngiebel pointed to the different ways customers will be able to work with Workday.
“Whether they want to request leave in Slack, find out a coworker’s office location in Microsoft Teams, or leave a colleague feedback in Workday by Facebook, Workday will be there, through our open approach.”
And while enterprises are always looking for ways to make data easier to access, the blog post also pointed to the need for security, data access and compliance to be maintained across all of these applications, especially with new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) coming into effect May 25. However, Slack recently announced that it’s changing its privacy policy to let customers who pay for premium services download all the data from their workspace without informing members of the community. In addition, the new policy allows Slack customers download any private messages and channels, something that was possible before the new rule change, but only available for top-paying customers. The function also had to be be enabled, and when it was, workspace members would be notified.