The Workday implementation outcome you want to avoid

About a month ago, I got a call. A smart, well-intentioned leader, deeply invested in making their Workday implementation work, was two months from go-live and had just realized they were in trouble.

The technology was ready. What wasn't: they'd never aligned their time off policies across their global footprint. That's not just a communication gap. It's a legal one. Employees in multiple countries had to be formally notified before their time-off policies changed, and Workday was about to harmonize them.

I already knew the answer before they finished explaining. This project wasn't going live on time.

I hear some version of this call every year. Every time, my first thought is the same: this was preventable.

Not because the leader didn't care. They did. But somewhere along the way, the assumption was that change management was something that could be shortcut, an unnecessary budget line item for a tactical communication and training effort that internal team members could cover.

It doesn't work that way.

This post is about what you need to have in place long before you're anywhere near go-live.

What "too late" looks like on a Workday project

By the time a leader calls me in crisis mode, the symptoms are usually the same regardless of the organization.

Employees are surprised by how much is changing. Not just the technology, but the processes underneath it: how they submit time, how they access their benefits, how managers approve requests (often instead of HR), how data flows between departments, and where they go to get help (a centralized service center). Things that felt like background noise in the design phase are now front and center, and nobody prepared people for the shift.

When project teams fail to incorporate strategic change support into their Workday effort early on, by the time the final push to go-live comes around, resistance has moved underground. The loudest skeptics got attention early on; but when no one listened to the feedback, they stopped sharing.

Now the concern is quieter and harder to address. People are complying on paper while quietly holding on to the old way. Workarounds are already forming before the system is even live.

The project team is exhausted and a little fragmented. Each workstream has been heads-down executing for months and hasn't picked up their heads to look across the effort to notice patterns. The collaboration that looked good on the governance slides didn't happen in the day-to-day. Some people know why this implementation matters and can explain it clearly. Others can't, and it shows in how they interact with stakeholders.

Training is being compressed. There isn't enough time to build what was originally planned, so choices are being made fast, often without a clear framework for what matters most. The safest bet becomes training on everything at once, which means employees get overwhelmed and retain less.

Behavioral science explains exactly why all of this happens. When people don't feel involved in a change process, they experience what researchers call reactance, a psychological pushback against something that feels imposed on them rather than built with them.

The later employees are brought into a Workday implementation, the stronger that pushback response tends to be. Because loss aversion means people feel the risk of losing something familiar about twice as acutely as they feel the potential gain, a go-live that arrives as a surprise activates a threat response rather than curiosity.

By the time a leader calls me, they're not managing change. They're managing that threat response. That's a much harder problem, and one that's probably going to compound once the technology goes live.

Why it happens: what the early phases actually require

Most leaders assume change management is a late-stage activity. You build the system, then you communicate about it. You finalize the design, then you train people. That sequencing feels logical, but it's the source of most of what goes wrong.

The early phases of a Workday project that include the design, build, and first rounds of configuration are actually when the most important change work happens. Not the visible work: not communications or training materials. The foundational change design work.

This is when you assess which audiences are most affected and how. It's when you build relationships with the people who will either champion this implementation or quietly resist it. It's when you establish roles within the team so that those team members become sources of social proof later.

It's when you establish a clear, consistent message about why this change is happening, not just what the system does, but what it means for how people work. Then listen to the feedback so you can address it early before it becomes underground resistance. It's when you identify the leaders who need to be actively involved, not just informed.

If that foundation isn't built during the design and build phases, the execution phase has nothing to stand on. Communications go out, but nobody trusts them because they haven't heard a consistent message for months. Training gets scheduled, but attendance is poor because people don't understand why it matters. Go-live happens, and adoption stalls. Not because the system doesn't work, but because the people weren't ready for it.

The change design happens alongside the system design. 

The organizations I've seen navigate Workday implementations well aren't the ones with the biggest change budgets. They're the ones whose leaders understood that the people side was just as strategically important as the technology. They make time to understand the bigger people picture rather than outsourcing it to tacticians. 

The resource gap that makes things worse

When a project is in trouble late in the game, leaders often reach for the same solution: bring in more help. There is a version of that which works.

An experienced change consultant — not a contractor, but someone with deep practitioner experience — can assess the situation quickly and prioritize based on what's actually recoverable. They can coach sponsorship, redirect resources, and help the team triage what matters most in the time remaining.

But here's the honest reality: the less time you have, the more expensive and imperfect the recovery. A consultant brought in six months before go-live can build something. A consultant brought in six weeks out is doing damage control. (It's why I declined to help that global implementation's policy communication effort).

Neither of them replaces the thing that was actually missing: an internal leader who understood the people side of this implementation from the beginning. Someone with enough change leadership experience to ask the right questions, push back when timelines were being set without accounting for people readiness, and recognize early warning signs before they became a go-live crisis.

That internal capability doesn't appear on its own. It has to be built.

This is the call you don't want to make

If you are a program sponsor preparing for a Workday implementation, or an internal change lead who has been handed accountability for the people side of a deployment more complex than anything you've navigated before, this is the moment to build that foundation.

Not after design. Not after build. Now.

The changecapable Leadership Program exists for exactly this. It's a focused fall cohort for 25 leaders: a lightweight investment in building change design capability on the job, applied directly to a transformation effort like Workday. Prioritizing the people side early keeps a much larger organizational bet from stalling at adoption. Program sponsors learn what success looks like and how to get there. Internal change leads build the confidence to lead something they've never led at this scale.

It is the thing that makes that late-stage panicked (and expensive) call unnecessary.

Learn more about how we support Workday leaders 

Update note, May 2026: This post was originally published in October 2022 focused on recovering from change missteps. It has been substantially reframed around prevention. Specifically, what needs to be in place well before go-live to avoid a people-side crisis. It has been updated to include behavioral science research on reactance and loss aversion, and is grounded in current examples from Workday implementations.

Kris Jennings is an organizational change expert with 30 years of experience leading transformations for large organizations. She developed the changecapable method, a behavioral science approach to change that delivers higher adoption. She works with enterprise organizations navigating digital transformation, ERP implementations, and large-scale change.