As a company matures, that rapid growth opens up a new horizon of opportunities. But it also brings new challenges, almost all of which come down to scale. How can a company grow in a way that doesn’t also extend the costs and strain on its team? 

The challenge: scaling HR systems for enterprise growth

If an organization wants to grow at scale, it almost always has to change the way it does things, internally and externally. This applies to people teams as much as to any other department. As a company brings on more and more staff, HR needs better, more efficient ways of managing the processes and workflows relating to the company’s most precious asset: its talent.

Pendo’s own people team has found itself in precisely this situation, as our organization continues to add new employees to its ranks and hit exciting milestones at a rapid pace. To help scale the growth of Pendo—and support the ongoing development of every Pendozer—our HR team has turned to Workday, a comprehensive human capital management platform. And to help staff get onboarded in Workday as quickly and easily as possible, we’re using Pendo’s own employee-facing digital adoption platform. 

The solution: Pendo's digital adoption platform for Workday

For both the greater team and HR specifically, it just made sense for Pendo to implement Workday. Mike Rooney, an HR systems manager at Pendo, explained that the department previously managed new-hire-related data via manual spreadsheets when Pendo’s staff count was smaller. But as the company started growing, these spreadsheets became less tenable. 

“Our previous spreadsheet-based data entry system was secure and shared with only the proper people, but you can imagine why that can become hard to manage,” Rooney said. “Anytime you have people doing manual data entry, you run the risk of mistakes. So the move to Workday was in response to the question: How are we going to scale this growth in staff? Rather than just throw more bodies on the HR side, how can we actually automate these workflows?”

Through Workday, Pendo has established a source of truth for every lifecycle change an employee goes through, whether that’s an adjustment in total rewards, position, or manager. Integrations with other systems means this information is automatically passed to other apps and software in which employees work. It also empowers employees to take care of important HR-related tasks themselves, without assistance. Rather than having to submit a ticket and wait on an administrative team member to change an address in Pendo’s payroll system, for example, Workday allows employees to self-service and make the change themselves, which then carries through to downstream applications.

Implementation: Role-based guidance for every employee

Implementing Workday and effectively onboarding employees is a complex task. But it’s one that Pendo’s own product is making much easier for the people team. 

Normally, the process would involve long and detailed in-person training sessions for admins, managers, and general employees in advance of the rollout. The problem with this traditional method, though, is that by the time Workday went live, employees would have forgotten much (if not most) of this training and gone back to HR admins with the same questions they had earlier in the process.

Pendo’s platform changes all that. Rather than deal with all the headaches in the wake of a one-time training long forgotten, the Pendo people team is proactively equipping Workday users with the knowledge they need to navigate the platform themselves. They’re deploying in-app notifications and guidance, segmented by role, to get the right information to the right employee at the right time. A sales manager, a finance admin, and an engineering intern will all have vastly different needs from Workday, and Pendo helps make sure the person in each role is served the content that matters to them. 

“Segments are critical for us in Workday because there are so many different employee populations that we can target,” says Phil DiBuono, a senior HR systems analyst at Pendo. “If you’re not a manager or an admin, you don’t need that role-specific training in Workday.” 

“People aren’t in Workday every day. So if you’re a manager or an employee, it’s easy to forget how to do something,” says Rooney. “That’s why if we could target your role with guidance, it would just be extremely helpful, right? And with Pendo, we’ve done it.”

Impact: Transforming how employees use Workday*

The Pendo platform fundamentally changed how employees interact with Workday:

  • Employees can now complete complex workflows like performance reviews independently without contacting HR support
  • Role-based guidance ensures each user sees only information relevant to their job function and responsibilities
  • In-app help reduced reliance on external documentation, email inquiries, and training session attendance
  • The HR team shifted focus from answering repetitive technical questions to strategic people initiatives

The key insight: digital adoption platforms aren't just for customer-facing products. They deliver measurable value for internal software where employee productivity and operational efficiency are at stake.

Key takeaways for enterprise teams

Here are five lessons from our Workday implementation:

1. Start with user pain points, not features: Identify workflows causing the most confusion or support requests

2. Segment by role and use case: Generic guidance doesn't work at enterprise scale where users have vastly different needs

3. Deliver at the moment of need: In-app guidance beats pre-training because it's contextual and timely

4. Make it self-service: Reduce dependency on support teams by embedding answers directly in the workflow

5. Treat adoption as ongoing: Software adoption isn't a one-time launch event; continuously optimize based on usage patterns

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