Table of Contents
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- A Broader Year Than Features Alone
- 2025 in 90 Seconds
- Platform Reality: Releases Set the Pace, Adoption Set the Value
- Crawl–Walk–Run: A Practical Framework for Workday Success
- Launches That Made Workday Easier to Navigate
- Partnerships That Expanded Capability: Coreteam × Novus
- Events as Learning Accelerators
- Culture & Human Moments
- Practical Content That Met People Where They Are
- What Was Tangibly Different by the End of 2025
A Broader Year Than Features Alone
A year-in-review of how organisations strengthened their day-to-day Workday experience with the right support, structure, and focus.
In 2025, we worked closely with organisations using Workday across HR, Finance, Reporting, and Planning by supporting teams as they made decisions, built capability, and settled into more confident ways of working.
Across the year, the focus consistently returned to a few practical questions:
- How do we (organisations) get clearer insight from our data?
- Which updates deserve attention now?
- How do we (Coreteam) support teams without adding complexity?
This year-in-review brings together the platform updates, frameworks, partnerships, learning content, and community moments that shaped those conversations.
It reflects how organisations enhanced their Workday experience through thoughtful adoption, structured reporting, and people-centred enablement, with our consultants and experts supporting the journey at every stage.
Here we share what we learned alongside our clients, what helped teams progress, and how those lessons continue to inform the way organisations work with Workday going forward.
2025 in 90 Seconds
If you read nothing else, start here.
What changed in the platform
Workday evolved meaningfully across the year, not just through core releases, but through how capability expanded and connected.
- Two major releases: Workday 2025R1 and 2025R2, delivering enhancements across core modules
- Expanded use of AI-driven features and intelligent automation, supporting faster decisions and reduced manual effort
- Introduction and evolution of agents and automation capabilities, shifting how routine tasks are handled
- Continued improvements across HCM, Finance, Absence, Reporting, and Adaptive Planning, with stronger links between insight and action
What changed for organisations
As we worked alongside teams throughout the year, the way they approached Workday began to shift, often through meaningful changes in how decisions were supported.
- Reporting conversations became more focused
By helping teams’ step back and assess what they needed, we supported a move toward fewer, clearer reports that people trusted and used in their daily work.
- Release adoption became easier to manage
Through structured guidance and role-based prioritisation, teams gained confidence in deciding which updates to focus on and when, instead of feeling pressure to adopt everything at once.
- Support evolved into ongoing enablement
Conversations increasingly centered on improving processes, building internal capability, and helping teams feel more in control of their Workday environment, not just addressing immediate issues.
Where we focused
- A Crawl–Walk–Run reporting maturity model, adopted across client programmes
- Release readiness grounded in role relevance and business impact
- Practical optimisation across Reporting, Absence, Finance, and Planning
- Users across various industries and teams worked with greater clarity and confidence
➡️ 2025 wasn’t about doing more in Workday… it was about doing less, better.
Platform Reality: Releases Set the Pace, Adoption Set the Value
Workday 2025R1 and 2025R2 introduced meaningful capabilities across HR, Finance, Absence, and Planning.
Across the year, the conversation shifted from what’s new to what’s useful.
Teams began prioritising:
- which updates aligned to their operating model,
- which supported adoption,
- which could wait.
Releases became inputs that supported progress, rather than moments that disrupted it.
👉 Read the Workday 2025R1 insights
👉 Explore the Workday 2025R2 highlights
Crawl–Walk–Run: A Practical Framework for Workday Success
The Crawl–Walk–Run framework provided teams with a simple way to understand their current position, identify the next focus area, and progress without overbuilding.
Teams moved faster when they stopped trying to do everything at once and instead aligned on where they were and what would help next. The Crawl–Walk–Run approach provided a straightforward way to achieve this, fostering a shared understanding of reporting maturity across roles.
Crawl–Walk–Run: A Practical Way Teams Built Maturity
Rather than trying to solve everything at once, teams progressed by focusing on where they were and what would help next.
- Crawl focused on visibility and trust, understanding existing data and getting more value from standard reports.
👉 Workday Reporting Basics (101 Guide)
👉 Executive Out-of-the-Box Reporting Guide
- Walk shifted attention to relevance, role-based dashboards and reporting people actually returned to.
👉 Essentials for Managers
👉 Best Practices for Executives
- Run connected insight to action, using reporting and Adaptive Planning for scenarios and decisions.
👉 Adaptive Planning Use Cases
👉 Prism vs. Adaptive Planning
What mattered most was the clarity the framework created. Reporting became a capability that grew over time.
Launches That Made Workday Easier to Navigate
In 2025, we focused on helping organisations navigate Workday with more structure.
This was the launch of the Workday Elevation Hub, a single place bringing guidance, frameworks, and service paths helping organisations and teams navigate decisions with clarity.
It brought together:
- Services, frameworks, and practical guidance
Helping teams understand what support is available and when it makes sense to use it.
- Client segmentation and specialised expertise
Providing the right skills, at the right time, for focused Workday progress.
- Defined service paths across AMS, reporting, and optimisation
Clear entry points and progression paths that made it easier for organisations to scale and mature their Workday environment in a controlled, predictable way.
Each of these services in the Workday Elevation Hub was designed to reduce friction, improve clarity, and support teams as they grew and matured.
Partnerships That Expanded Capability: Coreteam × Novus
Throughout the year, organisations showed growing interest in how engagement, behaviour, and experience sit alongside core systems.
The Coreteam × Novus collaboration reflected that shift.
Grounded in the Redefining Talent Engagement approach, the collaboration brought together:
- Coreteam’s experience in building scalable Workday foundations
- Novus’ AI-driven personalisation, behavioural insight, and engagement capabilities
Rather than adding complexity, the focus was on making engagement measurable, actionable, and human while connecting attraction, engagement, retention, and leadership development into a continuous flow.
Read here: Redefining Talent Engagement: Coreteam × Novus
Events as Learning Accelerators
Events in 2025 weren’t treated as highlights… they became feedback loops.
- Workday Elevate (London & DACH) enabled honest, peer-led conversations around adoption and maturity
- Workday Rising EMEA gave insight into where reporting, analytics, and planning are heading
- Webinars and live sessions tackled real, lived challenges… not abstract best practices
Learning flowed both ways, shaping content, delivery, and priorities.
🔗 Catch the highlights from Workday Elevate
🔗 Watch: Workday Reporting 202 Webinar
Culture & Human Moments
Some moments mattered because they reframed complex topics in relatable ways:
- Valentine’s campaign: Finding the Right Match, focusing on fit over features
- Summer content addressing burnout, continuity, and well-being
- Mental Health Day workshops reinforcing people-first delivery
These weren’t distractions.
They reflected the reality that systems only work when the people using them are supported.
🔗 Explore Finding the Right Match
🔗 Not Attracting Talent?
🔗 Our Approach to Mental Health & Work-Life Balance
Practical Content That Met People Where They Are
Throughout 2025, learning landed best when it matched how people actually work and absorb information.
Different needs were supported through different formats:
- Workday Simplified
Short, focused videos breaking down specific Workday topics, from reporting basics to practical feature walkthroughs.
👉 Watch the Workday explainer videos
- Reporting demos and roundtables
Live and recorded sessions where practitioners discussed dashboards, data hygiene, and how to reduce reporting noise.
👉 Watch the Reporting Roundtable sessions
- Interview Ninja short-form video series
Bite-sized videos covering interview preparation, mindset, and practical techniques for both candidates and hiring managers.
👉 Watch the Interview Ninja series
- 2+2=5 podcast conversations
Longer-form discussions with leaders and practitioners exploring decision-making, leadership, data, and the realities behind the systems we use.
👉 Listen to the 2+2=5 podcast
Each format served a different purpose, but the intent stayed the same:
practical, role-relevant insight that people could apply immediately.
What Was Tangibly Different by the End of 2025
By year-end:
- Fewer reports, higher trust
- More intentional release adoption
- More predictable absence and planning processes
- Support that enabled progress instead of slowing it down
Not perfect. But meaningfully better.
What 2025 Taught Us
- Only platforms don’t create clarity; structure does
- Campaigns work when they explain real trade-offs
- Events matter when learning flows both ways
- Content sticks when it solves a specific problem
- Consistency beats one-off excellence
Closing: Why 2026 Starts from a Different Place
As organisations move into 2026, expectations around Workday are rising.
Regulatory change, like the Europe Pay Transparency Directive, ongoing platform evolution, and growing demand for decision-ready data mean Workday must now support compliance, insight, and adaptability at the same time.
What’s different now is how organisations are preparing:
- Reporting is built to adapt and stand up to scrutiny
- Adaptive Planning is used for scenario modelling and workforce decisions
- Enablement initiatives that help teams adopt what matters and ignore what doesn’t
- Support models focused on momentum, not maintenance
More initiatives are already underway, expanding platforms, deepening frameworks, and simplifying how organisations work with Workday.
The year ahead isn’t about more noise.
It’s about making Workday easier to use, easier to trust, and easier to act on.
Thinking about your next phase?
Start a conversation with our team and explore what practical support could look like for you.
