Interview: Chano Fernandez, co-CEO of Workday – a European co-helming a Californian enterprise

Chano Fernandez, the co-CEO of Workday, is a rarity. It is rare, that is to say, to find a European chief executive of an IT company. The industry is dominated by the US, and California at that, and its founders and senior leadership teams tend to be American.

Workday itself is a Californian company, headquartered in Pleasanton, but Fernandez is Spanish, a graduate of the University of Salamanca, and based between London and Madrid.

He has 25 years’ experience in the industry, and has been with Workday for almost eight years – since August 2020 as its co-CEO, alongside co-founder Aneel Busri. He had a formative stint at McKinsey in the mid-1990s and has had a career in enterprise software that includes stints at SAP and Infor.

He is a physicist by background, while Workday co-founders David Duffield and Busri are electrical engineers. They are known as a thoughtful senior leadership group, interested in ideas. They have also adopted an unusual co-CEO model, first with the founders and now with Fernandez and Busri.

Duffield is famous as the founder, in 1987, of PeopleSoft, which was acquired by Oracle in 2005. Workday is well known as a company that prefers to retain staff, as against one that leans more towards a “tour of duty” model, turning over job hoppers – which is more of a Silicon Valley norm. It gave all employees two weeks’ wages at the start of the pandemic as a bonus, to help them deal with any initial financial difficulties due to the public health crisis.

Fernandez describes Workday’s culture as “significantly customer focused” and “very welcoming”. “[It is] a lot about the ‘we’ and the team and collaboration. Making sure people want to do the right things for the company, not the right things for themselves,” he says. “Keeping that in mind, we have a very simple saying, which is we don’t see companies that have happy customers and unhappy employees.”

He says it is commonplace today for companies to say employees are number one, “but if you go back 10 years, people wanted to highlight how customer focused they were, they were always talking ‘customers, customers, customers’ – but customer satisfaction is an outcome of employee satisfaction”.

“I don’t think I understood the impact of culture on values till I came to Workday. If employees are happy, they want to do the right things, they want to do the best for the company, they want to perform, they want to be productive, they want to stay out of politics, they want to really collaborate within their teams”

Chano Fernandez, Workday

When the Covid-19 pandemic started, he says Workday decided to “double down on employee support – not just in relation to health and safety concerns, but also financial concerns in terms of what was happening in the future”, starting by making a bonus payment to all employees, equivalent to 15 days’ salary.

“We’ve supported them with their mental health, we support them through flexibility, [enabling] care-giving support for those who need to take care of either parents or children. I think we’ve done the best we could, guided by our values,” says Fernandez.

“I don’t think I understood the impact of culture on values till I came to Workday [in 2014]. If employees are happy, they want to do the right things, they want to do the best for the company, they want to perform, they want to be productive, they want to stay out of politics, they want to really collaborate within their teams. All the employees are shareholders, and they feel ‘this is my company’,” he says.

All full-time employees of Workday are shareholders as they are given shares that vest over time. They are also awarded additional shares as performance bonuses.

It’s not always been a quasi-socialist utopia, however. “Like anyone else, we went through our difficult times.” Five years ago, he says, “the culture was deteriorating”. While, in the early years of the company, the founders were able to interview every recruit, once they were adding in the order of 1,500 to 2,000 people a year, the scale of the growth was attenuating the culture, “which is something that you always need to be preserving”. Today, Workday has around 12,500 employees.

Hence, in 2016, the company designed an annual programme where first-time managers (first time to Workday, that is to say) gather to talk about culture, not commerce. They have been putting 600 to 1,000 people through the programme each year.

“It sounds a bit fluffy, talking about these things for two to three days. But it’s been great, with lots of real-world examples. We go through cases and ask, ‘What would you do?’ It helps our managers make decisions about people’s performance and behaviour, making sure they understand how we think about our values and the expectations of managers at Workday.”