Blog: Job Aids, Governance, and Getting People to Actually Adopt Workday, with Kendria Countee

     When Kendria Countee joined a nonprofit as their Workday product owner, she expected to optimize and modernize. Three months later, she was relaunching the entire system, handling integrations, configurations, governance, and issues with the recruiting module. That experience, she says, taught her more about what Workday success actually requires than anything else could have.

     Kendria is now the CEO and lead consultant at Abnorma Logic, a firm dedicated to helping organizations get real value from their Workday investment. On this week’s episode of Workday Gold, she shared some of the clearest thinking I’ve heard on why so many implementations struggle after go-live, and what it actually takes to turn things around.

Don’t Swing the Pendulum Too Far

     One thing Kendria said early in our conversation that stuck with me was about managing how much change you throw at people at once. Workday can do an enormous amount, and there’s always pressure to roll out more features, more automation, more self-service. But not everyone is ready for that level of change at the same time.

     Her approach was to bring people along slowly, gather feedback early, and let that feedback shape what came next. When employees could see their own input reflected in the plan, buy-in followed naturally. It sounds straightforward, but most organizations skip this step and then wonder why adoption is low six months later.

     The other piece she emphasized: understanding what’s in it for each employee. You can’t lead with the system. You have to lead with the benefit.

Busyness Is Not the Same as Progress

     This part of our conversation hit close to home. Workday teams are genuinely busy. There are tickets coming in, releases to keep up with, and a backlog that seems to grow faster than it can be cleared. Kendria describes this as a real trap: teams doing meaningful work but not moving toward any clearly defined goal.

     I really appreciated her summarization of this: “Volume without vision just feels like volume, but volume with vision feels like value.”

     The fix isn’t doing more. It’s defining what success actually looks like. What does ROI from Workday mean for your organization? What’s the north star? When teams can connect their daily work to a measurable outcome, the effort feels different.

The Governance Piece Most Teams Skip

     Kendria helped stand up a governance committee at her first organization, and she’s helped clients do it since. The key insight: Workday touches HR, finance, IT, procurement, and more. What happens in one module affects everything else. Without a cross-functional forum, you end up with silos, surprises, and decisions made without the right people in the room.

     She started small. A steering committee. A space to surface what’s happening, what’s coming, and what’s needed from each team. That structure also made a difference at budget time. Leadership wasn’t hearing about needs for the first time. They’d been in the room.

     Governance doesn’t have to be heavy. It just has to exist.

Seeing the Cliff Before Everyone Else

     One of Kendria’s LinkedIn posts caught my attention: “Being the person who sees the cliff before the organization reaches it is exhausting.” I had to ask her about it.

     She’s describing the experience of spotting a risk early, raising the alarm, bringing the data, and getting met with silence or “we’ll revisit this later.” Then later arrives. The problem is now a crisis. You’re back in reactive mode, even though you tried to prevent it.

     It’s something many Workday practitioners know all too well. Kendria’s takeaway is that sometimes your job is to sound the alarm, prepare the organization as best you can, and accept that not everything can be avoided. That’s not a satisfying answer. But it might be what sustainability actually looks like.

Job Aids Don’t Drive Adoption on Their Own

     We also talked about job aids, those process guides teams create and then watch collect digital dust. Kendria made a point that I think gets overlooked: creating the documentation is only part of the job. The harder part is driving the behavioral change that gets people to actually use it.

     That means understanding why people aren’t using it. Is it because they don’t know it exists? Because they don’t understand the benefit? Because it’s stored in SharePoint and they live in Teams? Often it’s more than one of these. And leadership accountability matters. The Workday team can build the resources, but they can’t force the behavior change on their own.

     The conversation naturally led into AI and what Workday’s Sona Core is starting to make possible. If an employee can simply ask, “I just had a child, what do I need to do?” and get a guided, policy-aware answer in plain language, the job aid problem starts to look very different.

A Different Kind of Conversation

     Kendria brings something to this work that is underappreciated: she’s been on the customer side. She’s lived through the hard parts. That experience shapes how she approaches change management and consulting, and it comes through in everything she does.

     If any of this resonates, I’d encourage you to listen to the full episode. We cover a lot more ground, and the conversation is one of the more grounded and practical ones I’ve had on the show.

Listen here!