Meet Our Sponsors: Alexandra Bayne

UBC strives to attract, engage and retain a diverse global community of outstanding students, faculty and staff. This includes development and learning solutions that influence workplace practices for employees who help drive the success of the University. Alexandra Bayne from Workplace Learning and Engagement shares her perspective as an IRP sponsor on the human resources impact and importance of Workday for UBC.

What is your role and history with UBC and what is your connection with the IRP?

My role is Managing Director of HR & Strategic Workplace Initiatives, Learning and Engagement where I have primarily three main portfolios. One of the portfolios involves workplace learning and leadership, through which we offer faculty and staff learning opportunities such as coaching, conflict theatre management and professional development. Another portfolio is around change and workforce planning and the third portfolio is around workplace engagement strategy and HR communications. In terms of my history at UBC, I started over 20 years ago and said I'd stay as long as I was doing interesting, challenging and rewarding work. I feel very fortunate that I've had a great career at UBC. Some high points in my career include:  being part of the team that opened the Okanagan campus; collaborating on developing the Focus on People Framework; sponsoring interesting work that improves our workplace like Conflict Theatre and putting in place metrics that help us better measure how faculty and staff workplace experiences. I became involved with the IRP because I believe that it will improve the workplace experience for faculty and staff. As an IRP sponsor, I contribute my expertise primarily to the Human Resources and Organization Change Management streams.

What excites you about the IRP and Workday?

One is that we'll have more easy access to information that we need to do our jobs. That's really exciting. But if I stay specific to my portfolio, I'm really excited about onboarding support and orientation, and launching the canvas catalog which will transform the workplace learning experience for faculty, staff and student employees. Right now onboarding can be a bit daunting for someone new, so I believe the Workday guided experience will make things a lot easier for people as they orient themselves here at UBC. With Workday, this will be the first time UBC is going to have a strategic human resource system. So it's going to help us manage online the employee lifecycle of our faculty and staff, from job design, recruitment, and orientation/onboarding, to benefits management, attendance, and important to all of us - how we get paid! The whole employee lifecycle will be supported by Workday, whereas right now it isn't.

What do you think success will look like when it comes to the implementation of Workday?

I believe after the launch of Workday, success looks like having the foundation placed in correctly and we are able to continue to do our core business processes right. Over the long term, success means understanding the incremental improvements needed for the system and taking advantage of the new functionality that will be updated every 6 months. While we may not get everything in place for everyone the first day we Go-Live, there is lots of opportunity to build and improve those as we go along to make sure the system is working optimally.

What do you think people across UBC can do to contribute to that success?

I think the first thing they can do is to begin thinking about their business processes now and what it means for them and their unit. While everyone might not know the exact step-by-step procedures, everyone should understand by now that paper-based methods or Excel spreadsheets for certain processes will be changed into a Workday process. By acknowledging and preparing for that upcoming change, for instance cleaning up outstanding vacation balances and expense submissions, we will help make that transition more smoothly. There are some great resources available for people to access on the IRP website like Workday 101.

I just want to thank the UBC community because everybody has been truly engaged and I know there's equal amounts of excitement, hesitation and a little bit of fear around this big change. And that's natural given there's still some ambiguity around what it will all look like.

*This is where they can leverage their Transition Network members around them. Become familiar with your Transition Network leads and captains, communicate the support you require for this change. These TN members can then leverage their connections with the IRP to make sure you are equipped as much as possible for this change.

*Stay tuned for the full roster of the Transition Network members to be posted on the IRP website in November!