What business problem(s) did your organization / project face, and why did you choose a digital adoption strategy to help you solve it?
WMG has grown primarily through M&A and partnerships. This has led to a fragmented digital ecosystem with many duplications. We wanted to produce an offering that helped our employees through this, so they can get back to managing some of the biggest artists in the world.
With this approach, we had a big issue with digital adoption within the organisation; our WalkMe partnership grew out of L&D– and is now considered one of our employee experience platforms. Using both the WMG Assistant (Workstation) and the browser extensions, we are able to connect the WMG universe.
How did you use WalkMe, in conjunction with other strategies and technologies, to address your challenges?
WalkMe was one of the first cross functional deployment projects: the main contributors were GT, Digital Learning and our innovation function, so for the first time we started to align and compare strategies and found common ground.
We both wanted to empower our people, through tech enablement, to work more efficiently and to make better, smarter decisions – allowing us to look across the entire ecosystem and spot opportunities to reduce administration and deploy automations at scale. Linking these two strategies has changed the ways our teams work together.
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, impact or benefit your end-users?
Our digital adoption strategy benefits the employees in many ways. Firstly it acts as their guide around WMG’s complex digital ecosystems, saving duplication as well as time and money.
Within our first 2 weeks of launching the WMG Assistant (Workstation) we had over 100,000 sessions with usage all around the world.
We then looked at employee efficiency: “where are systems and processes just getting in the way of our people?”. If we look at Workday, our HCM, we found that employees were spending
an average of 31 mins per month in the system, just doing basic things like booking annual leave, managing their goals etc.
Using WalkMe’s auto-step ability, we were able to halve that time and increase the amount of people following the processes.
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, impact or benefit your team and/or leadership team?
We didn’t have a digital adoption strategy before we started partnering with WalkMe, and approaching this project really made many business areas start to take notice of something we were offering.
From a leadership team perspective, they’ve now been using Insights to help form investment decisions. Before, at least 1 day a week of our product owners’ time per month was spent on basic “how do I and where do I?” questions.
Now, we are attacking these using WalkMe and our digital adoption strategy and are already seeing significant reductions in this.
Also, we are the first HR Project with a signed off ROI by our CFO; historically we’ve always been seen as a cost centre, and that perception is changing.
How has your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, helped your organization better achieve its mission, goals, or values?
We’re still early in our WalkMe journey, but the successes we are seeing this early are outstanding, and we are having areas of the business collaborate like never before.
I believe that this new approach and strategy is a first step to allowing this organisation to put into place a fully realised mission that is utilised across all of our groups and labels.
How has the success of your digital adoption strategy helped to change the perceptions or attitudes of your stakeholders?
Very simply, we are now having people openly speaking about employee experience, making sure that we have that voice at the table, and ensuring that everything we end up making is done in a manner that we can measure and assess the results (and pivot the approach if we need!)
There was a lot of resistance at first with us bringing WalkMe in, it was seen as an expensive training tool. This perception has radically shifted, it is now seen as part of our development kit, our employee experience approach and of course, the best training tool possible.
What about your implementation or success makes you most proud? Why?
For us, it’s a few things: it’s been labelled as the most successful tech project in WMG history, so many groups and departments that were historically “closed” to working together are now coming to us.
For our employees, seeing them actually taking to this tool and using it as part of their day to day working is amazing. We’ve both walked around our offices (New York and London) and seen it being used – and I’m also proud to see this being used around the world in our insights as well.
About your company
With a legacy extending back over 200 years, Warner Music Group today is home to an unparalleled family of creative artists, songwriters, and companies that are moving culture across the globe. At the core of Warner Music Group four of the most iconic companies in history: Atlantic, Elektra, Parlophone and Warner Records. They are joined by renowned labels such as Asylum, Big Beat, Canvasback, FFRR, Nonesuch, Reprise, Rhino, Roadrunner, Sire, Spinnin’, Warner Classics, Warner Music Nashville and many more. Warner Chappell Music – which traces its origins back to 1811 – is one of the world’s leading music publishers, with a catalog of over 1.4 million copyrights spanning every musical genre from the standards of the Great American Songbook to the biggest hits of our time.