Workday Inc., a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, has announced that it is all set to acquire employee feedback technology company Peakon ApS in cash. “By joining forces with Workday, we’re able to accelerate our mission to help every employee drive the change they want to see,” says Phil Chambers, co-founder and CEO of Peakon.
Transaction overview
Workday will acquire Peakon for $700M (approx €577.4M) in cash. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of Workday’s fiscal year 2022, ending April 30, 2021.
Orrick and Bech-Bruun are serving as legal advisors to Workday, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Osborne Clarke, and Highbridge are serving as legal advisors to Peakon and its shareholders.
About Workday and Peakon
Workday, founded by David Duffield, is an American on‑demand financial management and human capital management software vendor. The company’s applications for financial management, HR, planning, spend management, and analytics have been adopted by organisations around the world and across industries – from medium-sized businesses to more than 45 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies.
As for Denmark-based Peakon, it is an employee success platform that converts feedback into insights. With the largest standardised data set of employee feedback in the world, Peakon claims to provide customised benchmarks and personalised insights to support its mission of helping every employee drive the change they want to see. To date, Peakon has helped organisations like Capgemini, The Adecco Group, Delivery Hero, Staples and easyJet.
Aim of this acquisition
With this development, Workday will provide organisations with a continuous listening platform, including real-time visibility into employee experience, sentiment, and productivity, to help drive employee engagement and improve organisational performance.
“Bringing Peakon into the Workday family will be very compelling to our customers – especially following an extraordinary past year that has magnified the importance of having a constant pulse on employee sentiment in order to keep people engaged and productive,” says Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and co-CEO, Workday.
The combination will merge intelligent technology from Peakon that determines and distributes surveys and information to the right person at the right time, with the comprehensive employee insight in Workday, to help leaders discover and respond to evolving employee feelings, needs, and behaviours.
For example, customers will be able to gain better insights and understanding on employee belonging, which will help them adjust plans to encourage an inclusive workplace culture.
Josh Bersin, global industry analyst, says, “Listening to employees has become one of the most urgent strategies to build agility, responsiveness, and growth. Workday’s acquisition of Peakon will enable Workday customers to deploy a highly targeted and integrated employee listening strategy, addressing a top priority in employee experience today.”
Data with regards to employee sentiment of 2020
Peakon’s Heartbeat website that shows macro-trends has accumulated 153 million survey responses and found out that in 2020, the focus was on how companies and employees were responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A surprise finding: “We saw that from the start of 2020 through July, employee engagement actually increased 2 per cent globally for Peakon customers. In addition to this, we also observed a 5% increase in employees feeling their mental well-being was a priority for their employers,” mentions Phil Chambers, Peakon’s co-founder and CEO, in a blog post.
According to the website, in 2020, employees missed out on career growth. The data shows that the formal recognition of that learning through growth and career progression has slowed slightly.