Workday is one of the most established HCM software in the HR technology market. Its platform spans HR, talent management, payroll, workforce planning, and more. That breadth is exactly why so many organizations buy it.

It is also why performance management can get stuck.

A system built to support nearly every HR process and beyond will naturally optimize for breadth, consistency, governance, and enterprise-wide standardization. Those are important. But performance management needs something different. It needs frequent adoption from managers and employees. It needs goals that stay connected to work. It needs feedback and coaching in the flow of execution. It needs flexible workflows for different teams, regions, and talent decisions. It needs performance signals that leaders can actually use.

A broad HCM can record performance activity.

A purpose-built performance management system should improve performance.

That is the Betterworks argument. The goal is not always to rip out Workday. The goal is to move performance management out of Workday when Workday becomes too broad, too administrative, or too disconnected from how performance actually happens.

1. Workday is a system of record. Performance management needs a system of action.

Workday’s center of gravity is the system of record. It is where many organizations manage employee data, job architecture, organizational structure, compensation information, and other foundational HR processes.

Performance management has a different job.

Performance is not just data to be stored. It is behavior to be shaped. It is priorities being translated into work. It is managers setting expectations, coaching through change, giving feedback, making decisions, and helping employees understand how their work connects to the business.

That is why the “we already have Workday” argument often breaks down.

You may already have a place to store performance information. But do you have a system that actually helps performance happen?

For some organizations, Betterworks sits on top of Workday. Workday remains the HCM foundation, and Betterworks becomes the dedicated layer for goals, reviews, feedback, calibration, 1:1s, skills, and talent intelligence. Betterworks also has a Workday integration designed to support that model.

For other organizations, the move is more direct: they stop running performance management in Workday and shift the performance function to Betterworks.

Both paths reflect the same conclusion.

Workday may be the right HR system of record. But that does not mean it should be the system where performance is managed, coached, calibrated, and improved.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks becomes the system of performance, whether Workday stays in the stack for HCM or not.

2. Goals in Workday can become records. Goals in Betterworks become an execution system.

Most performance systems can store goals. That is table stakes.

The real question is whether those goals stay connected to execution.

In too many organizations, goals are created at the beginning of the year or quarter, lightly revisited during review season, and then used as partial evidence in a retrospective performance conversation. By then, the business has already changed. Priorities have shifted. Managers are relying on memory. Employees are reconstructing impact after the fact.

That is not performance management. It is performance archaeology.

Workday includes goal and performance capabilities as part of its broader talent management suite. But when goals live inside a broad HCM workflow, they can become another HR object to maintain rather than the operating system for how work gets aligned and executed.

Betterworks takes a different approach with Goals and OKRs. Goals are not just an input to the review cycle. They are the connective tissue between strategy, work, check-ins, feedback, coaching, reviews, and talent decisions.

That matters because leaders do not just need to know whether employees completed a goal form. They need to know:

• Are teams aligned to the right business priorities?

• Where is execution on track?

• Where are teams blocked?

• Which goals are stale?

• Which priorities have shifted?

• Which employees are driving outcomes that matter?

• Which managers are keeping work focused?

If the performance system cannot answer those questions, it is documenting activity, not driving execution.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks connects goals to business outcomes, manager conversations, feedback, reviews, and performance decisions, so goals stay alive after they are set.

3. Managers need more than another Workday workflow.

Managers are where performance management succeeds or fails.

That sounds obvious, but many performance systems are still designed primarily around HR administration. HR launches the cycle. HR configures the forms. HR tracks completion. HR chases managers. HR reports on whether the process closed.

That may help HR manage compliance. It does not necessarily help managers lead.

This is a major issue because managers are under pressure. Gallup has reported that managers account for a large share of variance in team engagement, and recent workplace coverage has connected declining employee engagement to increased strain on managers. Business Insider’s coverage of Gallup’s 2025 workplace findings noted that manager engagement has fallen and that managers are central to the employee experience.

That should change how organizations evaluate performance software.

A performance management system should help managers:

• Set clearer expectations

• Keep goals current

• Prepare for better 1:1s

• Capture feedback while it is still relevant

• Coach based on evidence

• Summarize performance themes over time

• Make fairer, more consistent decisions

Workday can support manager workflows, but its breadth can also create friction. On G2’s Workday HCM reviews page, the summary surfaces recurring user-generated cons such as limited customization, poor interface design, not user-friendly, learning curve, and difficult navigation. Capterra reviews similarly note that some Workday features can feel overly complex and unintuitive, especially when navigating deeper workflows or generating advanced reports. 

That kind of friction matters in performance management because performance depends on repeated behavior.

If managers only engage because HR reminds them to complete a required task, the process becomes a compliance exercise. If managers find the system useful in the moments they actually manage, adoption becomes easier to sustain.

Betterworks is built for the manager behaviors performance management depends on. Goals, check-ins, 1:1s, feedback, conversations, and reviews are connected in a continuous experience. Managers can prepare with better context. Employees can see how their work ties to priorities. HR gets a more complete picture of what is happening throughout the performance cycle.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks helps managers coach, align, and develop employees in the flow of work, not just complete performance tasks when a cycle opens.

4. Review cycles are not enough for modern performance management.

A review cycle is not a performance strategy.

Priorities shift before review season. Teams reorganize before ratings are finalized. Skills become relevant before job architectures are updated. Managers need coaching context before they sit down to write a narrative. Talent decisions happen during business pivots, compensation planning, succession conversations, and internal mobility discussions, not only when a formal review window is open.

Workday has also recognized the need to evolve performance management with AI and continuous development. In its own thought leadership, Workday has described AI as a way to make performance management more continuous, personalized, and less administratively burdensome. That is the right direction for the category.

But buyers still need to ask a harder question: Is continuous performance the architecture of the system, or is it being layered onto a broader HCM suite?

Betterworks is built for continuous performance from the ground up.

Goals inform check-ins. Check-ins inform conversations. Conversations and feedback inform reviews. Reviews and calibration inform talent decisions. Skills can be inferred from real performance signals over time. The result is a richer and more current understanding of performance than a review event can produce on its own.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks turns performance from an episodic review process into a continuous system of goals, feedback, coaching, skills, and talent decisions.

5. Workday standardization can slow down performance agility.

Enterprise performance management is rarely simple.

Different teams need different review templates. Global organizations need localized workflows. Matrixed employees may need input from more than one manager. Some teams need quarterly check-ins. Others need project-based feedback. Some calibration sessions need a 9-box. Others need custom views, multiple data sets, or decision criteria tied to promotion, succession, or compensation.

The larger the organization, the less likely one standard process will fit every population.

Workday’s strength is enterprise standardization. That can be valuable for core HR. But for performance management, too much standardization can become a constraint.

This shows up in user feedback. G2’s Workday HCM review summary lists “limited customization,” “learning curve,” and “difficult navigation” among recurring user-generated cons. Those are broad HCM observations, but they matter for performance because performance programs need to evolve quickly as the business changes.

• A new leadership team may want different visibility.

• A business unit may need a different review cadence.

• A global region may need a tailored process.

• A compensation cycle may need more nuanced calibration.

• A transformation initiative may require goals to be reset quickly.

• A talent review may require performance, skills, aspiration, mobility, and readiness data in one place.

If every change feels like a systems project, HR becomes less responsive to the business.

Betterworks is designed for performance flexibility. HR teams can configure review cycles, templates, workflows, permissions, calibration views, talent fields, and reporting structures around how performance actually needs to run.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks gives HR more control over performance management without forcing every team, region, or talent decision into the same rigid process.

6. Calibration should support decisions, not just normalize ratings.

Calibration is one of the clearest places where performance management either becomes strategic or stays administrative.

At its worst, calibration is a meeting where leaders debate ratings with incomplete context, inconsistent criteria, and a spreadsheet open in the background.

At its best, calibration helps the business make fairer, more consistent, and more defensible decisions about performance, growth, promotion, compensation, succession, and internal mobility.

The difference is data quality and workflow flexibility.

Betterworks performance review calibration is built around real-time performance data, flexible cycles, and configurable views. Instead of treating calibration as a static rating exercise, Betterworks helps HR and leaders bring together goals, feedback, conversations, performance history, skills, and other talent context to support better decisions.

That is a very different outcome than simply completing the calibration step in a workflow.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks makes calibration a decision-support process grounded in real performance context, not just a review-cycle requirement.

7. Skills and talent intelligence need real work signals, not just HR data.

Workday has a skills story. Workday Skills Cloud is positioned to help organizations understand workforce skills and capabilities so they can upskill, reskill, redeploy, and hire more effectively. Workday’s broader talent positioning also emphasizes skills-based talent management and internal mobility.

The issue is not whether Workday has skills functionality, but whether your skills intelligence is grounded in performance signals from real work.

Betterworks connects talent intelligence to goals, feedback, 1:1s, conversations, recognition, reviews, calibration outcomes, and skills inferred from actual performance context. That creates a more dynamic view of what employees are demonstrating, where they are growing, and how they may be deployed next.

Static skills inventories can help create structure. But they do not, on their own, create a reliable view of workforce capability.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks connects skills, performance, goals, feedback, and talent decisions in one system, so leaders can make decisions based on evidence instead of assumptions.

8. Workday AI is broad. Betterworks AI is built for performance decisions.

Workday AI is broad because Workday is broad.

Betterworks AI is focused on the performance moments that matter: writing stronger goals, summarizing performance themes, helping managers prepare for better conversations, reducing review-writing friction, surfacing coaching opportunities, and turning ongoing performance signals into better talent intelligence.

That focus matters because AI in performance management should do more than generate text.

A faster review narrative is useful.

A better-informed talent decision is strategic.

The risk with broad AI is that it can make administrative work faster without fundamentally improving how performance decisions are made. The opportunity with performance-specific AI is different. It can help organizations understand performance, skills, growth, and readiness with more context and less reliance on subjective memory.

Betterworks AI for HR is designed to support employees, managers, and organizations as they work toward goals, improve feedback, and make performance work more effective. Betterworks also describes its performance management software as connecting goals, feedback, skills, and 1:1s to drive stronger execution and more defensible decisions.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks AI is embedded in the performance workflow, where it can improve goals, coaching, reviews, skills visibility, and decision quality.

9. The real move is not always away from Workday. It is away from Workday Performance Management.

Should Workday still own performance management?

For many organizations, the answer is no.

They may keep Workday for core HR. They may continue relying on Workday for employee data, org structure, job information, and other HCM processes. But they move the performance function into Betterworks because performance management has become too important to run as a module in a broad suite.

If performance management is mostly about process completion, Workday may be enough.

If performance management is about business execution, manager effectiveness, skills visibility, talent mobility, succession, and evidence-based decision-making, Betterworks is built for that job.

The Betterworks difference: Betterworks does not have to replace all of Workday to beat Workday for performance management. It replaces Workday as the place where performance actually happens.

Betterworks vs. Workday for performance management

Signs you should move performance management out of Workday

You may be ready to move performance management from Workday to Betterworks if:

• Your goals exist in Workday, but they do not meaningfully guide execution.

• Managers only engage with performance tools when HR reminds them to complete a cycle.

• Reviews rely too heavily on memory, recency, or subjective manager narratives.

• Calibration requires too much manual preparation or spreadsheet work.

• HR struggles to adapt performance workflows for different populations, regions, levels, or business units.

• Talent discussions happen without enough evidence from real work.

• Skills data exists, but leaders do not fully trust it for mobility, succession, or workforce planning.

• Business leaders are asking HR to prove how performance management improves execution.

The issue may not be your Workday investment. The issue may be expecting Workday to do a job that requires a more focused system.

The bottom line

Workday is a strong HCM. That is not the debate.

The debate is whether Workday should still own performance management when the business needs more than a process to complete.

For many organizations, the answer is no.

They do not need to rip out Workday. But they do need to stop letting Workday define how performance works.

Betterworks gives HR leaders a purpose-built alternative for the performance management function: one system for goals, coaching, feedback, reviews, calibration, skills, and evidence-based talent decisions. Some companies layer Betterworks on top of Workday. Others move performance management out of Workday entirely. In both cases, the point is the same.

Performance is too important to be treated as just another HCM module.

It is how strategy becomes results.