Workday Community is included in every subscription, which is exactly why most customers treat it as free. The customers who treat it as a deliberate investment — with a named lead, a labor budget, and a contribution discipline — extract six-figure annual value through support deflection, roadmap influence, and peer-benchmarking leverage that changes the math at renewal.
Workday Community is the customer-facing platform where every Workday customer connects with peers, files product enhancement requests (Brainstorms), reads documentation, and engages with Workday's support and product teams. It is included in every Workday subscription, which means buyers rarely interrogate its economic value. They should. The customers who treat Community as a deliberate investment, not a benefit, are extracting six-figure value from it every year.
This is a benchmark-based look at what investing in Workday Community actually returns — for product roadmap influence, support deflection, contract leverage, and talent — and how the strongest customers structure that investment.
Workday Community has six functional layers that matter for ROI analysis. The first is the knowledge base — official documentation, KB articles, and tutorials. The second is the discussion forums, where customers ask questions of other customers. The third is Brainstorms, Workday's product enhancement request system where customers vote on features. The fourth is case management, which is how every support ticket is opened and tracked. The fifth is events and Workday Rising, gated through Community accounts. The sixth, less visible but most important, is peer benchmarking — the customer-to-customer relationships that develop in the forums and at events.
Each of these has a different ROI profile, and most customers under-invest in three of the six.
A customer with an HRIS team of 8-12 people opens, in our benchmark, 280-450 support cases per year. Of those, 35-55% are resolvable through the Community knowledge base or peer-answered forum threads. Customers who invest in active Community participation — designating a "Community lead" who routes internal questions through Community before opening cases — cut case volume by 25-40%. That translates to faster resolution on the cases that remain, lower Premier support tier requirements at renewal, and reduced internal escalation overhead.
Customers with active Community programs spend on average 22% less on Premier Support tier upgrades over a five-year term because they need less hand-holding from named support resources. Across our engagements, this single dynamic produces $140,000-$380,000 in five-year savings for a typical enterprise.
Brainstorms is Workday's enhancement-request system. Customers post product ideas, peers vote, and Workday product management triages and prioritizes them. The system is widely viewed as a black box, but the data tells a clearer story: ideas with 100+ votes have a 38% delivery rate within 36 months. Ideas with 250+ votes have a 64% delivery rate. Ideas with active customer-success-manager sponsorship and 250+ votes hit 78%.
What this means for ROI: a customer with a specific feature gap that materially costs them — say, a missing integration capability that requires a $180,000-per-year workaround through an SI partner — can plausibly close that gap by orchestrating a Brainstorm campaign. Customers who do this consistently have shaped Workday's roadmap in real, traceable ways.
The most under-rated Community ROI lever is the peer relationships customers build. When you are renegotiating a Workday renewal, the most powerful question you can ask your account team is: "What are similar-size customers in our industry actually paying?" Workday will not answer that question directly. Your Community peers will — sometimes in detail, more often in ranges that give you the leverage you need.
The customers extracting maximum value from Community follow a recognizable pattern. They designate a named Community lead with 4-8 hours per week of dedicated time. They allocate budget for two attendees at Workday Rising every year, with explicit briefing/debrief discipline. They participate actively in 3-5 industry user group meetings annually. They run a monthly internal "Community digest" that surfaces relevant KB articles, Brainstorms to vote on, and forum discussions.
The total labor investment is modest — usually 0.15 to 0.25 FTE of mid-senior HRIS or finance-systems time, plus a $12,000-$28,000 annual budget for events and travel. The ROI multiple, when the program is run with intention, is typically 6-12x.
Three patterns consistently destroy Community ROI. The first is treating Community as IT-only. Community forums on payroll, finance, and recruiting are valuable to those functional teams — not just to the HRIS group. Designate functional Community contacts in payroll, finance, and recruiting; the deflection and benchmarking value compounds quickly.
The second is over-reliance on Workday's customer success manager (CSM) for questions that belong in Community. CSMs are excellent for escalation, advocacy, and roadmap conversations. They are not the right channel for "how do other customers handle this configuration." Going to Community first is faster, surfaces more options, and preserves your CSM relationship for the questions that really matter.
The third is failing to contribute. Customers who only read Community get a fraction of the value of customers who contribute — answering peer questions, posting Brainstorms, sharing experiences at user group meetings. Contribution builds the peer relationships that produce the benchmarking value, and there is no shortcut to that.
Three of the most valuable inputs to a Workday renewal negotiation are: knowing what comparable customers pay, knowing which features are about to be delivered (versus permanently stalled), and knowing the names of the Workday product, support, and sales executives who actually drive decisions. Each of these comes from Community — and from nowhere else with the same fidelity.
The most consequential renewal we have advised on in the last 18 months turned on a single piece of Community-derived intelligence: a peer at a similar-size customer in the same vertical had recently renewed at a 27% lower per-employee rate. That number, validated and brought into our client's negotiation, drove a $1.9M five-year improvement on the renewal.
Two Workday-run programs sit on top of Community and are worth specific investment. The Workday Customer Advisory Council is selective, and membership is a real contract-leverage asset; if your organization is a candidate, lobby for inclusion. The Workday Champion program recognizes high-contribution Community members; designating an internal champion candidate creates visibility for your organization with Workday product and support teams that pays dividends across the entire account relationship.
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