With just a few hours to go before the 2025 CHRO Awards, anticipation is building for a night that celebrates South Africa’s most inspiring HR leaders.
Among the event’s proud supporters is Workday, returning as the sponsor of the prestigious CHRO of the Year Award.
CHRO South Africa caught up with Kiv Moodley, the country managing director at Workday South Africa, who explained that as a partner to HR leaders worldwide, they are passionate about the evolution of this critical role, and the continued partnership reflects their respect for the evolving role of the CHRO.
Q: What inspired Workday to sponsor the CHRO of the Year Award?
Our inspiration for sponsoring the CHRO of the Year award is simple. We are inspired by the CHROs themselves. This award celebrates the leader at the very epicentre of business transformation. The role of the CHRO has undergone a profound evolution. It has moved from a functional, administrative leader to a core strategic partner who is instrumental in driving business outcomes. Today’s CHRO is the architect of culture, the steward of the employee experience and the key driver of organisational agility. They are navigating immense, complex challenges from the rise of AI and the demand for new skills to building a culture of belonging in a hybrid world.
We are inspired to celebrate the individual who masterfully balances the humanity of the workforce with the strategic demands of the business. Sponsoring this award is our way of championing these exceptional changemakers who are designing the successful, people-centric organisations of the future.
Q: What makes this award category especially meaningful? And how does this sponsorship align with your organisation’s purpose?
This award is uniquely meaningful because the CHRO is our primary partner in transformation. Our purpose at Workday is to make work better for everyone and we do that by putting people at the centre of enterprise software. The CHRO of the Year is the executive who embodies this mission within their own organisation.
This sponsorship aligns perfectly with our core purpose in two ways:
- It celebrates our shared mission: Our platform is built to empower the CHRO. We provide a unified, intelligent data core that enables HR leaders to move from intuition to insight and from reactive reporting to predictive strategy. When a CHRO succeeds in building an agile, skills-based and engaged organisation, it is a success we are proud to be a part of.
- It underscores our commitment to South Africa: This sponsorship is a tangible sign of our commitment to the South African market. It signifies our investment in the local leadership community and our belief in the world-class talent here. We are not just a technology vendor; we are a partner invested in advancing HR excellence and supporting the leaders who are making it happen on the ground.
Q: How does your organisation embody or promote the principles celebrated by this award?
We walk the walk by embedding the principles of HR excellence: strategic partnership, innovation and a human-centric approach, into everything we do.
As an organisation, we are a customer zero of our own technology. We use Workday to manage our own talent, listen to our people and build our own great place to work culture. We are consistently recognised as a top employer globally because we prioritise the same principles of engagement, skills development and belonging that this award celebrates. Our entire platform is designed to promote these principles for our customers.
Q: What’s one quality you think every future CHRO should embody to live up to the spirit of this award?
If I must choose just one, it is courageous adaptability. The future of work is not a fixed destination; it is a state of continuous motion. The future CHRO must embody this.
They must have the courage to invest in people and culture when financial pressures mount. The courage to lead the responsible and ethical adoption of AI, always championing the human in the loop and the courage to advocate for talent as the primary driver of business value.
They must also be the chief architect of an organisation that is built for change. This means fostering a culture of learning, building a skills-based workforce that can pivot, and, critically, having the technology backbone that allows the organisation to re-plan, re-skill and re-deploy talent at speed.
The CHRO of the Year is a leader who combines this courage and adaptability to not just navigate the future, but to actively build it.
