Top 5 Workday® HCM Features for 2021R1

It’s a new year and time for new Workday features! Here are a few of our favorites for HCM.

Ongoing Support

The pandemic has changed our world and the way that we interact with our people. Workday and customers have impressed us this year with rapid and collaborative responses to the COVID-19 related needs. The first feature on our list takes this support one step further for recruiting making it easier to facilitate remote interviewing.

1. Web Conference Integrations for Interviews

This feature, using Workday Studio, allows organizations to integrate with their web conference provider. The unique link generated can be shared via meeting invitations and interviews in Workday allowing candidates and interviewers to seamlessly connect for interviews.

Making Life Easier

As a Workday professional, we occasionally find ourselves saying “that is not current Workday functionality, we will need to find a workaround.” The next features on our list solve common pain points from customers and eliminate the need for workarounds.

2. Benefits Enrollment Instructions by Coverage Type

The new benefits interface is very user-friendly and intuitive for employees. However, the inability to configure help text by coverage plan type made it challenging to truly help employees navigate selections. Added functionality to customize enrollment instructions for coverage types will greatly improve the employee and administrator experience.

3. Change Job Templates Security and Condition Rules

The job change process covers so many different types of changes. Although the ability to create streamlined Change Job Templates has been around for a while, Workday has significantly enhanced this by allowing configuration of different condition rules and security groups for each template. This added ability to manage different job change types makes the Job Change business process simpler for users and more streamlined for HR staff.

4. Supervisory Organization Changes on Hire

For customers who have regular organization changes (or even, a manager change), updating the supervisory organization on a hire has been a big challenge. With the latest update customers can now correct Supervisory Organizations on a completed or pending hire. It can even trigger related changes to ensure data integrity.

People Experience

Over the past couple of years, Workday has introduced a lot of great features related to Innovation Services including Skills Cloud and now the suite of People Experience products. For our last HCM feature we are highlighting People Experience features to ensure you are getting the most out of this product.

Some People Experience items delivered are included with a Workday subscription and some require the purchase of a new SKU (Journeys and Help). If you are not currently utilizing these, set aside some time to learn more and consider speaking to an account executive about pricing.

 5. People Experience Features:

• Cards and Suggested Tasks (included) – Set up a customized experience where users are presented with common tasks or information.

• Workday Assistant (included) – Allows users to use a chatbot to ask questions or even initiate actions.

• Integration with Slack and Teams (included) – Users can access data or initiate actions such as an expense report right from these platforms

• Workday Help (additional SKU)

  • Case Management – Allows employees to request help, such as for benefits or payroll, right through Workday.

  • Knowledge Management – Provides an accessible library of items for users.

• Workday Journeys (additional SKU)

  • Guides – For more complex changes, such as becoming a new manager, a journey can be configured to enroll in learning content or provide personalized onboarding recommendations.

  • Insights – Using machine learning, Workday can make suggestions to users based on a current role or other specific attributes.

You probably selected Workday because it is a powerful and configurable system. However, most organizations cannot adopt all functionality at go-live. Take release opportunities to audit the system, evaluate the feature roadmap, and adopt new and unused features that will take your organization to the next level.

If you are interested in a 2021R1 Release Review please contact us and we would be happy to customize a review specific to your Workday environment. Also, keep an eye out for our next blog post on the “Top FIN Features for 2021R1” coming next week!