Workday 2023R2 brings in a lot of exciting, powerful and sophisticated new features, mostly coming from user and partner brainstorms, which will definitely be beneficial to both new and existing Workday customers. This release covers 6 overarching themes,namely: Agility to give organizations an agile foundation to quickly adapt to changing business conditions, Compliance to manage global compliance risks by delivering the latest compliance updates and proactively surfacing business risks, Efficiency to drive operational agility and efficiency through frictioneless automation and functional breadth and depth, Experience to engage users in the moments that matter and save time with smart, intuitive experiences, Insight to enable better business decisions at all levels of the organization by harnessing power of data and lastly Trust to provide capabilities that provide organizations with enhanced ways to secure their data and adhere to evolving privacy standards.

Amongst 1,200+ new features in this release, we have picked our top 3 which not only our favorite but also considered as critical feautures which will surely brings in next level sophistication to Workday platform.

My Tasks

First on our list is the improvement on My Tasks. The improvements will bring efficiency and flexibility, enabling action owners to easily locate tasks and reducing scrolls and clicks when they are working on their Inboxes. This is critical a feature since My Task will be replacing the Inbox in 2024R1.

With the enhanced My Task, users will now able to set Assignment parameters whether they want to filter the task list only to those assigned or delegated to them, or assigned to multiple action owners including them. This will definitely a game changer since most of our existing users today with multiple security roles have trouble filtering their tasks and sometimes may miss some important actions. While Inbox today has filter function where you need to set condition rules, this Assignment Parameter provides easier filtering on one of the most common filter parameter.

Along the assignment parameter enhancement, there will be a new Date View Display options where you can toggle between views whether you want to see the relative date or the number of days when you received the task, or the absolute date where you can see the exact date when you received the task. This enables users to prioritize task based on what tasks came in first, or they can also locate tasks based on what date it was sent to them. This is really a big help for action owners who receive many actions in a day or a week.

To complete the enhancement for My Task, very simple yet very helpful is the automated refresh feature that removes tasks from your view once you have completed them and add news task at the top of your list as you receive them at the time of the refresh. The refresh button is too administrative and action owners may miss urgent actions to complete when they miss to click on the button. With this new feature, action owners will need not to worry about refreshing their list to remove all completed and add all new tasks into their task list.

Aside from these new enhancements, My Task basically enables action owners to manage their Inbox items or Tasks more effectively, with more flexibility and definitely a big leap to Workday User Experience.

Guidance Workspace

Another great feature for 2023R2 is the enhancements to Guidance Workspace. Basically, Guidance Workspace enables users to author and add quick tips on a certain list of tasks and fields. These quick tips help end users to complete forms and task easier and more accurately as each of the important fields will show instructions and descriptions real time as you hover over them. This will minimize back and forth of these submitted tasks, multiple queries while completing a form or task, frequency of rescinding or cancelling tasks with incorrect data input. Initially, Guidance Workspace is enabled to 20+ tasks, and for 2023R2 it will now be available to 150+ tasks.

These quick tips are very helpful to increase utilization and improve adoption especially to those large organizations where hundreds of users complete tasks in Workday simultaneously. One of the common challenges of organizations migrating to Workday is to help their end users adapt to the new terminologies and business process that Workday brings in, resulting to high volume of queries, rescind requests and incorrect data input that has immense downstream impact. This also led organizations to conduct extensive training, produce numerous training materials, worse centralizing the tasks to few people, bombarding them with all of the tasks that are meant to be completed by other users. This new Guidance Workspace aims to empower all other users and find ease in using Workday, increasing utilization, and improving User Experience.

HR Partner Hub

Lastly and another great feature for this release is the HR Partner Hub. Across organizations, we have seen both common and unique challenges that HR Partners face thru different change requests, explorations, enhancements on reports and dashboards and these are all ever changing periodically. We have also seen evolution on support models thru changes in security policies, roles and assignments as the HR partner support model may a bit of challenging for some organizations. With this new HR Partner Hub, Workday aims to solidify this role and its involvement to the overall support model.

HR Partner Hub provide HR Partners with a single point of access to workforce movement information and to enhanced reports and dashboards relevant to their roles. This will greatly improve user experience for all HR Partners who are struggling to locate all relevant tasks and reports making them more efficient in their roles. In this hub, they have an easy access to Announcements targeted to them, employee movement dashboards with flexible filters, customized cards and external links. They will also have a customized report showing pending and completed tasks related to employee movements, when it was initiated and to whom it was pending. The Hub will also provide access to numerous dashboards showing different view of analytics and navigate through People Analytics for some organizations.

Enabling these for HR Partners empower them to be one of the most important roles in Workday, complementing Managers and Employees themselves.

Ultimately, aside from these top 3 selected features, there are more other great new features in this release that will definitely ups the game for all Workday customers.

 

Workday Release 2023 R2 – Adaptive Planning