Every 6 months Workday brings out a new Release of their product with updates and improvements to existing features, and completely new features. It’s something both customers and implementers look forward to with great anticipation and excitement.
Each release brings with it a really big number of changes, and keeping abreast of all of these changes is no small task. We would like to help you navigate this area a little bit by highlighting what we think are some of the most interesting, promising, and helpful features of this new release.
Docs for Layouts
Personally, I have been very impressed with Workday’s new Workday Docs. Initially this was rolled out for Recruiting only, and that is where I first started using it. When this got rolled out to cover other modules, and when Workday added Notification Designer to this in 2023, I was really excited. I have used Workday Docs and Notification Designer on a number of projects and have been so impressed with its ease of use and flexibility. Where previously technical knowledge (and let’s not forget, quite a bit of time!) was needed to create BIRT designs to add to documents and notifications, customers can now easily and quickly update or create new and existing templates in their Drive. I mean, what is not to like about this!Now, Workday is taking it another step further and rolls out a new feature called Workday Docs for Layouts. The principle of this feature is very similar to Workday Docs and Notification Designer, in that it is a simple ‘drag and drop’ way of creating a layout. Images, tables, free text, headers, footers, and of course dynamic fields from the connected custom reports can be added in a very straight forward way. One very clever attribute is the conditioning of headers and footers, where you can have different headers/footers depending on conditions leveraging fields from the related report.
One big difference when compared to Docs and Notification designer, is that this feature can be accessed as a task from the tenant, without the need to access the Drive. The only thing required to access to task is that the domain ‘Docs for Layout’ is enabled, and security groups are assigned to enable access.
Workday has confirmed the new feature can be used for Compensation Reviews, Supplier Remittances, Employee Reviews, Talent Cards, and Invoices. Personally, I have also tested the feature for Payslips, and I have successfully created a layout for payslips – and again I am incredibly impressed and excited about the opportunities this new feature creates.
Customers can get creative with their designs for layouts, and do not have to concerned that there are restrains in terms of time and money investments whenever layouts need to be changed. A few clicks can make a big difference and no hard technical skills are required. What a great improvement!
Active Consent Preferences for Personal Information
Workday now enables customers to collect consent from its workers relating to how the customer will use their workers’ personal information.
The tenant can be set up with Processing Purposes (for example, ‘DEI Reporting’, ‘Third Party Integrations’, etc.). For each of these purposes the tenant can also be configured to request consent, or just to collect an acknowledgement if consent isn’t required per se.
Per country consent settings can then be activated and a custom consent statement configured for workers to read whenever they are giving their consent. Consent only needs to be given once, unless the consent configuration is changed after which consent has to be collected again. This functionality is so versatile that personal information attributes can be selected which are to be processed and for which consent is requested.
In our age of growing concern around data security and personal information integrity, this is a great feature to have as it helps customers build trust with their workers. Being open about how data is processed, and actively seeking consent or simply informing workers about the purposes of data processing, is a great way to let workers know you care about their personal information and at the same time, can be a great aid in order to comply with (current or future) data protection legislation.
User-Based Security Framework
A new BP to use when assigning user-based security groups! This feature does not come as a surprise, since assigning role-based security groups already leverages the ‘Assign Roles’ business process, and within this process reviews and approvals can be configured.
Since user-based security groups are so incredibly powerful, it is surprising that this business process wasn’t made available any sooner. We can now set up a business process with reviews and approvals to be used whenever updates are made to user-based security groups. Using routing conditions, we can also ensure that a security administrator for example, does not approve their own newly assigned user-based security groups but instead another security administrator has to approve.
This is a good improvement on security in principle – however when using this new functionality, please ensure to read in on its specific usage. For example, a new task has been created that works with this business process (Update User-Based Security Group Assignments) and that this task has to be used in order for the BP to trigger. The old assign user-based security group task however can still remain, and it bypasses the new BP even when this has been set up in the tenant. Equally, when assigning users to a user-based security group off of the security group itself (task ‘Assign Users’) the BP is not triggered.
Therefore, if opting into this new BP, it is recommended to also opt-in to the disable User-Based Security Group Tasks feature. This feature disables the old tasks so that only the new one remains, ensuring that the BP gets triggered whenever any changes are made to User-Based Security Group Assignments.
Did you know….?
There are so many more features that I could mention for this 2024R1 release that your organisation could benefit from, but there are too many to mention. Think of Effective Dating Of Service Dates, Dynamic Fields On Help Case Message Templates, Job Profile Business Process, Request Compensation Change Step on Collective Agreements, and many, many more.
Did you know however that a lot of these updates, improvement, and new features are actually an outcome of community engagement? Yes, indeed they are! If you have ever seen ‘Brainstorms’ on the Workday Community page, then you may have noticed that Workday responds to these and sometimes adopts the request by making new features or improving existing functionality.
This brings me back full circle to the first feature I mentioned (Docs for Layouts) which was actually requested by a community member right here. Check it out! And please, get involved on community by adding your experiences, answering on other members’ queries, or opening a Brainstorm and who know if your suggestions are going to be adopted in one of Workday’s future releases!
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