Workstream 

Key Updates 

Feature Description & Business Impacts 

Absence  

Start and End Times on Absence Tables 

A long-awaited feature for clients who need visibility into their time offs start and end times, and who also want to leverage absence tiers. With this update, time off entries with start and end times can now be included in absence tables, helping companies meet their policies and improve resource planning. The change will also allow clients with absence tables to transition to start/end time off entries, supporting a better experience with third-party absence integrations, such as Outlook Calendar. 

Change Job/Assign Work Schedule Impacts on Time Off 

Following the Termination Impact in Time Off from 2024R1, Workday delivers two new service steps that can be included in your BPs: Change Job and Assign Work Schedule. These service steps will remove invalid time offs for which users are no longer eligible after the change job/work schedule assignment event. It will also exclude time offs based on the ‘days to include’ definition in the time off plan, filtering out time off requests for non-valid working days. 

Absence Report Fields for Leave and Time Off 

Workday also introduces two valuable new report fields that can be used in custom reports and condition rules: “Days Between Leave Start Date and Today” and “Total Units Requested for Current Leave, Including All Leave Types and Time Offs Associated with the Current Leave Type.” These new fields will make tracking ongoing leave balances easier and more streamlined than ever before. 

Time Tracking 

Rename Request Overtime to Time Requests 

Although it may seem like a small change due to the “rename” description, this feature introduces significant updates that will enhance the Request Overtime functionality. In addition to the name change for broader usage, it will now be possible to create different time request codes as easily as time entry codes. The experience for required comments will also improve, as the comment box will appear as required and prevent submission of time requests if empty. Furthermore, Workday delivers the task ‘Review and Approve Time Requests,’ which allows managers to approve requests for multiple workers. The Edit and Approve task will also include a new section with time review summary for the period being approved, providing a reconciled view of time entries and time requests. 

Effective-Dated Time Entry Templates 

Before this change, updating time totals, time entry setup, or eligibility settings due to company policy or legislative changes would result in losing visibility of previous setup on the time entry page (or require creating a duplicate template to maintain accurate results). With the effective dating of time entry templates, updates can now be made as of a specific effective date, minimizing the workload for changes and improving audit visibility. 

Automatically Submit Time Enhancements 

Workday continues to improve this great functionality to simplify time submission. Besides the existing time entry template prompt, new fields are now delivered, such as Organizations, Job Profiles, Worker Type, Locations, Collective Agreement and Work Shifts. It will be also possible to exclude current and future periods for more flexibility.  

Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Time Entry 

Building on the machine learning features delivered for other modules in the last release, this feature will streamline time entry by displaying recommendations based on the most recently used and most frequently used selections in the prompts. I’m excited to test this one and see how it will affect the user experience when multiple time entry codes are in scope.