Top 3 Workday optimization tips and trends

According to 2019 Industry Trends in HR Technology and Service Delivery, over half of the 271 global companies surveyed did not feel they achieved their business value by moving to a SaaS platform. Lack of user adoption, underinvesting in change management and process inefficiencies rank among the top pain points effecting business case realization for our Workday customers.

Alight has worked with over 100 customers on Workday post deployment assessments and optimization projects. We’re calling out the biggest Workday tips for functionality optimization as we’ve helped our customers realize their full investment.

1.Workday notifications

Workday notifications top the list of quick win opportunities we have seen across our optimization clients at Alight. System notifications can be overused, specifically for administration roles or other daily users of Workday. When users receive several notifications each day, they are likely being ignored versus used as actionable items, impacting overall user adoption and the employee reaction to Workday.

Use notifications as a method to engage user adoption with manager self-service and/or employee self-service.  Notifications can also help influence employee satisfaction and encourage the use of Workday. Areas like career development are enhanced when enabled strategically throughout the system.

2. Workday tenant assessments

Data maintenance and the lack of a solid data quality management strategy has a significant impact to most of our optimization clients. This is especially true of clients with high volume recruiting or large employee bases. Stale processes can impact the usability of reporting results and can create data inconsistency in your tenant. Workday has the power to help you discover data driven insights, but these insights rely on accurate and consistent data management. Engaging in a full tenant assessment of your Workday system helps you uncover processes that could be reworked to better fit their purpose. Plus, you can discover other obstacles that could be causing errors in the daily tasks of your end users. This is a great first step in discovering optimization opportunities and road mapping functionality, especially if you are aware of issues in your platform but are unsure where to start.

3. Customer optimization spotlight: Job profiles

There are many reasons certain Workday features are not completely built out during an initial deployment. For some features, Workday recommends 12-18 months of transactional data prior to enabling. The Opportunity Graph and some parts of the Workforce Metrics dashboards are typically added to a roadmap for future technology opportunities. It makes sense to add these features when you and your team are ready to enhance the employee experience.

The largest area where we find optimization opportunities is a feature that is core to the Power of One in Workday – the Job Catalog.  Again, there are several reasons certain aspects within a Job Profile may not be built out during an initial deployment. Some companies may not have detailed, consistent job descriptions. Most customers we have worked with are not ready to store detailed qualifications like education, competencies and skills at a job profile level for go live.  However, as customers look to further optimize their system across areas of Compensation, Talent, Talent Optimization, Recruiting and Learning, the details within job profiles becomes a very powerful tool. Ease of filtering candidates for your recruiting team and internal career mobility within your existing workforce are just a few examples of processes that can be enhanced by optimizing your job profiles.