Recent change in my career path, from an end user administrator (HR Specialist) to a full-time Workday HCM consultant, speaks volumes about how I’ve perceived Workday as a tool for HR professionals. Not all HR tools are convenient, and using multiple tools that do not sync can be very difficult, a tale I keep on hearing on repeat from my HR friends in other companies.

Claiming that Workday is a complex and unified platform may sound like a polished elevator-pitch, but based on my user experience as an HR professional, I have to say it lived up to the pitch. The following are some concrete examples of how I used Workday every day.

Main source of data

For us in Tietoevry, Workday is the main data source for employee-related information, where all changes in the other systems must originate from Workday. The benefit of keeping Workday as the main source of data is the possibility to extract high-quality live data. This is an important aspect for people like me in HR Operations, especially when our job includes swiftly providing necessary data to relevant stakeholders.

Reporting and Security

Security and privacy play an important role when handling large amounts of sensitive and/or personal data in Human Resources. When processing data directly in Workday, we could utilize its secure reporting capabilities. The possibility to use standard reports, and build, schedule, and share custom reports helped us to become more efficient. Workday supported our demanding reporting requirements whilst keeping a high validity of reported results. For admins, it meant that reporting was as easy as searching for the report, selecting needed filters, and hitting the OK button to run the report. The report could then be sorted/filtered directly in the interface – or easily extracted to Excel, or other formats.

Using Workday in the team

As a team, it can be difficult to work efficiently and move away from person-dependent knowledge. When performing tasks and actions in Workday, there is a possibility to add comments to the actions related to the tasks. For example, if I was supposed to approve a compensation change, I could add a comment to the approval action in Workday, providing additional information such as the ticket number from our HR helpdesk system.

This way, it was easy to track the corrections of the Business Processes and the Worker History record. Since we all used this method when making changes, it was very easy to check the history and background for the change. This resulted in minimized person-related dependency, saved a lot of time and effort for “double-checking” actions, and improved our delivery and support for the rest of the organization.

Ease of adapting to changes by configuring the business process definitions

As an HR representative, you need to react to the ever-changing demands and requirements, so it is important to constantly challenge the ways of working. I have learned that in order to do that, you need to carefully balance the important aspects such as time, effort, security, and compliance.

In Tietoevry, we adhere to maximum data security. For example, in Sweden we had a very limited view of the other countries´ employee records, and we also lacked the possibility to maintain documents, nor could we add additional information to the worker profile. When cross-country transfers happened, the needed employee information updates by Swedish HR had to wait until the employee started in the new position, and thereafter showed in the Swedish organization. This brought some practical problems.

Before the merger, one person in the Swedish HR team was responsible to keep track of all cross-country transfers to and from Sweden. When our organization grew, it was no longer possible for one single person to be responsible. We also wanted to move away from maintaining several different Excel sheets to keep track of all the transfers and when to perform required actions.

We decided to configure scheduled reminders in Workday, based on the transfer date (effective date) of the employee. The so-called to-do business process step is now triggered on the day when the employee shows up in Swedish records, containing a checklist of tasks to be performed before the first file is exported to payroll.

By utilizing the to-do and its scheduling, we could move away from the Excel sheet with the “tick in the box” checklist or from the person-related dependency of setting up a personal outlook reminder.

We could solve the problem also by adjusting and modifying the security policies, however adding the to-do step into the Change Job business process definition served the purpose with needed precision. This also shows how agile Workday is as a tool. You can find different solutions for the same problems and simply decide what serves you the best.

Looking back at our ways of working, in my new role, I am very pleased with the tools that we had to support our day-to-day work for employees in Sweden. So pleased, in fact, that I’ve decided to learn more about Workday and become a consultant. This story I will save for the next time.

Our Workday journey started in 2017, when it was first implemented in Tieto. A few years later, after the merger, a new implementation went live for our new company, Tietoevry. Tietoevry is now both a Workday partner and a happy customer of Workday HCM and Adaptive Planning solutions. Reach out to us for more information about our insights and Workday services.