Birthdays and PTO from Workday® to every Manager’s Calendar
In a highly competitive job market, keeping employees happy and engaged is crucial to retention. A simple and effective way to do that is by celebrating your employees’ birthdays and anniversaries in a consistent manner. The keyword here is “consistent”. Very few people are good at celebrating such events naturally. When times are busy, it’s really easy to forget these important celebrations or to update your calendar when new team members join the team or others leave. A slightly different, but equally troublesome problem is keeping track of team member PTO...but more on that in a moment.
I have personally worked on this very common “reminder” problem on and off for the past eight years at various fast-moving companies in the Bay Area and have tried a number of alternatives to solve it: email alerts, shared calendars, excel sheets, slack messages,… All of these solutions provided some success, but none of them worked universally. Either they required manual upkeep of the base data or they relied on systems that do not normally have access to the information in a native way. In either case, failure was inevitable. Sure, there were a few managers who could keep the solution going, but for the vast majority it did not work.
I was determined to solve this overlooked problem with an easy, elegant and universal solution. My solution is a simple integration with Workday® that sends calendar reminders to managers, administrative assistants or peers to remind them of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries (and even PTO). It doesn’t require sharing access to calendars thus maintaining confidentiality.
This entire process is done in 2 easy steps:
We build a simple Workday Report to get the data we need:
2. We then send calendar reminders to the population of your choosing, managers, administrative assistants, peers - without requiring any of them to provide any access to their calendars:
The solution is compatible with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook but can also be extended to another Calendar solution your organization might be using. On Outlook and Apple Calendar, reminders are setup so that they always come up on a weekday regardless of when the birthday or anniversary actually occurs. This ensures the reminders won’t be missed if they fall on a weekend.
This tool can populate, based on preferences, each employee’s Anniversay/Birthday/PTO days to the appropriate audience. This can be a team calendar, or directly to individual calendars by manager or peer group.
Keeping this vital information actionable is a major hurdle that is not easily overcome with standard tools and processes. This integration allows companies to proactively empower their teams to act on information that is important to each employee and can be impactful when they reflect on their work environment and their interactions with their manager and peers.
We are excited to offer this tool to Workday customers. Email us at info@teamUpHR.com for more information about our Workday to Calendar tool.
