teamUpHR

Team "Top Ten" from Rising 2018

Our team had a great time at Rising! As usual Workday® and its customers and partners came together to provide a week jam packed with great content – and a little fun too! A common theme we took away from this year’s sessions is “maximize your Workday® investment”. Many of the sessions focused on ways to leverage Workday® in new and different ways to solve business challenges and many of the features and enhancements we were most excited to learn about are included in your core subscription.

1. View Security for Securable Item 2. Mass Operations Management (MOM) 3. Enhanced Survey Feature 4. User Activity Logging

5. Request BP, and Guided Tour text

6. Benefits User Experience

7. Extended Indexed Data Sources

8. Recruiting Enhancements

9. Prism

10. Workday® Cloud Platform (WCP)

Below are our team’s top ten take-aways:

View Security for Securable Item - How many Rising sessions erupted into applause three times in a one-hour session? This is what happened during a session on security and here are the details. Security for Securable Item is an invaluable tool. The issue is typing ‘Comp change,’ receiving a list of 50 items, then clicking on descriptions of each one. Coming soon to your tenant – enter ‘Comp Change’ in Sec for Sec and receive a filtered set of responses by type (Tasks, Reports, Report Fields).
Mass Operations Management (MOM) allows users with appropriate security to perform mass operations on business processes on an ad hoc basis or a scheduled background process. This feature can be used to automatically escalate up the management chain, reassign, advance and even cancel business process tasks. One interesting use case is in feedback. Feedback is great when it’s frequent and timely. It’s also time-consuming for managers to request feedback on team members or for employees to request feedback on themselves. MOM (Mass Operations Management) can be used to push feedback requests and it’s available for: Get Feedback on Worker and Get Feedback on Self. Admins will also be able to use MOM to cancel Give Requested Feedback if not completed in a specific timeframe.
Enhanced Survey Feature - And speaking of easier ways to engage employees, have you considered using Workday’s enhanced survey feature? Workday shared how they leverage surveys internally to measure employee engagement demonstrating that employee engagement surveys don’t need to be a huge, annual, multi-layer, 30-question behemoth that your workers dread. They push out a short two-question survey to all employees’ mobile apps every Friday morning. The survey takes seconds to complete giving executives the ability to quickly decide what is top-of-mind for them – not to mention critical-inch for the company. And they get employees’ opinion immediately. Plus, you can easily configure the BP to exclude workers as needed, like those who might be on a leave of absence.
Have you already opted out of User Activity Logging? Did you receive that email? If not, User Activity Logging is on for all customers who did not previously opt-out. The feature provides data on user access and activity including any changes made within a tenant for 30 days. Customers are still able to opt-out manually. How this data is viewed, extracted and utilized should be detailed in an internal security policy. Is your company’s up to date?
Request BP, and Guided Tour text - Have you ever wished you could create your own business process in Workday to give users the ability to initiate a “request”? Now you can use the request framework. Requests can be change requests, employee self-service requests and manager requests on behalf of employees. Like other business processes, requests can have rule-based process definitions, security policies and approvals. Real-world use case: A company with a small IT team that was exploring help desk software is now considering leveraging Requests to manage their IT Help Desk. They’ll create a Request (IT Help Desk) BP, guide the requesting Employee through their options with drop-down lists (which PCs or Monitors they can request, for instance, based on Comp Grade), add some Guided Tour text on specific fields and route it to the Manager for Approval, before ever getting their small IT Help Desk staff involved. Then that staff doesn’t have to go back-and-forth about what a person is entitled to request, and they can start on the fully-approved request as soon as it hits their Workday inbox.
Benefits User Experience - Open enrollment season is in full swing and another hot topic at Rising was the benefits user experience. Benefits open enrollment on mobile is live now and Workday is in the process of redesigning the enrollment experience in the desktop as well. This is huge, as the current benefits user experience leaves much to be desired. In addition to the user experience enhancements, expect the ability to compare plans, as well as integrate third party decision tools. The idea being all your decision-making tools would be in one place, rather than having to link out to another website. This will also be a big win for customers. The benefits redesign has started with 31 & will continue through 33.
Extended Indexed Data Sources - In the realm of reporting, we were excited to hear about the ability to extend custom data sources and indexing. These features have the potential to make significant performance differences. The reporting log that is available will be put to good use as well. There are many times a report is running slow and you’re not sure which fields might be causing the issue. The report performance log will help quickly isolate those fields.
There were 40 sessions tagged as Recruiting related this year. We heard well deserved applause for the focus on the Recruiter Experience, with various ways to reduce the number of clicks. Also highlighted was focus on Candidate Experience (for example self-scheduling) and improvements for high volume recruiting organizations (mass actions.) A couple of sessions on reporting performance used recruiting examples for the demos, as indexing is not yet available for Financials and Student data sources. Given most of us live on Recruiting for more than a year have 5x to 20x (or even more) the number of candidates compared to the number of workers, Extended Data Sources allows us to write reports that will perform similarly to HCM Worker reports, opening some opportunities for Dashboards.
Many of this year's Prism sessions emphasized the importance for clear use cases. Demos of Discovery Boards drew consistent oohs and aahs. It's a powerful new tool for rapid analytics on combined data from Workday and external sources and is available now for Prism customers. Discovery Boards are not tied to Prism and should eventually be available for all Workday customers. Also coming soon, is an analytics application called People Analytics. Prism shows a lot of promise for those wishing to combine external data with Workday and view that data using Workday's latest UI options. With power comes caveats. We suggest those considering Prism determine a consistent process and governance around external data management.
Last, but not least is the Workday Cloud Platform. WCP was announced at Rising last year, but still only available at this time for those accepted as Fast Followers. This year Workday announced several features such as the Workday Query Language (WQL), App Creator for non-developers, and a marketplace of shared solutions (https://marketplace.workday.com). We look forward to helping customers with WCP once they are accepted as a Fast Follower.