When a customer implements Workday Human Capital Management it’s often an exciting event for the Human Resources team but can be an underwhelming experience for the firm.  For Workday Human Capital Management customers we’ve seen them struggle to increase user engagement. Implementing Workday is a significant investment so it can be frustrating if there isn’t a sense that it’s used firmwide. Customers that have Workday Financials or Payroll in addition to Workday HCM tend to have higher user engagement. It’s much more frequent that an employee will log into Workday to submit an expense than to update their home address. For those HCM customers that are looking for ways to increase user engagmement, FinServ has a few tricks that have worked for our clients:

1. Explain the impact. Oftentimes the best way to get employees to complete the task you’re asking of them is to explain why you need them to do it. For instance, if you explain to an employee that they need to complete all their tax forms before they can be paid, you’ll likely have a much higher rate of success among your employees.

2. Create a winner. A sure way to increase user engagement is to create an incentive for employees. For example, you can hold a raffle for those employees that enter information you’ve requested. Our clients have had success when asking employees to update their education or career history and entering employees into a raffle for completing their profile.

3. Make the ask easy. Of course if you want your employees to use the system (and like it too) you’ll want to make sure their experience is painless. We suggest leveraging Workday functionality at every opportunity. For instance, if you want employees to update part of their profile, leverage the business process Distribute Document or Task. This will send the task, like updating your Education history, directly to the worker’s inbox so they can easily execute the task without having to navigate to their worker profile.

4. Lastly, include ample instructions. There are many opportunities to include instructions and we encourage our clients to be very explicit. For instance, if you distribute a task, include a customized instructions on how to execute the task. For very detailed instructions, we include a link in our email notifications that brings an employee to a PDF with screenshots on how to complete the task. When creating the task in Workday you are also able to include instructions that will then appear in the worker’s inbox.

FinServ has helped many clients increase their user engagement and demonstrate the ROI for their Workday HCM platform. We also work with clients to plan their annual Workday initiatives, build new functionality, and maintain their system security. To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

It’s a new year and Workday’s Semiannual Release is fast upon us. As always we recommend thoroughly reviewing the Announcing and Feature Consideration documentation and review the notes in the Release Center prior to the release date, March 9^th, 2019. With new features available in Preview Tenants starting on February 2nd, your team can get a jump start on reviewing and testing the new release features to ensure there are no major impacts to your tenant. Here are a few tips that have served us well with past clients:

1. Prioritize the features. The first action we recommend customers take is to review all the release features and prioritize which items are High or Low impact. It’s important to identify which updates may directly impact your tenant or indirectly impact other systems. Use the tools Workday provides, they offer a spreadsheet that categories each new release feature. It’s a quick and easy way to understand all the release features. In this semiannual release the Workday Inbox worklet is being retired and there  are new updates for Payroll integrations. We’d label the Workday Inbox worklet as Low Impact since the Inbox now is featured directly on the Home screen. For those clients with a third party payroll system, the Payroll integration updates could be a High Impact so it’s important to review the release notes and thoroughly test.

2. Adjust your project plan. In a previous post we wrote about the importance of creating an annual Workday project plan. Once you’ve identified how the release will impact your tenant, make sure to adjust your project plan so that it accounts for the time you’ll spend testing the new features. Ideally, you factored the Release into your Workday project plan but make sure you adjust appropriately if other initiatives need to take a backseat while you prepare for the semiannual release.

3. Enlist help. Enlist the help of your team and other users to make sure that you’ve adequately tested the functionality. It’s okay to have one person lead the Semiannual release preparation but we recommend spreading the testing among your Workday team and other employees at the firm. You’ll want to make sure you test every scenario and examine all the details, which is doable with the help of others.

4. Communicate to your Super Users. If you’ve identified items that will impact your tenant or new features your team could leverage we recommend getting the word out as soon as possible. In past releases we’ve seen updates to functionality that seem minor, like modifying the way a phone number is entered into Workday, create a lot of noise for your other infrastructure teams.

FinServ has experience advising clients on Workday’s semiannual release, including assessing which features will impact the client’s tenant, recommending new features to adopt, and testing existing functionality and integrations. We also work with clients to plan their annual Workday initiatives, build new functionality, and maintain their system security.  To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

As we head into the new year, FinServ has been working with clients to develop Post Go-Live Workday project plans. To best prepare for 2019 your Workday team will need to develop a plan that includes additional functionality rollouts, annual system maintenance, and preparation for Workday’s system releases. FinServ has worked with clients to develop their post Workday Go-Live project plans, below are a few steps we recommend:

1. Start with your laundry list. It’s best to first hold a brainstorming session with your team to write down every Workday initiative including new functionality, system enhancements, maintenance, and data improvements that your team wants to accomplish both in the short term and the long term. We recommend assigning each task with an estimated duration for how many collective hours it will take your team to complete each task.

2. Identify which of these items require a business decision or further discovery. Oftentimes clients will put action items onto their plan that are unrealistic or end up not making sense for the business. For instance, if you want to leverage manager self-service, take the time to speak with your managers to make sure that they are interested in this functionality and have the bandwidth to train and test. Oftentimes an initiative like manager self-service  is put on the plan and it either gets pushed to be completed later on in the year or doesn’t happen at all because your team quickly discovers that the functionality won’t meet the manager’s requirements or the managers simply don’t have the time to dedicate to the initiative. Be selective as to which action items do make it onto the plan so that you set your team up for success. 

3. Don’t underestimate system maintenance. Anyone familiar with Workday knows that Workday requires a fair amount of daily maintenance. If you’re a growing firm your team will likely spend a big chunk of their time creating new bespoke roles, security groups, or segmented security for new members of your team. For example, you may have a new HR member join your team and you’d like to give them Workday that excludes visibility to your HR team’s Compensation data. This type of request would require a new role and a lot of testing before you’d be able to assign the role to the new user. There are also the semiannual releases that your team will need to plan around. Each semiannual release comes with many new features that need to be tested to make sure they don’t impact your Workday environment or have any impact on other integrated systems.

4. Get the business’s input. It’s important that this plan doesn’t just work for your Workday team but it works for your HR / Finance teams and the other department heads. Once you have a draft of your project plan sit down with other parts of the business to get their input. It is important that you have their support and oftentimes you may discover other use cases they may have for how their team can better leverage the system. 

5. Review annually. As you near year-end it’s important that your team reviews the plan and determines how successful they were at executing against the plan. It’s also important to track how accurate the plan was compared to what was accomplish throughout the year, you may be surprised by how many unexpected tasks came up throughout the year (one of our clients created more than 20 new security roles).  Once you’ve reviewed the plan it’s time to start the process all over again for the new year! 

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

According to a 2018-2019 Sierra Cedar HR Systems Survey, 25% of respondents reported that Workday “always” meets their needs and 70% of respondents reported that Workday meets their needs “most of the time”. Those are lofty satisfaction numbers for sure and in the chart below, this reflects Workday’s inclusion in the upper echelon of Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS).

But what about when Workday does not quite meet your needs? Since Workday is a SaaS (Software as a Service) system, you are dependent on the functionality that is provided, and you could not customize the system even if you were so inclined to do so. Consider the following examples that we have seen with our clients where the existing functionality did not align with the business needs.

• While creating Feedback templates for the Performance Management process, we discovered that you could not add Quantitative Scoring on the templates. The templates only allowed open text boxes that are typically used to support Qualitative feedback
• Enabling the Team Time Off Calendar for Managers to view their team’s Time Off schedules generated unexpected results. In the Calendar, all Contingent Workers were shown as well even though they were not eligible for Time Off. Including the extraneous data cluttered the Calendar, particularly for the Managers with large teams and Contingent Workers. The existing configuration options do not provide any ability to remove Contingent Workers from the view
• Delegating Managers’ Time Off Request capability to their Executive Assistants proved difficult as we could not perform a mass data upload. The mass data upload would have been performed via Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) and unfortunately, an EIB to do this was not available, making the initial data load (and future data loads) more difficult than expected

Running into scenarios where functional changes are desired is not unexpected and Workday provides mechanisms to actively and passively solicit client feedback and requests. As such, let Workday know about any frustrations or enhancement requests and your voice will be heard. Workday offers several channels to submit and solicit requests that you should take advantage of.

Workday Community

• Post or vote on Brainstorms (product enhancement ideas). Be detailed in your Brainstorm and provide the business case you are trying to solve. The more votes your (or any other) Brainstorm gets, the more traction it gets, and Workday will be more likely to meet the request
• Subscribe to topics of interest so that you will be notified of any new posts relevant to the topic. You will be notified of the latest posts from fellow Workday customers and posts from Workday. Who knows – another customer may provide a work around for your issue or you may see a Workday request for specialty group participation such as:
  • Design Partner Group – actively influence the enhancement design and product road map
  • Early Adopter – become an early user/tester before the enhancement is officially released
  • Product Surveys – provide feedback on pain points on specific features such as Identifying Incorrect Accounting Transactions

Customer Success Manager (CSM)

• Your CSM is there for you, use them. Let them know your pain points, the business case behind the idea and have them be your advocate
• Express interest to your CSM about partnering with Workday for the enhancement. With enough traction for the enhancement and your known interest, you can be selected to be a part of the design process/Design Partner Group
• Participation in the Design Partner Group is limited, so be sure to give your CSM plenty of reasons why you should be a part of the group
• Express interest in becoming a Fast Follower where you will be one of the first to implement the enhancement after it is officially released

The Bottom Line

While Workday will meet most of your business requirements out of the box, there are pieces that are not quite there and often times you are not quite sure how to get Workday to listen to your request. FinServ has been through these situations before with our clients and we know how to work through the Workday support channels. We can help you craft a thorough enhancement request and actively manage/monitor the request. And while the request is being considered, we can help design and implement any work around that will support your business needs in the interim.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

Finding qualified candidates who meet the requirements of the job description and compliment your company’s culture is becoming increasingly harder when you don’t have a system in place to logically work through a plethora of resumes being submitted via various venues. This alone is a difficult task, but even more-so when your firm is competing with others in the market. In some cases, firms do not have the capability to house a recruiting team internally, meaning this process quickly becomes a juggling act with employees’ day-to-day operations. Dealing with a manual recruiting process paired with other work responsibilities is a recipe for stunting your firm’s growth, either by missing out on high-caliber candidates due to lack of time focused on recruiting, or hiring ill-fit candidates by rushing through your candidate pipeline.

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can mitigate these risks and help your firm scale at its highest potential by automating your operational workflow and assisting your team with cumbersome tasks, but how?

Handle Larger Applicant Pools

Finding the best fit for your firm is a numbers game. Plain and simple. Not only should the candidate meet your desired skill set, but also should share the same drive and values aligned with your firm’s mantra. The ability to parse through large amounts of resumes in the screening stages ensures the candidates whom are passing through to the next stages are interview-worthy. With an Applicant Tracking System, utilizing pre-screening survey questions will allow you to automatically weed out candidates that do not meet your requirements. Setting this pre-screening questionnaire can also aid in prioritizing candidate interviews based on the score of the questionnaires so that your recruiting time is using their limited time to focus on the top candidates first.

Using Analytics to Your Advantage

Utilizing an Applicant Tracking System’s reporting and analytics functionality can paint a clear picture of your recruiting trends as to what is working. Whether your top candidates are coming from a specific university or have a niche background/skill set, analytics can allow you to focus on those recruiting efforts which are bringing your firm the best talent at all levels. Analytics can aid recruiters to understand when candidates are applying to jobs the most during the year so that they can anticipate the heavy rush and reach out to the business in advance to get the most up to date list of positions needed by the firm.

Creating recurring and one-off reports for management reporting is simplified with the ability to store report templates within the system, which are preset based on your reporting requirements and parameters.

Keep Worthy Candidates in Your Back Pocket

Often, the best candidates are the ones not available. Utilizing the talent pool functionality within an Applicant Tracking System can help your team keep track of those candidates who would be a great fit for the firm, but are not currently available, or your firm does not have availability at the time. Often the recruiting process is building a relationship with candidates so having a built in CRM “customer relationship manager” will help facilitate the tracking and communications with these candidates. These candidates can be bucketed into talent pools based on skill set, experience, or any other criteria desired which makes it easier to locate them and include them in campaigns.

The process ultimately begins with making sure the right system is chosen from the start so that you ultimately minimize your risk and create a smooth implementation and a faster adaption into your overall process. To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

With Workday Financials gaining popularity thanks to its customization capabilities, we expect that organizations who have adopted Workday will have their hands full addressing the growing regulatory requirements, particularly around documentation of system controls.

All your departments are affected

Surely, we expect that Corporate Finance, Accounting, and Internal Audit departments will be pressured from management and regulatory bodies to maintain tight controls and processes in response to the adoption of highly configurable solutions like Workday. This is because Workday customers have full ownership and ability to make changes that have material upstream impacts on financial statement reporting to investors.

However, it’s important to note that this will also affect all your departments that interact with Finance and Accounting functions, including your Shared Services, Information Technology, Legal, Valuation, and third-party administrators, and others.

A digital footprint in Workday

Workday has done extremely well by developing an audit trail of changes to every record, configuration, and policy into its platform. The historical log of changes certainly is one of the system’s core strengths. In fact, you can’t even delete instances within the platform. Simply because wiping your history is just not a concept that exists in the world of Workday. Instead, you would need to correct, inactivate, or adjust the component that you’re looking to change.

Let’s take this example: The bank settlement details for one of your suppliers is incorrect. Rather than deleting this, Workday provides the option to “inactivate” or overwrite the details with the correct data for the existing line item. When that item is changed, Workday retains a record of this change activity: the old value, new value, who changed it, and when. 

But what’s missing?

It would be nice if Workday delivered a report that captures the changes to security roles which have the ability to impact financial data. This is an important consideration if you’re familiar with the power of Workday’s security model. A role assignment within the system is not as one-dimensional as providing Sally Hansen the ability to record revenue entries. Such requests should be taken with careful evaluation of the various processes, domains, or functions allowed within that role due to the upstream impacts.

As an example, you may want your payroll processor to post monthly payroll accruals. A seemingly basic function, which is allowed through Workday’s delivered Accountant role to create journal entries. However, you may hesitate before assigning this role as it also allows users to also create cash payments. You can see where things can get complex because someone who has access to both cash and payroll would represent a clear violation of segregation of duties. This would obviously be subject to criticism during an audit as a weakness in the firm’s internal control structure, and required to be remediated to obtain a clean opinion on the financial statements. Therefore, you may want to segment access by creating a new security group with specific access just to post journal entries before deciding to assign roles with core Finance functions.

It goes without saying that the Security Administrator is a very powerful role, one with the ability to change and administer any role within the system without restraint.

So if you don’t have something similar already, it’s worthwhile to create a custom report showing security changes to those key Finance roles. You can hand the report off to senior management, internal and external auditors, and not only will you be addressing a key risk area, but you also gain visibility to what your teams are doing, and you can really manage your people’s roles in a highly configurable platform like Workday.

Attracting and hiring the right people for your company is an important process in periods of growth, consolidation and contraction. Graduates and experienced candidates rely on using technology to apply to jobs whether it be through social media or a recruiting application.  Companies have to embrace this trend and the technology being used in order to reach the full pool of candidates. In addition, because of the ease for candidates to apply to jobs the volume of applications can be too high for a recruiting team and a system with artificial intelligence is needed to comb through resumes and pre-qualification questions in order to auto-reject some candidates and pass others onto the next stage of the process.

Are all recruiting systems the same?

Since the recruiting needs among companies vary so does the functionality among the systems offered. Some companies have a simplified process whereby a single posting is made for a specific job to be filled as soon as possible. Others choose to build relationships with candidates as early as high school and track them over the years to monitor their progress before offering them a job. One goal that all companies have in common is to show candidates that their company embrace modern technology to simplify the candidate experience.

Define your future hiring needs before you choose a system

If you haven’t reviewed your existing recruiting process in the past year then it’s time to, as your existing  process may not be the best. Internal recruiters and hiring managers may have the best experience in reviewing resumes and screening candidates, but if they aren’t making contact with the best candidates then the company is missing an opportunity.

The following article written by a recruiting system vendor explains how the hiring market has become “candidate driven” and how companies need to adapt to this environment in order to stay competitive. This is not a recommendation this system is best for you, it is meant to provoke thought about how your existing process and insight into changes you may need to make. As noted earlier, there are many systems available offering different functionality. It is best practice to blueprint your future needs and then carefully select a vendor that meets your business, technology and security needs. 

15 New Recruiting Trends You Should Implement in 2019

For further discussion on this topic, please contact Todd Piskadlo at (201) 790-6400.

Ensuring your existing accounting, security roles, and internal controls are compliant with regulatory standards can be daunting. Additionally, since Workday Financials is still a relatively new player in the market, we’ve seen clients challenged to configure their tenant with the confidence to meet their requirements. Because we’ve implemented Financials at several clients, FinServ provides a clear vision of your fully configured Workday tenant.

HCM Example: Managing the Compensation Structure

With all that said for Financials, Workday HCM also presents its own set of complexities. Workday Compensation is used to craft unique packages across all areas of the organization, with the key benefits of having Payroll, Talent, and more all on the same technology platform. FinServ understands that the compensation structure at financial services firms is complicated, and each firm has a unique model. For example, there can be challenges with how a firm runs waterfall distributions, defers payments, calculates discretionary bonuses, and more. Due to these nuances, there is a higher level of customization required by many of our clients compared to other industries. As such, Workday may be required to handle these compensation models with a highly-customized solution in Workday Studio.

FinServ has also experienced the introduction of a third-party vendor to develop a customizable compensation platform that runs in parallel with Workday. This solution may offer a higher degree of flexibility to handle specific requests, such as complex bonus planning with various components and financial roll-ups. This is especially useful as many firms have multiple exceptions or inconsistent compensation rules that are hard to account for with a traditional software provider. These calculations can be fed back into Workday Compensation so the numbers are tracked to each employee, thus enabling all data to flow through a single platform. In our experience, this is often the best approach for alternative asset management firms, allowing the integration to be more efficient from a time and materials basis.

Choosing the right structure for compensation is a big decision since employees’ pay and talent retention are top priorities. Whether you decide to fully develop your compensation through Workday or utilize a third-party integration in parallel, FinServ has experience with both solutions to develop the best structure for your firm. Additionally, FinServ has more than a decade of integration experience with specific knowledge and relationships with vendors in the industry.

Conclusion

Workday is an expensive system that offers a huge amount of flexibility, and has quickly become the de facto choice of progressive firms looking to implement a HCM and Financial systems solution. There are huge, tangible benefits that a firm can achieve from implementing Workday, but the key to success is selecting the right specialist firm to ensure that the system is configured to meet business goals. With FinServ, you have a trusted advisor with experience in both Workday and the industry to help you make informed decisions about what functionality to leverage, ensuring that you make the most out of your Workday investment. We help those in financial services and alternative asset management to create an infrastructure that fosters growth and supports their staff in the most efficient manner possible.