Whether you are implementing Workday for the first time or are an existing Workday user, proper support is needed to ensure your Workday experience is a success. To realize the system’s full potential and adequately support your business users, Workday must be supported by resources capable of taking on many tasks. These tasks can vary from answering how-to questions, troubleshooting issues, administering recurring events, updating calendar/schedule periods, liaising with Workday, and analyzing/deploying Workday release features.

When building your support team or enhancing it, it is essential to look for the following key characteristics. These characteristics are attributes of individuals who know Workday in and out and how the industry operates. These attributes will result in a support team that can efficiently handle any Workday request.

1. Resources with Industry Experience – Support personnel with experience in the industry are more efficient than newer resources without the requisite background. In addition, these resources can understand and diagnose issues quickly and accurately as they have been through similar situations before.
2. Less Specialization – Resources knowledgeable in multiple Workday modules provide more comprehensive solutions to issues. In addition, cross-module expertise enables these resources to know what components are related, how they impact each other, and what is part of any total solution.
3. Documentation Skills – Resources that know how to create well-written documentation provide value beyond configuring Workday. The documentation they produce will be invaluable to retaining institutional and contextual knowledge, mitigate against staff turnover, and provide a knowledge base for others to leverage.

Resources with Industry Experience

It is important not to fixate only on what resources know in Workday. Knowing the ins and outs of the industry is just as valuable. This knowledge is gained only through experience and provides a perspective on how things are supposed to work regardless of the kind of system.

For example, it is quite common for terminating employees at Asset Managers to be subject to a Garden Leave policy where the terminated worker is essentially paid not to work for a set amount of time after their termination. Workday does not come pre-configured with the means to put someone on Garden Leave; it will be up to your firm to configure this. Resources with experience administering and using Garden Leaves will know how to configure it properly. In Workday, the easy part is setting up the Garden Leave itself so that the terminations could go on leave and not terminate until the end of their Leave. However, there are additional considerations to review regarding whether Garden Leave terminations should be included in active headcount, where they should sit in your organization, or whether they should be visible to employees outside of HR. Support resources knowledgeable about Garden Leaves would know how to configure Workday optimally, focusing on the pitfalls to look out for and specific reporting requirements.

This is just one specific example; however, with so many moving pieces for a feature commonly used by Asset Managers, it is critical to vet resources on their knowledge of Workday and how they have applied Workday to meet HR policies at other firms in the same industry.

Less Specialization

Having less specialization in a specific Workday component may seem counterintuitive, but in our experience, it is quite the opposite. Sure, a specialist in a particular Workday module can expertly configure its module. However, this specialization comes at a cost where they cannot configure other modules or realize the more significant impact a request may have on other areas of Workday.

As a result, a specialist may not be able to implement a comprehensive solution. Or, their lack of knowledge of other Workday components would introduce complexities when handoff and coordination are required between multiple resources.

For example, in Workday Financials, you can set up a Punchout where Workday integrates with a vendor allowing you to purchase items (like office supplies or computer hardware) directly from the vendor, and the order information would flow directly into Financials. Setting this up would involve creating a Purchase Order, matching the invoice, capitalizing the asset (if applicable), and setting up a depreciation schedule. Again, a resource that was knowledgeable in multiple Workday components would be able to advise you on what to watch out for and the best path to implement the solution.

Documentation Skills

The most overlooked attribute when evaluating Workday resources is the mindset and ability to document everything and do it well. Documentation is critical as resolving Workday issues is often an involved process involving researching the subject, implementing the solution, and testing multiple scenarios. Furthermore, many types of problems and projects repeat themselves (i.e., an employee thinks their Time Off Balance is incorrect, Performance Cycles happen twice a year, annual Open Enrollment, and new time off plans). Documentation can prevent having to research and resolve the same issues more than once.

Proper and well-written documentation will preserve the work done, allowing you to retain institutional knowledge, lessen the impact of any resource turnover, and enable work to be done more efficiently. The team will spend less time re-examining common issues, attempting to understand past decisions, and more time resolving the actual problem.

Retaining knowledge of your existing setup is particularly relevant across the alternative investment client base, where firms often devise complex allocation rules to determine the true profitability of each business line.   These rules result in a ‘fully-loaded’ P&L by business line and can be used in some cases to determine the compensation of portfolio managers, traders, or other essential employees associated with the business. In some cases, firms will want access to this P&L but not have it truly posted in the general ledger and instead use it for reporting purposes. This necessitates customized reporting that may exclude or include these allocations depending upon the view of the person running the report. When troubleshooting or modifying these reports, it may take a resource that is unfamiliar with the setup much longer and may lead them to recommend modifications that are not appropriate. It may also require lengthy explanations from the business that is not the best use of time and could otherwise be avoided.  

Conclusion

Successfully supporting Workday is not easy, as there are many types of users to deal with and a wide array of issues to resolve. Therefore, selecting the proper staff to support Workday is in your best interest. Your support personnel must be capable of working with multiple Workday components, documenting solutions and decisions well, and having knowledge of the business to create solutions that fit within the industry. By recognizing and evaluating resources against these critical traits, you will be well-positioned to field the right Workday support team for your organization.

FinServ’s long history servicing the world’s top Alternative Asset Managers, combined with our deep Workday expertise, make us a natural option to help you find a world-class Workday support team.

Large healthcare companies can have hundreds of business locations and thousands of departments across these offices, housing thousands more employees. Large occupancy and physician compensation costs must be carefully budgeted and tracked for strategic planning; however, the FP&A data collection process for these line items can be particularly onerous, often using outdated systems and Excel manipulations.

The implementation of business intelligence tools with existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems makes data collection more efficient and timelier, leading to improved reporting and decision-making.

Implementing Business Intelligence Tools

FinServ’s client, a large and rapidly growing healthcare organization, recently implemented a SAAS Facilities Management software for more efficient space utilization and planning to enable the client to track moves/adds and changes to departmental space at every location. Prior to the implementation, the departmental space usage was tracked in an Excel file, so the data quickly became stale as departments changed locations or moved from one floor in a building to another. Since occupancy costs are budgeted and allocated to each department based on square footage, the stale square footage numbers became meaningless with respect to budgeting and allocating actual occupancy costs to the respective departments.

The project was a significant undertaking. Floor plans for hundreds of locations had to be obtained and converted from PDF to CAD format, and the space on each floor required confirmation from the respective clinical managers in each department. The successful implementation allowed the company to update moves/adds/changes to the real estate portfolio on a timely basis, providing efficient data collection and reporting on departmental occupancy costs in the FP&A process. This allowed management to make more timely decisions on the use of space. The software also enables the organization to manage its vacant space and incorporate that information for the planning and budgeting for new providers.  Combining this information with operational statistics such as patient volumes allows management to forecast profitability by location and make decisions to expand or close locations based on that profitability. The company can now decide on the quality of staff at specific locations using clinical data on patient volumes and satisfaction to make staffing and compensation decisions.

Overhauling the Compensation Process

Our client’s physician compensation process was similarly complicated and outdated. The methodology of compensating physicians is also constantly changing. At one point, physicians were compensated on the P&L they generated, which forced physicians to spend time managing their costs, such as the number of clinical staff they required to support them. Physician compensation, or “Phy Comp” was also tracked and calculated in Excel, which was unsustainable for a rapidly growing company.

The implementation of Business Intelligence tools with the company ERP systems gave the company the transparency to work relative value units (“wRVU”), which are standard units of measurement used to establish values for health care procedures or codable direct patient care experiences. The transparency of this data enabled the company to move to a production-based compensation plan for physicians, which allows physicians to spend less time managing their costs and more time dedicated to patient care.

The company is also moving towards value-based-pay incentives as more data around the patient care experience has become available in the ERP systems. The company has also undertaken a project implementing a compensation system to automate salary and bonus calculations, documenting processes and controls for IPO readiness. All these project improvements will streamline the FP&A processes with respect to Phy Comp.

Forward-thinking healthcare companies are also adopting the Financial Services model of offshoring support functions of their ERP systems to low-cost locations like India. These cost-effective managed services offer excellent support to resolve issues through the client support ticketing process quickly.

Technological improvements to ERP systems result in improved transparency of clinical data from billing systems. This allows for a more granular process in using detailed data for financial analytics and forecasting and can significantly impact financial results when utilized effectively by management.

Conclusion

FinServ Consulting, LLC has technical expertise with respect to systems, data collection, and US GAAP accounting to add value to healthcare companies, including the FP&A and ERP domains. Our team is well-positioned to help ensure the success of your next project. If you would like a full picture of FinServ’s methodologies or capabilities in running a project for your healthcare organization, please contact FinServ Consulting at info@finservconsulting.com or call 646-603-3799.

Employee engagement surveys measure employee passion for the job, commitment to the organization, and alignment with firm values. FinServ assisted a leading healthcare services company to select and implement a new employee engagement survey platform. The client owns multiple hospitals, Ambulatory Service Centers (ASCs), and outpatient clinics across the United States. Likewise, participation in the annual engagement survey is an important part of the healthcare site accreditation process. Additionally, the survey results directly lead to tailored action plans for each site location.

Since COVID-19, it has become even more crucial for healthcare organizations to monitor the well-being of their employees. As the pandemic stretched on, the healthcare industry witnessed high burnout rates amongst its employees and the FinServ client wanted to ensure that they were supporting employees through the unprecedented difficulties placed on medical professionals.

Engagement Survey Questions – Examples

The survey questions focused on the employees’ overall satisfaction with the organization. These questions corresponded to the following categories:

• Workplace Satisfaction: The first set of questions targeted an employee’s satisfaction with the organization and their work team e.g., “Are you satisfied with your work team?”
• Growth Opportunities: The second set of questions focused on whether each employee’s work is meaningful to him/her and if they have ample opportunities to learn and grow. For example, one of the questions stated: “Do you find your work meaningful?” 
• Compliance Regulations: The final set of questions surveyed each employee’s familiarity with the compliance regulatory requirements followed by the client e.g., “Do you know the name of the Chief Compliance Officer at the organization?”

These questions were intended to provide valuable feedback to the client, which would be useful in retaining its valuable talent.

Key Success Criteria – New Engagement Management System

Given its complex structure, the client required a survey system that would meet both its core business requirements and regulatory Clinical and Compliance functions.

The client determined three key success criteria for the new EMS:

• User-Friendliness: The new system must be extremely user-friendly and easy to administer. As the client intended to conduct multiple surveys for the different units through a single platform, the new system needed to efficiently administer surveys at different points in time for various organizational units.
• Analytic Capabilities: The system should consider the unique nature of the client’s organizational structure and provide great flexibility in collecting and interpreting the survey results. This not only would provide the client easy access to the historical data but will also customize the analysis based upon each team size, providing an ‘apple to apple’ comparison.
• Reporting Capabilities: The system must possess data analytics capabilities, which could compile historical survey responses within the system’s repository and utilize them over time for accurate comparison. This would provide the client a unique opportunity to compare their employee responses over time and focus on any outliers. 

These questions were intended to provide valuable feedback to the client, which would be useful in retaining its valuable talent.

FinServ’s Vendor Selection Approach – New Engagement Management System

The FinServ team conducted a methodical vendor selection process using standardized processes and cumulative expert experience to ensure that everything from selecting the vendor to the survey rollout was seamless.

FinServ’s standard vendor selection process is typically divided into three main stages:

• Step 1 – Investigate: The FinServ team documented the current and future business requirements of the client. The project team held generic demos for long list vendors to validate current vendor landscape capabilities. Based on these inputs, a short list of vendors were invited to participate in a Request for Proposal (RFP).
• Step 2 – Assess: FinServ reviewed and scored each vendor’s RFP response using a quantitative score based on weighted question priority, supplemented by an overall qualitative assessment and cost analysis for each participant. The client selected finalist vendors for participation in a formal scripted demo process using the clients most important and/or complex workflows as evaluation criteria.
• Step 3 – Recommend: Detailed reference checks were conducted and FinServ prepared an recommendation presentation for the client executive selection review committees including a “winning” vendor, cost analysis, and proposed service level tier to target.

Under FinServ’s guidance, the client was able to make a thorough and educated decision to find the best long-term partner for their business under a tight timeline to both select, implement, and deploy their engagement survey.

Deploying the Annual Survey Questionnaire

After negotiating the final contract, FinServ worked closely with the client to construct the engagement survey and survey deployment process itself. Survey system administration historically posed a challenge. The client wanted to streamline the process to make it easy for employees to participate, but employee information was spread across three different Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) across its multiple facilities. FinServ spearheaded the client’s data migration onto the survey administrator.

After the data was uploaded into the system, FinServ took painstaking measures to verify the data. This included verifying the number of records, required fields and attributes, date formats, and removing the duplicate values to match the original data. This exercise ensured that the data upload into the new system was carried out smoothly and eliminated any inconsistencies providing the client with a robust data set to rely on for their new survey administrator. Additionally, FinServ’s expertise in data migration and data handling ensured a smooth enrollment of each survey user in the client’s system.

Finally, due to the client’s hierarchical organizational structure, emphasis was placed on creating the managerial hierarchy for different organizational units. The hierarchy was designed to ensure that each manager could view the aggregate response of only their team. FinServ worked closely with the survey vendor to implement stringent anonymity conditions. The client had historically struggled with post-survey analysis and ensuring the complete anonymity of the responses. This resulted in employees being hesitant to record honest responses, making it difficult for the client to implement meaningful reforms. In the new system, hard restrictions on how granular responses could be analyzed were implemented. E.g., managers would be unable to see individual responses for a team comprising of less than five members to ensure confidentiality and response safety. This allowed the client to get the analytical insight and depth they needed without compromising survey integrity and employee confidentiality.

Benchmarking Survey Results

Employee engagement benchmarks are critical to providing context for the employee responses to the survey questions. Using the benchmarks tied to the client’s survey results to a portfolio of other healthcare companies, FinServ’s client was able to add additional context to the survey data collected in order to identifying areas of weakness/strength across the organization to help structure leadership, cultural, and organization incentives.

The Outcome

The client was extremely happy with the smooth rollout of the engagement survey and the high survey participation rate. In addition, the benchmark selected by FinServ for the engagement survey proved to be a successful choice; the client was delighted with the reports created from the responses and found the benchmark a useful criterion to compare the survey responses. The client identified multiple opportunities to act on employees’ feedback and involve employees in co-creating actions to continuously improve their work experience.

In addition to designing and launching the engagement survey, FinServ additionally engaged to help the client design two other surveys in the portal. These included an engagement survey and a compliance survey targeted only at physicians. FinServ supported the creation of those surveys and the overall setup of the portal, which enhanced the efficiency of the client’s survey cycle. This ensured that the client could easily launch any of the surveys electronically, drastically reducing the time and cost associated with administering the surveys on paper. This also ensured that the client would be unlikely to rely on any other third party for designing and launching the surveys from now onwards, which added a long-term value to the client’s business operations.

Conclusion

Overall, employee engagement surveys can help the organizations retain their talents, especially in the wake of ongoing Great Resignation. Given how crucial engagement surveys are, it is critical that they are administered properly. By leveraging its vast expertise, FinServ can help your organization select an optimal engagement management system best suited to your unique needs.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services: info@finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.