🌞🏗 Workday 2025R1's most exciting HCM features

[1]

Feature: Configurable Visibility of Pools and Budget Wheels in Compensation Reviews

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Advanced Compensation

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: You can now hide compensation review pool and budget wheel graphics from selected populations within your compensation review users. For example, you can allow Managers who are Director-level and above to see pools and budget while hiding from Managers below Director. In addition to removal from within the compensation review tasks, Workday also hides pool and budget data on the…

• Compensation Review Budget Pools report

• Compensation Review Status Report

• Compensation Review Status Report by Hierarchy

Setup: Create a security group(s) that isolates the population you do want to give access to pool and budget data, and place this group on the new View Compensation Review Pool Data domain. Remove any broader security groups from the domain, activate pending security policy changes.

🔗 Release Note

[2]

Feature: Configure Additional Address Components

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: You can now use the Maintain Address Components by Country task to add additional custom address components for each country. This gives your global organization way more control and agility as you expand your global footprint and meet your changing integration data requirements.

You can also opt in to have Workday sync your Address Component updates with your web services (i.e., ensure your address inputs are reflected on EIBs that include addresses).

Something to consider with this feature—many organizations have already found workarounds for this previous limitation. Our take? It’s likely worth retiring your workarounds (e.g., business process validations) to utilize the new, delivered functionality.

Setup: Run the Maintain Address Components by Country task and click the + button to add row for a new address component.

Notes:

Changing address configurations can impact integrations! Workday includes a validation when you update address components to remind you of this.

Use the updated View Address Components by Country report to view your updated configuration.

You can update Recruiting Address Components on the Recruiting Address Components tab of the Maintain Address Components by Country task.

🔗 Release Note

[3]

Feature: Configure Optional Fields for Change Job

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday expands its optional fields functionality in the Change Job business process with 16 new fields that can be: hidden, required, restricted by security group, or displayed as non-enterable. Using the Configure Optional Fields task, admins now have more granular control over who can view, edit, or enter data—helping to improve data integrity by displaying only relevant fields and limiting inputs to the right people.

• Academic - Annual Work Period

• Academic - Work Period Percent of Year

• Academic - Disbursement Plan Period

• Employee Type

• Time Type

• Working Time

• Contingent Worker Type

• Select a Job Requisition for this change

• This person is a manager. Will their team be moving with them?

• Currency

• Frequency

• Job Profile

• Which team will this person be moving to?

• Who will be this person's manager after the move?

• Work Hours Profile

• Location

Setup:

1. Run the Configure Optional Fields task and select “Change Job” as the functional area.

2. Configure the fields for your organization, considering you Change Job templates and security setup.

3. Test your configuration and update your training materials.

🔗 Release Note

[4]

Feature: Hire Employee Task Redesign & Consolidated Hire Business Process with Compensation

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: 2025R1 delivers an automatically available, redesigned Hire Employee task (the 2024R2 opt-in is removed), with the option to add the Propose Compensation Hire subprocess to your consolidated template! The task's consolidated template now has 7 Hire subprocesses available. If selected, these tasks show up in the guided experience in this predefined order:

• Edit Government IDs

• Change Organization Assignments for Worker

• Assign Employee Collective Agreement

• Edit Service Dates

• Propose Compensation Hire (NEW!)

• Assign Pay Group

• Payment Election Enrollment Event

Setup:

1. Click the related actions on the Hire BP > Business Process Policy > View

2. Click the related actions on the Hire Business Process Policy > Business Process > Configure Consolidated Template OR Configure Rule Based Consolidated Template

To add a rule to your consolidated template, add your BP in the Configure Rule Based Consolidate Template task.

Notes:

• While the redesigned task is automatically available, note that consolidating your BP does require setup.

• Move all exit validation errors from the respective subprocess initiation steps up to the Hire initiation step. Otherwise, they won’t fire!

• Delegation is not yet available on consolidated Hire events.

🔗 Release Note

[5]

Feature: Infinite Scrolling on Compensation Review Grid

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Compensation

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday no longer limits you to 500 results in the popular Search Employees report for the comp cycle—the limit is increased to 2,000! This feature also delivers endless scrolling so you don’t have to click through pages of results.

Why’s this small update a game-changer, you ask? The 500-result limit meant that when you pulled large datasets into your comp grid view, you risked not getting your complete population of interest. You had to get creative with time-consuming, piece-meal workarounds, nearly defeating the purpose of using the grid at all. Now, more organizations can pull their full population in one go!

Setup:

The feature is technically automatically available, as listed by Workday, but you do have to tell Workday what your preferred limit is…

Run the task Edit Tenant Setup - HCM. Scroll to the Compensation section and in the Preferred Compensation Review Employee Awards Grid Limit, enter up to 2,000! The default is still 100 if you don’t change this value.

Notes:

You should only increase this limit if you meet these 2 criteria for infinite scroll…

1. You only have one plan per award type in the process (this supports the Search Report).

2. You only have one plan per award type for every employee in the Org and Sub Orgs (this supports the report from My Tasks).

🔗 Release Note

[6]

Feature: Mobile Benefits UI

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Benefits

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: For employee populations who mainly access Workday via mobile, Workday makes electing and changing benefits easier by optimizing the mobile benefits UI to improve their experience on-the-go (and off the desktop). They also add a number of accessibility features to ensure that everyone—regardless of ability—can access and use technology effectively to make the right elections. The UI redesign here is key for highly mobile workforces!

🔗 Release Note

[7]

Feature: Remove Multiple Matrix Members from Matrix Organizations

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: We’ll be honest… prior to the last release we often avoided matrix orgs. Why? You had to add and remove workers one at a time. 2024R2 delivered the ability to add multiple workers to a matrix org at once. And now with this 2025R1 feature, you can remove multiple workers and their associated positions from a matrix organization en masse with a new business process and associated task, Remove Multiple Matrix Members.

This is a BIG win for matrix organization usability 🙌

Setup:

1. Create and configure the business process definition for the Remove Multiple Matrix Members BP.

2. Configure and activate the business process security policy.

Notes:

When you set up an approval step on the Remove Multiple Matrix Members BP, the approver can review and approve all workers and corresponding positions for the event.

🔗 Release Note

[8]

Feature: Supervisory Organization Editable on the Change Job Business Process

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: You can now edit the Supervisory Organization field when reviewing job changes! This allows the person or receiving manager reviewing the change to select the right supervisory organization when a worker is being moved to a new manager. This update is super helpful for completing transfers more efficiently entirely within the Change Job BP.

Setup: None required, but we’ll note here—based on our testing and review of Community user questions, it looks like there may be some bugs with this feature in Preview. No definitive response from Workday yet, but they’ll surely take a look and get this working soon! Keep an eye on the Release Note, and wait to test this one further until WD has worked out the kinks.

Notes:

When the review step is routed to the current manager, they will not be able to edit the Supervisory Organization field.

🔗 Release Note

[9]

Feature: Workday Docs and Document Generation for Onboarding Business Process

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Onboarding

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: You can now configure a Generate Document action step within your Onboarding BP and use a document dynamically created with Workday Docs. You can then add a Review Document step to distribute the document during Onboarding. The ability to dynamically create and distribute documents during Onboarding all within Workday is a huge win for efficiency and flexibility 🙌

You can now consolidate documents that require dynamic sections, customize documents with event-dependent content, update branding and formatting in one place rather than loading PDFs to Workday Docs, and more!

Setup:

1. Ensure the Drive and Docs domains are configured within your System functional area.

2. Configure DWXF as a supported file type within your Edit Tenant Setup - System task > System Setup > File Type Setup Instructions.

3. Create and publish your document templates within your Workday Drive.

4. Select a document template when you configure a generate document step within your Onboarding BP.

🔗 Release Note

Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn — @ceciblomberg, @miaeisenhandler

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