🌞🏗 Boost employee experience and user adoption with dynamic branding

Read time: 8 minutes

Hey there! Are you using tenant branding to its full capacity?

The truth is, most Workday customers aren’t 🤔

Today’s newsletter is a deep-dive configuration guide on dynamic, custom branding.

There are SO many use cases for dynamic branding, both practical and fun…

You can apply branding based on job-related attributes such as company, location, business unit, etc...

Or celebrate 🥳 employees’ promotions, birthdays, and work anniversaries with special homepage visuals…

You can even automate your tenant’s branding to change with seasons, months, or holidays!

If you’ve got the setup know-how, the possibilities are awesome, and endless 💫

Let’s dive in, shall we!?

What is tenant branding?

Tenant branding is what makes your Workday tenant feel like your organization’s tenant when you log in. It’s made up of 3 configurable components.

Can you spot the 3 branding components on the Workday homepage below?

If you called out logo, banner, and color, you’re spot on! 🎯

While there are other areas of Workday you can brand (such as the Learning module, career sites, and your sign-on page), today’s newsletter is focused on general tenant branding.

First, we’ll cover setup basics. Then, we’ll get into the fun stuff—dynamic use cases 😎

Your branding setup basics…

🚨 Remember to complete your configuration in a test environment first!

Run the task, Configure Tenant Branding. This is where your tenant branding is managed.

Within this task, you’ll upload your Branding Logo and Branding Banner, and you’ll choose a Branding Color.

The setup below is what I used to generate the example homepage you saw in the previous section…

You’ll notice that the Branding Rule inputs are empty throughout the settings above.

Branding Rules are optional, boolean (True / False) conditions. You can use them to apply different logos, banners, and/or colors when certain worker-based or global criteria are met (more to come on Branding Rules later!).

For now, note that if you don’t select a Branding Rule, the logo, banner, or color is applied for all users.

If you scroll down within the Configure Tenant Branding task, you’ll also see a section for Mobile App setup…

Workday requires that you upload separate images for the Mobile App inputs, and recommends you use smaller image sizes for best results.

However, here’s what the mobile app homepage looks like using the same-sized logo and banner images from the Desktop and Mobile Web setup (FYI - “Mobile Web” refers to accessing Workday on your phone’s internet browser, as opposed to the Workday app).

Workday cropped and scaled the images differently, but they ultimately still work…

Branding Logo

Your logo appears on Workday’s application header (where the search bar is) on desktop and iPad. On mobile, you’ll find your logo as the header image of the dropdown menu on the homepage…

To set up your logo, click into the *Branding Logo input, and click “Create Branding Logo”…

Select your logo image from your computer, and press OK…

Your new logo will appear in the Branding Logo input…

And, you can always access your previously uploaded logo images by clicking “All” within the input…

Here are Workday’s recommended image sizes for your Branding Logo…

Desktop and Mobile Web: 194 × 78 pixels

Mobile App: 100 × 100 pixels

Adobe has a free image resizer that works well enough if you need some help resizing!

✏️ Note that Workday recommends JPEG and PNG file formats throughout your branding setup.

Branding Banner

Your banner is the main image that appears at the top of your Workday homepage.

You can create and add your Branding Banner in the same way you set up your Branding Logo in the previous section…

Since Workday crops your banner to fit different screen resolutions, there are a few different recommended sizes you can try for both desktop and mobile…

Desktop and Mobile Web:

• 1440 × 193 pixels

• 1440 × 366 pixels

• 1280 × 366 pixels

• 1920 × 366 pixels

Mobile App:

• Any image with a 3:1 width to height ratio

• 1023 × 342 pixels

• 1920 × 640 pixels

Branding Color

Your selected color appears throughout your tenant. You see it applied to…

• Apps

• Task page headers

• Worker profiles

• Navigation icons

• Dashboard announcements

• Hubs navigation

• Cards

And more!

For Desktop and Mobile Web, you can select 1 of 42 colors from Workday’s “Branding Color Picker”…

Or, you can enter your own “Custom Hex Color”…

✏️ Note that for now, you can’t enter a hex color for the Mobile App—you need to choose one of Workday’s delivered colors.

If you don’t select a Branding Color, your task page headers default to white 👎…

And your apps, worker profiles, icons, etc. default to Workday’s basic blue…

Branding Rules

Okay! So now that we’ve covered the basics… let’s revisit Branding Rules.

Recall that a Branding Rule is a boolean condition you can use to apply different logos, banners, and/or colors when certain worker-based or global criteria are met.

The only way to create a Branding Rule, is with the task Create Branding Rule. Similarly, the only way to edit an existing branding rule, is the with task Edit Branding Rule.

This is a small setup quirk to be aware of… you can test or delete a Branding Rule from its Related Actions, however, you can only edit the rule via the Edit Branding Rule task…

Alright! Here’s an example use case to illustrate how Branding Rules work 👇

Imagine your organization just acquired a company—call it Company A. You’re tasked with setting up separate tenant branding for all workers who are in Company A. That is, workers who are assigned to the Company A organization should see a different logo, banner, and color when they log into your Workday tenant.

First, run the Create Branding Rule task to create a Branding Rule that will isolate workers in Company A…

Next, run the Configure Tenant Branding task to set up your dynamic branding as follows…

In the setup above, you tied your new “Worker is in Company A” Branding Rule to Company A’s logo, banner, and color. You created a second row with no Branding Rule that’s tied to the Parent Company’s brand assets.

With this setup, you successfully configured dynamic tenant branding! 🥳 Workers in Company A experience one set of brand assets, while everyone else experiences another set of brand assets.

✏️ Note that the order of your rows is important! Always place your most specific or high priority criteria on top. Your Branding Rules apply in the order in which they’re listed. If your first Branding Rule applies to a user, Workday assigns that branding, and exits the logic. An empty Branding Rule functions as a Branding Rule that includes all users.

Beyond basics… dynamic branding 💪

Branding Rules are the key that unlocks dynamic branding. That is—branding that changes automatically based on worker and/or tenant-level data.

This is where branding gets interesting and FUN 🤩

The possibilities are truly endless… if you can build a Branding Rule for the scenario, and test that it works as expected, you’re in business!

Here are a few use cases to ⚡️ spark ⚡️ your creativity…

📆 Branding by month…

You can delight your employees with a different tenant theme each month!

The Branding Rule below can be set up for each month of the year. This rule is fully automated and won’t require year-to-year maintenance—it evaluates “today’s” month…

And your subsequent Tenant Branding setup for logo, banner, and color will look something like this…

 A birthday surprise 🎂…

A little birthday acknowledgement goes a long way! Surprise your workforce with special celebratory branding on their birthday…

If you want to extend the birthday acknowledgement, you could adjust the rule to display birthday branding throughout their entire birthday week.

Your Tenant Branding setup will look like this…

🥳 Celebrate promotions…

There’s a delivered field for “Last Promotion Date” that works well for this use case. With this Branding Rule, you can swap out regular branding for celebratory visuals to acknowledge your employee’s career growth for the 7-day period after their promotion’s effective date…

While the Branding Rule in this setup uses a WD-delivered field, you can also build calculated fields for Branding Rules to pull in effective dates for other worker business process types. For example, you can…

• Welcome new hires 🎉

• Celebrate a compensation increase 💸

• Acknowledge a job change 🔀

And, you’re not limited to just one dynamic use case within your Tenant Branding setup—you can configure many! Just make sure you order your Branding Rules with your most specific / highest priority conditions on top.

Last but certainly not least… don’t forget to test!

Never (and we mean never!) assume your Branding Rules and Tenant Branding setup work without testing 😆

The best way to test your setup is to proxy as different test users. Ensure you proxy as multiple users to confirm a positive and negative result for every row in your setup.

✏️ And note that your own branding won’t update automatically—you’ll need to log out and log back in to see it take.

If you’d like to test your Branding Rules individually in addition to your proxy testing, you can use the Test and Test (BETA) functions within the rule’s Related Actions…

In the “Instance for Condition Rule Test” input, enter a specific worker you’d like to test on, and press OK. The results will tell you whether your boolean Branding Rule returns a “Yes” or “No” for that worker.

🎨 🎨 🎨

Is your head spinning with possibilities!? Think you’ll deploy dynamic branding for your workforce in 2025? We’d love to hear what you think!

As always, thank you for being a reader!

We’re celebrating you and your pursuit of a Well Built Workday 🥳 

Until next time!

Ceci & Mia

Co-Founders of Well Built Solutions

P.S. If you loved today’s newsletter, leave us a testimonial here 🥰