2024R2 Talent & Performance Updates

Summary Pages

Manager Insights Hub

Up to this point, there were a dozen delivered manager dashboards specific to different functional areas. And the Manager Insights Hub was no different – focusing solely on Talent & Career related items. But no longer! This update moves the Manager Insights Hub closer to one-stop-shopping for Manager tasks, agnostic of functional area.

Manager Insights Hub – Feedback

Workday has made the Manager Insights hub more holistically useful to Managers this cycle with the inclusion of content outside of Talent & Performance.  But they’ve ALSO made improvements to what presently existed in for Talent & Performance – namely in the realm of feedback.

Hub Navigation Customization

Previous Hub customization options were limited. Workday 2024R2 makes it easier for you to customize the navigation experience of your hubs. This enables you to create your own navigation items and groups with custom labels. You can also use this new feature to group and re-order Workday-delivered and custom navigation items on hubs.

Autosave for Guided Experience

It’s complicated enough to get review completion without Workday deleting your progress. Workday session timeouts have been the cause of a lot of heartache and lost prose when it comes to employee reviews.  The nature of the form frequently calls for thoughtful comments that take time to draft.  With this update, we will no longer hear of lost work in employee reviews as this autosave feature automatically does what the “Save for Later” button did, now every 90 seconds.

Skill Assessment

Prior to this update, feedback and flex teams were our only recourse for sourcing skill ratings from others. With this new Skills Assessment business process, it’s more intuitive than I found the feedback avenue.  We will only be limited by what security group(s) we include in our business process. Keep an eye on this update, it sounds like Workday intends to release MORE in a batch of 2024R2+ updates.

Suggested Skills for Workers

This change will give us more control over skill suggestions and make those suggestions easier to track.  Prior to this update, skill suggestions were driven most heavily by machine learning’s dotted-line designation of implicit (related) skills. This was not something we had much ability to influence or explain.  Now, suggestions will come from straight-line sources, if applicable, first.  And these straight-line sources are within our control.

Mass Populate Worker Skills

Relying on individual workers manually adding skills to their worker profile has mixed results. This mass action makes it easier to holistically populate skills on individual workers for your entire workforce.

Development Items, Skills & Mobile

With this update, Workday expands the connective tissue existing between different talent objects.  Previously, we were only able to connect competencies, job profiles, and work experience to development items.  Now, we can include skills and further connect the dots between what we say we are going to develop and how we actually go about doing it.

Goals Redesign Multi-Management of Goals

The only real downside of the Goals User Experience Redesign prior to this update was that we could only create or edit goals one at a time.  Workday has closed the loop there, displaying a Bulk Update button if we intend to act on multiple goals.  If this was a blocker to adoption previously, this Goals Redesign functionality is definitely worth another look.

Goals Redesign for Mobile

Ideally, the Workday experience would be the exact same on mobile as it is on desktop.  We’re not quite there yet, but this is a wonderful step in that direction if you leverage goals and the Goals User Experience Redesign Changes that came out last cycle (and that I recommend!) goal displays on mobile will be the lovely card layout experienced on desktop.

Organizational Goals Configuration

A step in the right direction for beefing up configuration options specific to organization goals.  Small but mighty, we now have the option to show or hide org goal descriptions, whereas previously if we didn’t want a description to show, we had to leave it blank.

Feedback Responsive Design

If leveraged, feedback can be one of the most frequently used talent & performance tasks. As such, it is an important touch-point with your workforce. At a minimum, this UX revamp is nicer to look at. Hopefully, it will  increase the ease of providing feedback.

Development Items in Career Hub

This update brings development item functionality holistically into Career Hub and increases actionability via skills-driven suggestions. Now that skills can be placed on development items, Workday can take those skills to develop and identify Learning Content and Flex Teams that develop those skills.

Career Hub Explore Improvements

Workday is putting a great deal of effort into Career Hub and the suggestions it generates.  For Career Hub to be a viable and worthwhile career building tool, it’s suggestions should be attainable and contextually relevant to the end-user.  These enhancements relative to the underlying skills and skill interests driving those suggestions is a step towards greater actionability.

Career Path Builder Seniority Filtering

Default behavior in the Career Path Builder doesn’t limit suggestions based on seniority, meaning it could recommend your next step be much higher or much lower than you are positioned presently. To provide more actionable suggestions, Workday has included the option to anchor these suggestions based on Job Level or Management Level.

Flex Teams User Experience

This UI update for Flex Teams follows a similar pattern to the Goals UI Redesign and is all aimed towards making it easier to staff flex teams.  Previously, the report for managing flex teams had redundant action buttons and the summary view didn’t tell us much.  Now, task buttons have been streamlined and the summary card output tells us what we want to know at a glance.

Flex Teams Without Career Hub or Opportunity Marketplace

Workday appears to be pushing for increased utilization of Flex Teams.  To that end, this update makes flex teams that much more accessible no longer requiring you to access them via Career Hub or Opportunity Marketplace.  Just because you aren’t using CH or OM doesn’t mean you can’t use flex teams.

Flex Teams Web Services

Workday is putting a good bit of effort into Flex Team adoption; it was a theme from 2024R1, and it is a theme for 2024R2.  With any object that has the potential to be quite numerous, end-users will want and need a way to act on flex teams in bulk.  With this update, we get just that; EIBs to create and edit flex teams in bulk.  Immensely preferable to creating and editing one-by-one, which has been an adoption deal-breaker in the past.

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Frequently Forgotten Things

Year-End Performance

For many, year-end performance reviews are fast-approaching. Today we’re here to cover 3 quick things that are both easy to do and easy to forget. Perform these checks and save yourself some trouble when the time comes time to launch your year-end performance review cycle. Don’t fall victim to year-end crunch time and wind up with problems that are sticky to fix.

Summary

Mass Advance Pending Goal Events & Performance Reviews

This item is more than just good housekeeping.  If you’ve got goals that you expect to auto-populate in your upcoming year-end review, those goals can’t be wrapped up in a prior performance cycle or Manage Goals event. Else they won’t pull into the latest and greatest review. Why? They’re locked. They’ve still got changes pending on them that are not realized until that business process is clocked as successfully completed. Workday won’t let you make changes on top of those pending changes.

What’s worse is if you don’t do this, it’s not the smoothest thing to fix.  Even if you mass advance those goal events and prior performance cycles after the fact. That ship has sailed. We will have to either cancel & relaunch, or instruct the employee to duplicate their goals and archive the duplicates later.  I personally dislike both of those options.

If you’ve built our 3 Quick Custom Performance Reports, its very easy to identify in-progress reviews from previous cycles and mass advance them to completion. 

Otherwise we can leverage delivered report Find Events to identify any In-Progress Performance Review and Goal events.

If we do, in fact, have in-progress events, we’ll need to mass advance them to completion to ensure our goal information auto populates.  Do this at some point before you launch your new performance cycle and you’ll be in good shape!

Due Dates

If you’re not using due dates within your performance review business process, they can’t be a problem! To check, navigate to your business process definitions for Start Performance Review, Complete Self Evaluation, and Complete Manager Evaluation.

You can have a due date for the entirety of the process, as well as for each step.  If these are still valid for this cycle, you are good to go!  Otherwise, be sure to update.  These dates show up in a variety of places and can confuse your end-users if different due dates have been communicated internally.

Any Mention of the Previous Year

I always try to avoid mentioning specific years (precisely so we CAN’T forget), but sometimes it’s unavoidable.  If you are referencing specific dates within template help text, notifications, eligibility rules, or conditional logic, be sure to update so we don’t stumble on the final hurdle.

If you do these things and test any changes you’ve made since last cycle, it will be smooth sailing!

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What Is My Development Item Related To?

We’re back for another round of interconnectivity between Talent objects with a deep-dive into how Talent Tags could make your Development Items more robust.

We’ve touched on Talent Tags before specific to Goals & Competencies (Goals, Meet Competencies ).  If that peaks your interest, click on over.

Today we’re going to start in task Configure Talent Tags. Below you’ll see that I’ve select all possible options available to us for the moment.  We’ll be focusing on Development Items, and why it might be of interest to reference Competencies, Job Profiles, Work Experience, or all three!

If you begin to worry about white-space, and making Development Items too busy – fear not!  Whether you select to include all three talent tags (competencies, job profiles, and work experience) or just one, they all live within one additional drop-down list of Relates To.

Why Would I Do This?

Development Items and Goals are similar features, configuration-wise.  Where they differ the most, in my humble opinion, is in intent.  Goals are often involved in performance reviews and applied a rating.  They are built around the roles & responsibilities of your position. Development Items, on the other hand, can be a bit more lofty.  Less “what I’m supposed to be doing” and more “what I want to be doing.”

To this end, as Workday itself delves deeper into the world of Career Growth, we are able to take something more lofty, forward-thinking – and attach specifics.

For an example around Development Plans, let’s say your workforce has taken the time to update their career profile and profess what Job Profiles they are interested in.  Wonderful!  But, now what?  The connectivity of Talent Tags would allow workers to take that interest, and specifically reference it as they craft a series of Development Items to go about achieving it.

For an example around a Performance Improvement Plan, let’s say an employee really struggled with one particular competency during their Mid-Year Review.  In preparation for the Year-End Review, they are on a PIP focused on that competency.

Can you continue on without Talent Tags? Absolutely.  But this is one of the most straight-forward configuration updates in my arsenal and it is simply too EASY to make Development Items more than just a jumble of free text floating in cyberspace.  If you’re talking about a specific competency, if you’re referencing a specific job profile, why not go ahead and tag it? I can’t think of a good reason not to!

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Where Can I Put Competencies?

If your organization is gearing up to introduce or revamp competencies, you’ve stumbled upon this article at the exact right time.  There are no “right” and “wrong” ways to organize your competencies, per se, but there are certainly easier vs. harder ways when it comes to Workday.  And it all has to do with which objects Workday lets us place competencies on.

The objects are:

In this post, we’ll start with a refresher on what competencies are and their capabilities as an object in Workday.  Then we move into the exciting part; where we can place competencies and how we can use this knowledge to make our lives easier.

As a quick aside and shameless plug, we’ve discussed competencies here before specifically in comparison to skills (Skills vs. Competencies). Click on over if that peaks your interest.

What are Competencies?

A structured and controlled way for organizations to highlight and define behaviors that they care about and want to use to drive performance. The organization dictates what competencies, defined in what way, get assigned to what cohort of employees. Competencies frequently will get pulled into employee performance reviews and receive a rating assessment.

Now, if your organization uses the same set of competencies for the entire population, you catch a break! The assignment of these competencies is straight-forward, with the easiest being hardcoding them into your performance review. 

However, if different employee populations are assessed on different sets of competencies, there are strategy options for how we deliver the right competencies to the right employees. 

What Do We Stand to Gain?

Two things, transparency and efficiency.  Let’s say we place clearly defined competencies on our job profiles or management levels.  That information makes expectations for end-users that much clearer.  I always prefer to know what I’m supposed to be doing before I’m supposed to be doing it.  And efficiency. How we organize our competencies could be the difference between a single Year-End performance review template and ten.

Where Could I Put Competencies?

Navigate to task Edit Job Profile > Qualifications > Competencies to include Competencies directly on a job profile. You have the option to indicate if the competency is required or optional, and select a target rating. IF you have competencies placed on objects associated with this job profile, you will see those listed in the “Competencies from Other Sources” section.

Navigate to task Maintain Competencies for Job Family and select which Job Family.  You will have the same options to indicate if a competency is required vs. optional and select a target rating.

This may begin to feel repetitive. BUT. Navigate to task Maintain Competencies for Management Level and select which Management Level.  You guessed it! You can add your competencies and optionally indicate if it is required and pick a target rating. 

If we can successfully organize our competencies based on Job Profile, Job Family, or Management Level, we can “pull from position” within our performance reviews.  In this way, employees can receive the same performance review template that auto populates with different competencies (that are pulled from their position aka job profile, job family, or management level).

If we CANNOT do this, hardcoding competencies onto performance review templates is our fail-safe option. All we’d need to do is identify the right cohort for each unique competency set via template eligibility rules. The downside here is more review templates; we’ll need a unique template for each unique competency set.

As an added bonus, if you include the Competencies tab somewhere within the Worker Profile, employees can see their delivered competencies and any applicable target / assessed ratings.

As we wrap up, it’s worth noting that your organization does not have to use competencies at all – plenty of folks don’t. But if you do, and it’s possible to organize competencies along the lines of Job Profiles, Job Families, or Management Levels, it does make ongoing maintenance easier within Workday.

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Add Skills to Job Profiles in Bulk

Continuing within our Workday Skills Cloud series, here we are going to deep-dive into placing Skills on Job Profiles in bulk via Mass Action.  We’ll cover what it looks like, the steps to do it, and why we should even bother in the first place.

Why Bother?

Better Suggestions: Nothing will “break” if you don’t place skills on Job Profiles.  But it will make suggestions within the system more accurate.  Take it as an opportunity to better inform Workday and remove some of the guesswork.  Workday can infer what Skills are involved for this job profile based on free text descriptions and other associated details, OR you could tell Workday specifically what Skills are involved. This impact spreads to any of the suggestions that Workday is making referencing a Job Profile as an input (Ex: Skills a worker might have, Skills to put on a job requisition).

Transparency: Workday’s AI and Machine Learning is not the only thing looking at your job profiles.  Your workforce is too!  From recruiting to career growth, increasing specificity on your job profiles will only increase the accuracy with which roles are advertised, pursued, and staffed.

Add Skills to Job Profile via Mass Action

Our first stop needs to be to Maintain Skills and Experience Setup to confirm we’ve checked the box to Populate Suggested Skills for Job Profiles. 

This will allow our second stop, delivered report Suggested Skills for Job Profiles to do the thing we need it to do — suggest skills!  Prior to this report, we were on the hook to come up with all the skills we wanted to place on all our job profiles.  Which was inevitably always a herculean effort. But no longer!

We’ll have the option to run this report for all Job Profiles, or a specific subset of job profiles based on Job Family, Job Family Group, or selected individually.

This report gives us three styles of skill suggestions with logic that is easy to track:

It is this report that we are technically plugging into our mass action.  We will run the task Launch Mass Action Event and populate our prompts:

You will have the option to run this task for all job profiles or a smaller subset.  Want to go rogue and add skills that didn’t show up in the Suggested Skills for Job Profiles report? You can! Feel free to add required or optional skills at will, just be careful when doing custom additions in bulk, the skills you select will appear on all the job profiles involved.

Remember those three styles of skill suggestions our Suggested Skills for Job Profiles report was returning?  You can specify which style, and how many skills from each style you would like to add.  That report will only return a max of 10 from each style, and if I select 5 it will be the first 5. 

Once we hit OK, Workday will launch a background process that generates our Mass Action Workbook.  We are almost done folks, I promise. Within our mass action Workbook we can confirm our displayed data looks as it should, troubleshoot any errors, and click Validate All. 

The final button to press will be Submit and just like that, all of our Job Profile Skills dreams have come true!

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Measuring Skills

When Skills Cloud first arrived on the scene, there was one component Workday users were left wanting: the ability to in some way measure “how much” of a skill someone had.  Workday listened and has been steadily adding features to do just that.  Here we’ll talk about what those features look like.

Bear in mind, if you have no interest in adding numbers & validation to skills, you don’t have to! There is plenty to do with Skill Cloud without injecting skill leveling.

Initial Setup

If you are interested in ratings/measurements for skills, theres a bit of setup involved. Unsurprisingly, security plays a role. The two domains specific to Skill Levels that you’ll want on your radar are Person Data: Skill Level and Self-Service: Skill Level.

If you navigate to task Maintain Skill Level Setup you will see Workday’s delivered 5-point scale (plus a bonus N/A).  You can override the below titles & descriptions to customize, but for one reason or another we are stuck with the 5-point scale. This will be the baseline for Skill Assessments/Skill Ratings that the Employee can self-assess and request from others.

There are presently 3 places where you can source skill ratings:

I’m going to ignore Externally Calculated Skill Levels for the moment.  This is a larger topic having to do with any existing 3^rd-Party Skill measurements you might currently have. We can load those values into Workday (via a delightful trio of EIBs).  Don’t hesitate to drop a comment if you want that deeper dive into Externally Calculated Skill Levels, but I shall proceed with assuming this is not the case for us.

This skill level calcuclation is going to influence the math on what we see as the “overall” rating for a skill. 

Regardless of the Skill Level Calculation you choose, Workday has provided a “Skill Level Breakdown” within this view to show end-users what math is occuring. Increased transparency and all that good stuff.

With that being said, let’s take a look at where these numbers are coming from.

Skill Self-Assessments

The skills self-assessment UI will optionally allow a worker to rate themselves from 1 to 5 on each of their selected skills. The strange thing here is that “Assess My Skills” is not a searchable, stand-alone task.  Universally – you’ll be able to update your Self-Assessment (on a one-by-one basis) from the same landing page that you can see the Overall Rating.

For Self-Assessment of Skills in bulk, it will differ depending on whether or not you have Career Profile enabled.  If it is enabled, it will be it’s own tab called “Assess My Skills.”

If you don’t currently have Career Profile enabled, you can access Assess My Skills via “Edit Skills.”

Requested Feedback Ratings for Skills

There are two different “styles” of skill feedback you can request from others.  We can ask them to rate our skills on the same 1 to 5 scale that we used for our Self-Assessment.  Or we can ask them to acknowledge the presence of that skill through an endorsement. 

For both options, we will need to create a unique feedback template that tells Workday what action we will be asking our feedback providers to perform.

When an employee goes to request feedback – it is at this point that they will select to collect Skill Ratings or Skill Endorsements and on which skills.

For the feedback provider, the requests for skill ratings or skill endorsements will look like the below:

Once the feedback is provided, both skill ratings and endorsements can be visible within the Feedback card on the worker profile summary and within the Feedback for Skills tab.

While it may feel like the sources for skill ratings are, at the moment, limited, I do anticipate future release cycles adding to this list beyond requested feedback and self-assessments. I will leave you with two final call-outs: 1. Keep in mind – Skill-Leveling is something additional we can do with skills but it is optional. We can still leverage Skills Cloud and not use it. 2. Self-Assessment can sometimes be confused with steps in the Performance Review. They are not the same thing. Skills, for the time being, cannot be assessed as a part of your performance review cycle.

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Skills Touchpoints & Suggestions

For part 2 of our skills cloud series, we’re going to cover the main cross-functional touch-points for Skills, and how it drives different suggestions. 

The Skills touch-points we’ll cover are in the realms of Talent, Learning, Recruiting, and HCM.  Most suggestions will be of skills themselves in different places on different objects, but Workday ALSO has the ability to suggest Colleagues, Learning Content, and Job Opportunities (aka Job Requisitions & Flex Teams).

Below we’ve summarized what Workday can suggest and where:

One example I like to use when talking about Skills Cloud, machine learning, and AI is Spotify (apologies to my Apple Music listeners). Spotify can push to their users any artists that they already listen to; simple and straight-forward. Spotify can also push songs & artists from the same or similar genres as the music their users listen to.  Still straight-forward, but there’s a little bit of inference involved here. The fancy thing Spotify can do (which has been pretty accurate, in my experience) is identify other listeners with similar music tastes to you and suggest songs that THEY like.  The connection is a bit more difficult to track since we don’t have access to all this data in bulk (nor perhaps the processing power to analyze it) but the resulting suggestions can be impressively accurate.

Loosely, Workday’s suggestions are doing something similar.  Workday is looking at all the data at its disposal and making straight-line or dotted-line connections from object to skill or object to object.  It’s just a bit more fun to talk about in terms of music.

Let’s dive into some of the places skills can show up, and the role they can play in the larger picture. As an aside, I’ll intermittently call out decisions we can make around skill functionality; by-and-large that decision is a check box in Maintain Skills and Experience Setup.

Talent

Lets start with the most well-known one.  Skills on a worker. Individuals can select skills they have, or skills they would like to have.  The songs on your playlist, if you will.

At this point, Workday can begin to identify other workers that are “similar” to you based on the skills that they have and are interested in.  Workday can also reference objects like job profiles and supervisory organizations when looking for similarities.

Via the Connections & Mentors functionality (pictured below in Career Hub) Workday can create dotted-line connections between workers.  Workers that are similar to you or workers that have something you want. This one is a slightly different suggestion of People rather than Skills.

Learning

The suggestions on Learning Content are two-fold.  Within the Skills drop-down is a category of Recommended Skills where Workday will make suggestions of Skills to include on this content.  In addition, Workday can also take this Learning Content and suggest it to Learners based on their interests and learning behavior.

Recruiting

When you apply internally, applicants can leverage skills cloud & skill suggestions in much the same way they do on their worker profile.  Optionally, an internal applicant can update the skills on their worker profile with any changes they’ve made in their job application so these two places remain in sync (this capability is new-er).

External applicants function a little differently with regards to skills.  You can optionally allow skills cloud to be accessible to your external candidates, but it won’t make skill suggestions (I assume because Workday doesn’t have much data on them at this point). The value in opening up skills cloud to external candidates (in excess of clean data and seemingly unlimited skill selection options) is that upon hire this information transfers over to a new hire’s worker profile.

Add required and optional skills directly to your job requisitions & flex teams (gigs) for clarity on the role, and direct influence in how it is promoted to applicants.  If a worker has skills that this job requisition/flex team professes to need, it’s more likely to be pushed to them as an opportunity that matches their skill set.  In absence of direct skills applied, Workday can leverage the free-text descriptions and/or job profiles to make skill inferences.

HCM

At this point, it’s becoming clear that we can sprinkle skills in A LOT of different places.  The final object we will cover is Job Profiles.  For Job Profiles, the information lives amidst other Qualifications, and you can add additional skill data for Required vs. Optional and Skill Level (more on Skill Levels to come in our Skills part 3 post).

If you want to add skills to Job Profiles in bulk, this effort has recently become MUCH easier. This will likely be it’s own Skills post, but the involved parties are the delivered report Suggested Skills for Job Profile and the mass action Edit Skills for Job Profiles.

There is so much to cover within the realm of skills.  I hope this overview has left you with more clarity and fewer questions.  If that’s NOT the case, or if you have suggestions for the next deep-dive skills topic, don’t hesitate to drop a comment in the link below!

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