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!
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:
Job Profiles
Job Families
Management Levels
Review Templates
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?
Job Profiles
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.
Job Families
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.
Management Levels
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.
Review Templates
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.
Fair warning – this is a big topic and there is a lot to unpack. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on what I consider the larger, more-impactful decision points. But this comes at the cost of a bit of nuance.
Skills & Competencies seem, colloquially, to be synonymous. And some recent updates to functionality from Workday are moving Skills & Competencies towards each other (namely, the ability to rate & endorse Skills. My go-to line used to be that Competencies are rated, and Skills are not). BUT it appears the intent here is to make the two options more complementary, as well as more individually robust.
When clients engage me for work with Skills Cloud, they are most frequently interested in better understanding the capabilities of their current workforce; what skills they presently have, and identifying any skill gaps. “What do we have, and what are we going to need?” Answering these questions will allow them to more accurately plan for sourcing needs in the future, and more effeciently recruit internally.
On the flip-side, when clients engage me for work with Competencies, the goal is usually to clearly communicate desired behaviors from the top down. “We’ve just revamped our Company/Executive/Department metrics and want individuals to put their focus in these areas because this is how we will measure success.” Less of a fact-finding effort, and more of an attempt at steering efforts towards identified priorities.
Skills
Perhaps most importantly, skills are self-reported, and their “scope” is smaller and more bite-sized compared to most competencies. They reference, by and large, a specific ability. And that ability does not necessarily need to be related to their current job at all. Skills and the Skills Cloud leverage machine learning, and while you can rate skills via gigs, feedback, and self they do NOT pull in to performance reviews.
Competencies
Competencies have a bit more structure and control compared to skills; your organization defines them and dictates how they are assigned (job profile, job family, management level). Usually, they are related to an individual’s role and represent a broader concept or more complex behavior than simple Microsoft Excel mastery. Competencies don’t get plugged into Machine learning and produce suggestions the way Skills do, but they can get directly pulled into performance reviews.
Separating Fact from Ficton
These two topics operate in similar spaces, and there is a lot of “newness” surrounding some of the functionality (particularly when it comes to Skills). Likely for these reasons, there are a handful of assumptions floating around that are not (for the time being) accurate. Let’s take a moment to dispel some of these misconceptions when it comes to the interplay (or lack thereof) of Skills vs. Competencies.
Touchpoints
What makes this head-to-head of functionality so interesting, and so complex, is that both Skills and Competencies have many cross-functional touchpoints. The graphic below is not an exhaustive list, but gets the point across that these two objects each serve as a sort of connective tissue in the worker experience.
We’ve covered a bit about what uses Skills and Competencies were “intended” for, and how others leverage them. But the configuration options are flexible. If you find this framework doesn’t speak to you, or is not quite a good fit for your organization, you won’t be the first to deviate from the proverbial “best-practice” herd. Before you write off Skills or Competencies (or both) entirely, lets chat!
One question we have been getting more frequently is, “are we able to connect goals with competencies?”
The answer is yes, which is great! What’s even better is that the set-up is quick & easy. The task you will need is Configure Talent Tags. Theres MORE Talent Tag functionality to cover here but for the purpose of this blog post, we just need to select the Competency Talent Tag in the Goals section drop-down.
The Talent Tag selection needed to link Goals and Competencies
Every selectable Talent Tag within task Configure Talent Tags
Once we’ve done that, and assuming you have competencies configured, employees will now have a Relates To field within the Additional Details tab of their goals. From here they can select multiple existing competencies to associate with an individual goal.
Any competencies selected to relate to a goal become reportable attributes on that goal; meaning, if you are interested in reporting on this connectivity across the organization, you can!
