What 's new for Absence Management in Workday 29?
Date posted
7 September 2017
Reading time
8 Minutes
What 's new for Absence Management in Workday 29?
Up until now Time Off 's in Workday have been limited to a Fixed Balance Period (holiday year) such as January to December or April to March etc. In a lot of applications, this works fantastically, as most types of absence follow this pattern; entitlements are awarded on a yearly basis, running for a fixed 12 months until the next entitlement. Unfortunately, there is a limitation when it comes to sickness. Entitlements for sickness tend to follow a Rolling Balance Period (not fixed like the previous 12 months examples).
In other words, instead of the employee receiving 10 days of sickness allowance at the start of the year and this being refreshed every 12 months, employees will generally have an allowance of 10 days awarded on the first day of sickness and available for the next 12 (or more) months. If an employee has used these 10 days they will not become available again until 12 months after the first day of the sickness request. There have been some workarounds to facilitate this previously, but these have all involved manual effort and offline tracking of balances, adding pressure and room for error within the local HR Teams.
Solutions Up Until Now
Workday does support Rolling Balance Periods within the Leave of Absence capability of the Absence Management module, however this is designed to hold longer types of absence, such as maternity or long-term disability etc. An additional manual process is required to return employees from a Leave of Absence, increasing work and processes into the HR team especially for 'Leaves' that span one or two days. For that reason, we don 't usually recommend using Leave of Absence to support Rolling Balance Periods for shorter absences. In the past, that meant customers would have to use the standard Fixed Balance Period within Time Off and manually track entitlements by storing them offline or calculating as requests came through. This also has an overhead to HR, but means one less physical process/approval chain in Workday. Both scenarios were far from ideal and took away from the power of Workday 's Absence Module.What Does This Mean for Me?
- If you are just beginning your Workday journey this is a great time to be implementing Absence the functionality is more powerful than ever and allows a lot of what would otherwise be manual processes to be run automatically in the background. The Reporting capabilities in Absence have also been increased dramatically within this new release giving large organisations a very clear indication of entitlements and events processed through Workday. Third party systems or processes can finally be removed from the equation and Workday can take over as your one comprehensive source of truth for all things Absence related.
- If you are an existing Workday customer this could be a time to consider retrofitting your configuration for Absence especially if you implemented Workday several releases ago. From an end-to-end process point of view, making these updates will take a lot of pressure off local HR teams who must keep balances up to date offline or manually keep returning workers from leave of absence. An investment in updating your configuration now would save countless hours of time both running processes and tracking entitlements/events in a third party system or excel etc. If a third party system is being used to track balances this can be deprecated, saving on licencing fees. This retrofit could also incorporate several recent Absence updates which include the Unified Absence Experience (Time off and Leave of Absence requests are both accommodated in the Absence calendar and appear seamless to employees) as well as the new functionality around team time off calendars which gives employees a view of their peers ' absences to help plan their own time away from work.