More intelligent Workday home page helps to simplify workplace tasks and eliminate need for HR portals

Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today announced extended capabilities and tools delivered through a single, intuitive user interface to help organisations create a more connected and engaging digital experience for their people. With new functionality driving a more intelligent Workday home page for Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), employees will be able to easily perform various workplace tasks across Workday applications and third-party systems without needing to access an HR portal, log a service ticket, or call someone for support.

With the new people experience, workplace connections, tools for growth, and development opportunities will come together in a way that thoughtfully aligns with each stage of the employee journey to deliver personalised information and actions to an individual as it is needed. For example, employee-specific details pertaining to benefits, stock options, job tasks, IT requests, and more will be surfaced in a personal Workday home page for easy navigation and simplified task execution that can enable the following:

• An employee preparing for benefits enrolment or a leave of absence could proactively receive guidance including deadline notifications, helpful FAQs, and required documentation.
• A newly-promoted sales manager could receive recommended content for leadership training; a set of onboarding tasks that direct her to set up sales targets, enter forecasts, and review the pipeline in a CRM system; and a snapshot of her team members — including their roles, birthdays, and work anniversaries — to help her get to know them.

Progressing beyond the HR portal

People working across separate applications, websites, and systems to conduct workplace tasks often struggle to find answers to basic questions and information when they need it most. To address this challenge, some companies aggregate and promote content, applications, and services with an HR portal. But even the most advanced HR portals are clunky, tough to navigate, and tethered to a desktop or laptop environment — creating more frustration and friction than ease, and lacking the full context of the person using it. Workday will simplify this heterogeneous environment with a single, cohesive experience for employees that is accessible via mobile devices and underpinned by the rich context and people data within their core people management system – Workday HCM. With a truly connected, personalised experience, Workday will be able to intelligently deliver the content, support, and guidance people need during critical moments throughout their employee journey.

With Workday’s new features and functionality, customers will benefit from:

• Personalised content – Information and content will be proactively pushed to employees through simple card visualisations and in a personalised feed, delivering content specific to key moments in a person’s workplace journey, such as onboarding, job transitions, and life events.
• Integrations for non-Workday applications – Workday will provide integrations for key third-party services providers and applications most used by employees, as well as an extensible set of APIs to develop custom integrations. For instance, companies offering stock and retirement plans could use a Workday-delivered integration to give employees easy, direct access to their financial services provider’s website.
• Advanced search – Built-in, advanced search capabilities will enable policies and documents to be full-text searched. For example, a sales executive preparing for a new business pitch could search for and find the team’s shared competitive intelligence documents right from his Workday home page — even if they are stored in a separate, web-based word processing program.
• Extensions to natural workspaces – Workday’s intuitive user experience will extend to employees’ external applications and tools they use to collaborate, chat, and drive productivity. For instance, after a project presentation, a manager’s anytime feedback given in Workday could surface in the instant messaging stream of the tool the team used to manage the project.
• Personalisation capabilities – Workday Designer, a web design tool that enables customers to personalise their Workday experience without requiring coding, will help create a differentiated, branded experience for employees. For example, adding imagery and logos and using similar brand colours would give employees a familiar experience while making the corporate brand more extensible.

Comments on the news

“Today’s HR leaders accept that they must employ a network of solutions to fully support and enable their people, but will no longer settle for a subpar, disconnected portal that adds complexity and friction to the employee experience,” said Cristina Goldt, vice president, HCM products, Workday. “Workday will fill the gap where HR portals have failed – alleviating the frustration that people endure when having to move between various tools and resources. With the power of personalisation and intuitive functionality woven into the core HR system, our customers can enable their people to perform tasks easily and efficiently, in turn, boosting engagement and productivity for the benefit of the business.”