Guide for managing talent in Workday

When it comes to talent in Workday, everything is different—by design.

So, what makes it different?

By bringing together HCM and talent into Workday, you are able to benefit from everything a unified system has to offer. Not only will your data be stronger, opening the door for complete visibility into your workforce, it will also provide consistency for your employees.

This combination of data across HR and talent provides quick and easy access into the full state of your workforce—it’s not just who works here and what they do, but it also tells you:

• What people are working on.
• If the right work is getting done.
• What the work is costing.
• Your overall business results for the work that is being performed.

Breaking it down... goal management for Workday talent.

What are organization goals?
They’re principles or values that your business or organization should achieve throughout a given period of time and applies to everyone as a whole rather than being tied to individuals. While these are not rated in performance reviews, any personal goals that support these organizational goals will roll up in a report for review and tracking.

What are personal goals?
They’re included in performance reviews, and can be rated either as support for organization goals or as standalone objectives. These can be determined by a manager or an employee.

What about archiving goals?
When goals are no longer relevant, employees and managers should put these into the archives. It’s important to note, if you mass archive your goals rather than archiving them individually, you cannot mass rescind the archived event and you cannot mass restore goals.

How should I use the employee review templates?
There are four categories, each using their own unique business process and template, which is the primary differentiator between each of them:

• Performance review
• Development plan
• Disciplinary action
• Performance improvement plan

What about feedback?
There are three different types of feedback that can be acquired either ad-hoc or as part of a formal review process:

1. Self-requested feedback allows managers to get feedback on their employees.
2. Role-requested feedback allows employees to get feedback for themselves.
3. Anytime feedback allows employees to give feedback to another employee voluntarily.

What are performance calibrations?
They are the interactive plotting (drag and drop actions) of employees based on a single rating (i.e. their overall performance). Performance ratings can flow directly into performance calibration so that workers are automatically plotted.

What are competencies?
They are a library of skills that can be associated with job families, management levels, job profiles, templates and positions. Although competencies can be associated with positions, it is not recommended because of the level of maintenance. 

Taking a closer look... worker profile talent attributes in Workday.

What is a professional profile?
They’re a snapshot of six key worker talent attributes including talent statements, job history, education, skills and experiences, projects and skills. If there is anytime feedback for this employee, it can be displayed here. Workers can also import education, external job history and skills by using resume parsing.

Talent Statements are brief professional descriptions about a person on their Worker profile. You can write talent statements about yourself or others. Talent statements can be used to support performance reviews, development discussions and career planning.

What skills and experiences are included here?
Education, languages, competencies, training, professional affiliations, certifications, external job history, accomplishments or awards, internal projects, work experience and talent statements.

What about career and mobility?
Career attributes can be captured through an employee’s talent profile, talent review and by using any performance template. Career interests, job interests (the “compare me to job” functionality), travel (the percentage of time configurable to your needs) and relocation (both short and long term) can also be captured here.

What are talent cards?
They’re a one page summary of a worker’s key talent information that can be printed as a PDF and are configurable with BIRT.

How should I use potential assessments?
These assessments are process driven to allow for additional flexibility and capture five values:

1. Potential
2. Retention (risk)
3. Loss impact
4. Achievable level
5. Nominations

They can be assessed on an ad-hoc basis (either on an individual employee or on a supervisory organization), with the section included on a talent review template or the task included as part of the performance or development process. 

What about talent reviews?
They are primarily used by HR to push an event out to employees and managers asking them to update their talent information. Try to think of this process as updating an internal resume. Similar to performance reviews, talent reviews can be distributed to each worker individually or mass launched for the entire organization.

What are talent calibrations?
Similar to performance calibrations, they use interactive plotting based on any two custom ratings (i.e. performance and potential) on the talent matrix. They are also a forward-looking event that is used to ensure performance and potential are assessed consistently across your organization. While commonly thought of as a true talent review, try not to confuse it with the talent review template.

What does the succession planning process entail?
Succession planning helps to identify candidates for critical positions while tracking important attributes such as potential and level of readiness. It’s business process driven to allow for additional flexibility and can be created for any position within the organization. The succession plan itself includes employee details and readiness for internal candidates who are going to be filling the position or a list of top candidates if the role needs to be filled externally.

What about succession pools?
These can be created to manage candidates for an individual or for multiple job profiles as they may be used in more than one pool.

How do you find workers?
You can search by various criteria such as location, job profile and supervisory organization, with a report filtered and customized to your organization’s unique needs. 

What about talent pools?
These pools enable you to group similar workers outside of your organizational boundaries together. There are two different talent pool types:

1. Static: these are updated manually, and can tag up to 5,000 workers. You can tag workers this way by using find workers, custom reports or worker objects.
2. Dynamic: these are updated automatically, and can tag up to 50,000 workers. You can tag workers this way by using saved searches from the find worker report.

Diving in...connections and mentors in Workday.

How do mentorships work?
Workday’s mentorship functionality gives structure to informal one-on-one relationships between workers that are business process driven. The functionality gives you the ability to add a mentor, view mentorships, edit mentorships and close mentorships at your disposal.

What about connections?
Connections capture informal networking between workers within your organization and can provide insight into the interpersonal relationships within your organization to help ensure employee engagement stays high. 

Workday talent - let’s recap.

As you know, things are always evolving within Workday and talent is no exception. There have been quite a few process enhancements recently that are worth noting:

• Consider my competency rating assessment in Workday—this is a new standalone task that pulls competency data from employee reviews and shows that data in a radar-style visualization graph so employees can see how they rated across all competencies within a specific review. 
• Did you know you can enable employee reviews for contingent workers? Now that employee reviews are open for contingent workers, you can initiate reviews of each type for all of your workers. 
• What about skill enhancements? The skill proficiency feature provides consistency within the skill experience between both candidates and current workers. It also helps to protect the integrity of the skills table while introducing recognized and additional skills to the table. 

Now that we’ve covered off on Workday Talent, you’re well on your way to helping your team understand the power of integrating HCM and talent together.