Return to work after COVID-19: Workday resources

In our previous checklist, we shared several tools available to you as a Workday customer for communicating with your employees as they adjusted to their new work environments. Our latest checklist shares the top tools available to help transition your employees back into the office setting or assist you in finding more permanent virtual options for your people.
 

  Workday Org studio

With the many changes companies are facing against the impact of COVID-19, HR teams may be looking at large-scale or multiple company reorganizations. Workday Org Studio is a reorganization modelling tool that offers a new approach to managing reorganizations in Workday. Using a combination of drag and drop capability, worksheets, audit functionality and collaborators (think business operations personnel that may have a vested interest in a reorganization), it simplifies the way these are done inside of the system. This tool is useful for organizations considering a large or multiple company reorganization, providing a quick and efficient way toto reorganize and restructure.
 

Workday Learning

Many organizations around the world are beginning to reopen, return employees to their workspace and adjust to the new normal. It’s important to consider that not all employees may have been working remotely; some may have been out of work for weeks on furlough and may need an alternate reintroduction to the workforce. Organizations that are operating with a smaller workforce than usual may also need to cross-train existing staff due to their changing scope of responsibilities. Additionally, many organizational budgets will have been tightened due to COVID-19, meaning that talent and benefit teams may need to find new ways to keep employees growing and motivated despite reduced training options and reduced bonuses.

If your organization doesn’t have a strong learning solution to support your employees’ evolving training needs Workday Learning is a great solution to consider during this time to enhance the skills of your employees. The learning module offers a consumer-like, on-demand and personalized experience for users and combines professional development, peer learning and required training into a single intuitive application for an enhanced user experience.
 

Utilizing the Workday homepage functionality

Workday enables customers to customize their Workday homepage to give their employees a better user experience. Consider how you can use the customization to share personalized updates with your employees and whether this could be an effective method of communication. Think about your people processes and how they may have been impacted by COVID-19. Do you need to create customizations or perhaps edit existing ones? Below are a few recommendations of personalized experiences you could consider from this Workday blog:

• Virtual employee onboarding pack

• Guidance for managing virtual teams

• Providing information on your leave schemes to employees impacted

• Guidance for transitioning to a new department, location or role

Workday Request Framework

Our recent Return to Work survey found that 79% of organizations were considering implementing a permanent flexible working structure for at least some of their employees. Your organization may have flexible benefits available to colleagues for their commute, such as travel season ticket loans or cycle-to work-programs that may need to be updated to accommodate new benefits needs for remote workers. Additionally, other more urgent needs may arise for your remote workforce, such as submitting a sick note when taking sick time. The Workday Request Framework allows you to create business requests within Workday, enabling remote workers to easily create requests around their needs, and for managers and leadership to manage and audit those requests directly in Workday. This feature also enables you to build these requests into existing business processes, including configuring approvals around these request steps, and allows for tracking and reporting for auditing purposes.

Workday for mobile

This is a great tool for organizations to use either while easing their workforce population back into the office or committing to more permanent virtual employment options. Workday for mobile allows your workforce to easily access and complete self-service tasks and view reports on the go. Because Workday honours tenant security settings regardless of the platform used, workers will have the same view they have on their desktops as they do on their smart phones. You can even restrict what access to Workday is allowed off network.
 

Candidate communications

With global unemployment at an all-time high, candidates are eager to stay in touch with employers. Workday enables ad-hoc communications to keep you in touch with candidates about hiring freezes, interview time changes and even  other potential job requisitions that may be open that fit their qualifications.
 

Adjust your financial plan

As companies undergo changes to their operations and workforce, they will need to complete financial reforecasting exercises as well. Workday Adaptive Insights has the analytical capabilities to model various financial scenarios by capturing the plan drivers that might affect financial planning going forward. It then provides reporting output based on actual results in areas such as staffing, inventory, cash flow and capital expenses.

For more returning to the workplace tips, check out Workday Community’s guide.