Is your HR team struggling to keep up with the onslaught of repetitive Workday requests? Perhaps you’re looking for a solution to minimize the many mundane requests that complicate your operations, take prolonged time to resolve, and divert attention away from your strategic initiatives.
But what if there was a better way to leverage Workday capabilities by pairing it with the power of automation?
In this blog, we discuss the eight common HR tasks that can be automated in workday as highlighted in our recent webinar, share how automation may streamline these tasks, and finally how tools like Moveworks can be used to automate HR processes within Workday.
What are the benefits of automation in Workday?
Setting up automations in Workday may help to noticeably enhance your efficiency, accuracy, and employee satisfaction too.
By streamlining routine processes and reducing manual errors, automation may enable HR departments to free up valuable time to focus on strategic initiatives and provide more personalized support. Using automation may lead to reduced manual labor for HR teams, faster response times, and accelerated approval workflows, which could help to enable improved HR productivity and efficiency.
Additionally, automation could help to minimize human error, ensuring improved data accuracy and compliance with regulations. By providing real-time updates and improving data quality, automated systems can enhance the overall effectiveness of HR operations. Furthermore, automation helps to enable HR departments to optimize resource allocation, enhance decision-making with valuable insights, and increase the ROI of existing HR systems.
To summarize, automations in Workday may enable HR teams to:
- Answer common questions instantly
- Accelerate support for complex issues
- Increase the ROI of existing HR systems
What HR use cases can you automate in Workday?
HR teams must often juggle handling employee profile updates, expense management, benefits enrollment, and support tickets while also addressing ad-hoc requests.
To optimize HR efficiency, consider introducing automations to span across your employee lifecycle. This can include onboarding new hires, managing time off and PTO, performance management, and automating training and open-enrollment reminders.
1. Recruiting and onboarding
2. Benefits administration
3. Time and absence
4. Expense management and payroll queries
5. Employee record profile updates
6. Learning and development
7. Performance management
8. Workplace culture
Let’s explore how it is possible to automate these eight common HR use cases in Workday that cut across the employee lifecycle.
1. Recruiting and onboarding
Recruiting and talent acquisition can be challenging to manage, between referring and interviewing talent, tracking referrals, monitoring headcount progress and managing candidate status.
Automating these workflows within Workday may help to streamline employee referrals and interviews, reducing the burden on managers and recruiters, and elevating coordination and communication, so that organizations can create a more effective hiring process.
2. Benefits administration
Navigating benefits enrollment, accessing information on retirement accounts, or understanding available benefits can be confusing for many employees. This may lead to numerous employee queries, inefficient operations, and poor program adoption, particularly during open enrollment.
By automating and simplifying your benefits enrollment process, you may help to improve your retirement planning, increase benefits awareness, and enable a more effective benefits management system.
3. Time and absence
Employees are often unclear how to book time off or fix incorrect attendance records. Additionally, HRIS systems can be tough to keep updated. This confusion means that your HR team may face difficulties with tracking overtime, payroll errors, or have a limited visibility into time-off trends.
Automating these processes and systems helps to streamline time off approval workflows and improve compliance, enabling you to more effectively coordinate time and absence management.
4. Expense management and payroll queries
Payroll can be challenging to manage, from fielding your employees expense and tax questions to handing compliance issues to managing approvals.
Automation enables your team to refine your expense reporting and reimbursement processes, which may improve efficiency, accuracy, and compliance. It may also potentially reduce manual data entry errors, refine workflows, enhance visibility into spending patterns, and help to enable compliance with expense policies and regulations.
5. Employee record profile updates
Maintaining accurate, updated records is far from straightforward with frequently changing employee information, manual verification processes, inconsistent data, and reporting issues.
Using automation may simplify, speed-up, and improve record-keeping processes, better enabling more accurate and up-to-date employee data, refined workflows, and reduced administrative burdens.
6. Learning and development
Employees can lack clarity on how to access or complete training courses, while your team might lack visibility into their training progress and development outcomes.
Using automation may help to simplify course management, streamline administrative processes, improve user-friendly identity management, and provide comprehensive employee record-keeping. In this way, by automating processes such as course notifications, approvals, and training reminders, organizations may be able to enhance employee engagement, elevate compliance, and improve overall learning and development outcomes.
7. Performance management
Managers and HR leaders alike can struggle with aligning team results with strategic goals, conducting performance reviews, and monitoring performance trends. However, by using automations to improve goal tracking, goal setting, goal alignment, and performance reviews specifically within Workday systems, organizations can help to create more effective and streamlined performance management processes.
8. Workplace culture
Have you ever wanted to have greater visibility in your organization’s workplace culture? Automation can be a key part of fostering a positive culture, enabling you to more easily survey, gather employee feedback, and analyze results. Additionally, automations could even help your employees to quickly identify Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which can help to cultivate a more inclusive and diverse workplace.
How to get started with Workday automations
Step 1: To get started with Workday automations, begin by assessing your current processes to identify repetitive tasks that could benefit from automation.
Step 2: You’ll then want to explore the various automation features available within Workday, considering specific use cases that align with your organization's goals no matter whether you're looking to enhance culture, manage performance, or onboard employees.
Step 3: It can be easier to implement automations in a phased approach rather than all at once. Try starting with simple tasks and then gradually expanding as your team gains experience. By following these steps, you can better leverage Workday's automation capabilities to simplify processes, improve efficiency, and reduce manual effort.
How Moveworks enables Workday automations
To bring much-needed automation to overwhelmed HR teams, we’ve continued to invest in our HR capabilities. The Moveworks platform helps to focus HR teams on meaningful work and employees get what they need by:
- Answering common HR questions instantly
- Enabling employees to complete key tasks themselves
- Helping to increase the ROI for existing HR systems
Moveworks functions as an AI-driven copilot for automating employee support, effectively addressing common HR queries and tasks seamlessly through a conversational interface. Moveworks integration capabilities enhance user support across multiple applications and systems, significantly helping to reduce the time employees spend searching for information or navigate traditional processes.
Moveworks uses generative AI to deeply understand what an employee is asking for and who they are. With this context, our copilot can comprehensively understand user queries and individual contexts across various domains, including helping to automate HR functions like checking remaining PTO balances, inquire about benefits, review company holiday schedules — and immediately get information tailored to their needs.
Maximize your Workday investment with Moveworks
As an owner or administrator of a Workday tool, it can be crucial to stay ahead of the curve by leveraging AI to automate repetitive HR tasks, enabling you to potentially improve your employee experience and operational efficiency too.
Automating HR tasks within Workday through the application of AI can transform your organization's operational capabilities. By utilizing Moveworks and Creator Studio, you may enhance processes, improve employee satisfaction, and cultivate a more efficient workplace too. Creator Studio is Moveworks' robust solution that enables developers and Workday owners to build workflows that integrate seamlessly with various HR processes.
For more information on getting started or advanced automation strategies, schedule a demo, reach out to your Moveworks account representative, check out our webinar on common HR tasks that can be automated in Workday or explore our Plugin Library to see the numerous plugins you can build for Workday in Moveworks Copilot.
Check out our Plugin Library to discover and add Workdays plugins to your Moveworks Copilot.
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