2024R1: Key Insights You Can’t Afford to Miss
Workday 2024R1 is here! This blog shares all the top features that Kognitiv’s Product Lead team has determined you need to be aware of and should be adding to your roadmap.
A few features are automatically available, meaning they require no setup for you to see and use; the rest require setup, which typically includes some configuration, testing, and change management (as needed).
As organizations strive to adapt to an ever-evolving business landscape, Workday continues to lead the charge with cutting-edge solutions designed to enhance efficiency, elevate user experience, and drive organizational success. Take a read, make note of anything you’re not already planning to implement, and get a plan in place to put them into use in your tenant!
HCM and Payroll
| Workstream | Feature | Description | Setup Effort | Product
Lead |
| Absence | Absence Calendar | New Absence Calendar experience will be available by updating the initiation security on the Time Off BP Policies. The existing time off and absence calendar experiences are set to be deprecated at some point in 2025. | Setup Required | Christina Duritza |
| Benefits | Reopen OE | Allows workers to request to reopen their most recent Open Enrollment, if within window based on configuration, to make any necessary updates. Admins can also reopen from the open enrollment status report for one or multiple workers. This removes the process of having to manually rescind workers OE events first and then re-adding them back. This also keeps the workers original elections (the manual rescind and re-add did not). | Setup Required | Maribeth Ebert |
| Benefits | Retirement of Benefit Worklet | The Benefits Worklet on desktop will be retired. You will need to transition to the Benefits & Pay Hub (which was released in 2022R1) or a custom dashboard, if not yet ready for the Hub. The Benefits worklet is still usable on mobile. | Setup Required | Maribeth Ebert |
| BIRT | Workday Docs for Layout | Gives clients another method for creating statements for a Compensation Review process beyond the Workday-delivered statements or BIRT. Works with several specific data sources for talent, performance, and financials. | Setup Required | Anne Reichler/ Jennifer Jensen |
| Compensation | Compensation Experience for Managers/ Dynamic Plan Type Display | More configuration options to show or hide relevant data to end users as they complete Change Job or Propose Compensation transactions. | Setup Required | Anne Reichler |
| Compensation | Grid Configuration Profiles for Compensation Review | Highly anticipated functionality that allows for multiple grids in a single compensation review process providing different views to different planners. | Setup Required | Anne Reichler |
| Compensation | Total Rewards Statement | The redesign makes the Total Rewards Statement easier to understand and navigate with a complete redesign of the user interface. New configurable section groups that display as cards on the statement are available. Section groups can include lists, tables, and calculated values. You can also arrange cards on the statement. | Setup Required | Anne Reichler |
| Compensation | Total Value Compensation Matrix | Allows for more complex calculations in Compensation Matrices via conditional calculations. | Setup Required | Anne Reichler |
| HCM | Configurable Fields for Personal Information | This feature allows you to define custom drop-down values within the Personal Information functional area. | Setup Required | Alex Wilson |
| HCM | Job Profile Business Process | Workday delivers a new business process that enables you to configure workflows and approvals for creating or editing a job profile. | Setup Required | Alex Wilson |
| HCM | Worker Messaging | Worker Messaging, which allows you to communicate time-sensitive messages to workers using SMS, email, and push notifications. | Setup Required | Alex Wilson |
| Recruiting | Configure Job Requisition Fields | Workday improves control and flexibility to tailor job requisition tasks by providing the option to hide ‘Create New Position’ or ‘For Existing Position’ when creating a job requisition. This feature release prevents the need for workarounds previously used such as validations on job requisition business process and addition of Check Budget step on job requisition business process to prevent position creation. | Setup Required | Francine Vosikas |
| Recruiting | Notification on Disposition | Administrators will now be able to configure notifications to trigger based on multiple disposition reasons per job application business process. This feature release lowers maintenance for administrators because you no longer need to trigger disposition notifications per reason, per stage (many customers may be able to move from 100+ notifications to just a few!) | Setup Required | Francine Vosikas |
| Recruiting | Recruiting Event Management for Candidate Engagement | Workday enables you to create and manage virtual, in-person, and hybrid recruiting events to improve candidate engagement. | Setup Required | Francine Vosikas |
| Recruiting | Skills Cloud for Candidate Pools and Prospect Introduce Yourself | Workday now allows you to create dynamic candidate pools that filter on Skills Cloud skills. Enables prospects to enter their skills when filling out the Prospect Introduce Yourself form and registration forms for recruiting events hosted with Event Management (part of Candidate Engagement SKU). Simplifies the experience of entering skills by suggesting skills based on resume content. | Setup Required | Francine Vosikas |
| Reporting | Composite Report User Interface | With the recent addition of the columns and column headings, composite reports have become less difficult to build. Columns allows for quickly adding columns to the report definition but also provides a helpful breakout of all the various column types such as control, data, lookup, repeating, formatting overrides, and calculations on the report definition. Column headers are a much needed improvement, creating and maintaining multiple column header groupings has never been easier. With these enhancements, Workday places all aspects of a composite report configuration in easy to access tabs rather than having to click on individual columns, rows, headers, cells, prompts, etc. | Automatically Available | Igor Bekman |
| Reporting | Mass Update Report Tags | With this release, customers will be able to maintain their entire custom reporting catalog. With mass update report tags, customers can easily identify reports based on search criteria and choose to assign, unassign, or unassign and assign report tags. This will enable customers to administer their reporting strategy with more ease, whether it be tagging reports that need to be deleted or reports that need to be updated. | Automatically Available | Igor Bekman |
| Security | Business Process for User-Based Security Group Assignment Updates | Workday introduces the Update User-Based Security Group business process for managing user-based security group assignments. This highly anticipated feature enhances controls and visibility around changes to user-based security group assignments. -supports conditional approvals, advanced routing, and notifications -does not currently support “Send Back” -does not currently support notifications being sent to the event subject -does not support validations -can be initiated in the UI or via web service |
Setup Required | Peter Stevens |
| Talent/ Performance | Career Hub | Workday improves Career Hub by allowing employees to save and manage job in their Career Hub plan | Automatically Available | Heather Tomer |
| Talent/ Performance | Gigs | Workday improves the gigs user experience by enhancing various features and enabling for gig roles. Gigs are being rebranded to Flex Teams. This is an automatic change on March 9th when the release goes live in Production. Clients can override Flex Teams with Gigs if they choose | Automatically Available | Heather Tomer |
| Talent/ Performance | Goals | Workday continues to enhance the new Goals UI by improving the navigation, usage, and management of goals. This only applies to clients that have enabled the new Goals UI in Production | Setup Required | Heather Tomer |
| Talent/ Performance | Peakon | Workday provides the ability to view insights and actions from within Peakon in the Manager insights Hub | Automatically Available | Heather Tomer |
| Time Tracking | Effective Dating | Can now select effective dated changes for Time Calculations and Time Calculation Groups | Automatically Available | Christina Duritza |
| Payroll | Payroll Insights | A new Payroll Insights feature – that leverages machine learning to analyze and provide real-time insights into payroll results based on historical payroll result patterns – enables administrators to find and review potential abnormal results. The intent is to improve payroll accuracy and reduce the amount of time and effort spent on identifying and reviewing payroll exceptions. | Setup Required (must opt in to Payroll Machine Learning GA Features innovation service) | Sarah Meyers |
| Payroll | Retro Tax Authority Changes | Workday Payroll for the U.S. removes Retro Tax Authority Changes from the list of unsupported payroll retro transaction types and ignores tax authority changes during retro calculations. Now you can calculate retroactive payroll for pay periods that contain supported transaction types without impact from tax authority changes, which reduces the need for manual calculations and pay input. | Automatically Available | Sarah Meyers |
Finance
| Workstream | Feature | Description | Setup Effort | Product
Lead |
| Accounting | Alternate Ledger Currency | This gives multinational clients the ability to now have more than one ledger currency. This change touches all operational areas since the new functionality posts operational journals to multiple ledgers. When reviewing the What’s New there are multiple references to this new feature | Setup Required | Candis Smith |
| Assets | Currency | Workday now enables you to register, track, and depreciate assets independently in your local and functional currencies by leveraging the ability to select a ledger when configuring your asset accounting books. This helps streamline asset reporting for local statutory reporting needs. | Setup Required | Lauren Peichel |
| Assets | Custom Depreciation Rate Schedules | Workday enhances custom depreciation rate schedules to streamline your compliance with accounting or regulatory requirements. | Setup Required | Lauren Peichel |
| Procurement | Requisitions Experience | Improved requisitioning experience in Workday by delivering the new Requisitions Experience Unification feature that you can opt into for a more streamlined requisitioning process through the Requisitions worklet. The new worklet was available in the last release but it’s further improved with product tour pop-up windows automatically available and non-configurable (not guided tours). | Automatically Available | Lauren Peichel |
| Suppliers | Alternate Ledger Currency | Workday enables alternate ledger currency in the Supplier Accounts functional area, allowing you to generate accounting and reporting for supplier transactions in both your functional and local currencies (cross functional as this benefits assets as well) | Setup Required | Lauren Peichel |
| Suppliers | Ledger to Payables reconciliation | Enhanced Payables to Supplier Reconciliation report by providing a new composite report that displays values based on the initial balances as of a fiscal period (vs. since the beginning of time) | Automatically Available | Lauren Peichel |
In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and enterprise solutions, staying ahead of the curve is not just a choice but a necessity. Workday has consistently demonstrated its commitment to empowering businesses with cutting-edge tools, and the 2024R1 update is no exception.
If you need help with implementing any of the above features, Kognitiv is here to help! Reach out to any of the Product Leads directly or contact us here.
