2026R1 Decoded: The Features That Actually Matter for Your Roadmap

Calculated Award Pools

With this feature you can now use the calculation engine to calculate promotion, additional adjustment, and lump sum pool calculations allowing for more granular control and customization.

This can help reduce the amount of time spent loading compensation review budget pool EIBs or using the UI tasks to change budgets when launching a compensation review process.

Setup Required

Waive Option on Enrollment Event Rule

You can now configure different date options of waiving from a plan vs. enrolling in it instead of currently needing two different event types.

Setup Required

Dependent Effective Dating

With this feature, Workday will require an effective date prompt when adding or editing a dependent. That date then applies to all aspects of that dependent and controls whether or not the dependent is visible in benefit events (currently this goes off of birth date not effective date). Workday also provides new tabs for Future Dependents on the My Dependents Grid of the benefits page of the workers profile. New feature also added to be able to correct the effective date – approval step must be on the Dependent Event BP and the event can be sent back to the Worker then to correct this – Admin will not receive to correct the date.

Automatically Available

Report Prompt Value Controls

This is the most exciting feature in report prompt controls that has been part of numerous brainstorms over the last decade. When a report prompts for certain types of fields, there are huge numbers of possible values. For example, when prompting for ‘Organization’, the prompt drop down may contain thousands of values that need to be sifted through in order for the user to select the right one. With this feature, you can control the following aspects of prompting:

You can specify the values that will be selectable under a particular prompt. Using the Organization prompt example listed earlier, you can configure such that only certain supervisory organizations, cost centers, locations, etc. will be available for selection.

You can also specify combination values. For example, if you have two report prompts (Organization and Employee Type), not only can you specify which Organizations are selectable, you can also specify which Employee Type is selectable based on the selected Organization. Let’s say you specify that in the Organization prompt, you can only select Cost Centers CC123 and CC456. You can control the Employee Type prompt to only allow ‘Regular’ employee types to be selected for CC123 and only allow ‘Interns’ and ‘Temporary’ employee types to be selected for CC456.

Please consider utilizing this feature for any report where end users are exposed to huge drop down lists of irrelevant Workday objects to greatly improve the user experience.

Automatically Available

Skils Cloud Skill Descriptions

With this release, Workday enables you to use AI-generated descriptions for Skills Cloud skills. You can view a three-part description for a skill that includes the definition, the knowledge required, and professional use cases.

Setup Required

Anonymous by Default Setting

Workday removes a barrier to providing feedback with the Anonymous by Default Feedback feature. We enhance the feedback experience by allowing you to set feedback requests sent to feedback providers as anonymous by default. Feedback providers no longer have to select to provide anonymous feedback.

Setup Required

Recruiter Hub

With this release, Workday enhances the Recruiter Hub, providing recruiters a centralized workspace with a single point of access to their job requisitions, candidates, tasks, and reports across all stages of the hiring pipeline. Enhances the recruiter experience by consolidating key recruiting information into a single, customizable workspace, enabling faster insights, improved focus, and quicker, more informed decisions.

Recruiter Hub replaces Recruiting Hub. Cards and UI are not configurable at the user level – ONLY administrators have the ability to update. UI will look and feel similar to newer hub framework (ex: Jobs Hub). The Recruiting Hub (old hub + collapsible sidebar) is being replaced by the Recruiter Hub in the Global Navigation Sidebar. The Recruiter Sidebar will remain, default collapsed, and can be manually expanded/collapsed.

Recommendations:

• Configure as soon as possible for an easy transition. If you do not configure, you will receive the default setup.
• Review and update card settings, and recreate any customized views.

Setup Required. If no action is taken, Workday will display the Recruiter Hub in default settings which may be vastly different from your Recruiting Hub today.

Fraudulent Job Application Settings

With this release Workday enables you to get more insights into network and location information for job applications coming through your External Career Sites. You also now have the option to restrict the ability for candidates to update their personal information after submitting them. Enabling the candidate signal data report fields give you visibility into common signals that you can use in combination with intelligence and other data, to determine the origin (or nature) of job applications completed on your External Career Sites.

Note:

• New fields are secured to Candidate Data: Job Application domain
• The signal data associated with the External Career Site Signals Business Object will start being collected once you enable the setting. Job applications prior to this setting being enabled will not retroactively update with data.
• If you use a 3rd party to host your apply pages, then the Automation score and other signals will not be available to you since the user needs to interact with the Workday pages to get the data.

Setup Required

Multiple Resource Pools for a Worker, Security and Reporting

Workday now supports adding workers to more than 1 resource pool, while ensuring that access to both the resource pool and its members are granted correctly based on user permissions.

The changes provide better visibility and flexibility in resource management and also improve system integrity.

Add workers as needed based on organizational requirements with the go live of this release.

Setup Required (Only as it’s determine a worker should be added to more than one resource pool)

Copy Canceled Settlement Runs

We now enable you to quickly create new settlement runs with open items from previously canceled settlement runs.

This feature enables you to quickly reprocess payments after you cancel settlement runs by eliminating the need to manually search for and select open items from canceled settlement runs. This saves you time and streamlines your workflows.

Automatically Available

Non-Live Registrations in Assign Registration Overrides

Institutions with complex transfer credit and/or course repeat rules rejoice: you now have more choices to align Workday with your policies surrounding how these types of courses are counted towards GPA versus degree requirements. These changes are automatic, so action is not needed to allow academic requirements to be overridden with “non-live” registrations, but action is needed if the institution desires control, approval, and/or insight into who is performing these overrides. Note that academic requirements overrides must be managed manually and they will not automatically shift based on the awarding of transfer credit or students repeating courses. Plan for testing and updating job aids so that students, advisors, and administrators are clear on what is possible, how to expect the system to behave, how to read the academic history and transcripts, and how to request and approve these overrides.

Automatically Available

External Student Site Redesign

This feature is for institutions using the External Student Site for Admissions Applications and who administer Financial Aid through Workday as well as those who use a third-party for Admissions but still use the External Student Site to allow students to respond to their offers, complete action items, or manage financial aid. Any of those institutions should consider opting-in to this new design as it results in a cleaner user experience with increased digital accessibility, but note that this is still the opt-in phase, so you can choose to wait until it is required. These new features are not supported for External Student Sites using simple brand settings — must use custom brand.

Setup Required

Student Journey Reporting

Institutions leveraging Student Journeys will be thrilled that Workday has exposed CRFs to enable reporting around journey progress. Reports and calculated fields that reference the Student business object can now pull in the “All Student Journeys” field. Vice versa, the Journey business object now offers a “Student” field enabling administrators to connect the journey progress to the Student completing it in multiple ways. The set up required is security related to open access to the new security domain Reports: Student Journeys and then to update existing reports or create new ones with those elements included. Institutions not using Student Journeys can ignore this feature.

Setup Required

Registration Assignment Policy

Any institution using non-standard or overlapping academic periods will be thrilled with this new feature that solves a variety of issues, e.g., students attempting to repeat a class in a consecutive non-standard period will no longer get a hard error. Setting this up is fairly straightforward and you’ll spend the bulk of the estimated time testing registration behavior, academic progress, and transcripts. Pay special attention to the deployment considerations noted around timing in the documentation and note that Workday plans to release a corresponding business process in a future release. If your institution is happy with all registrations rolling up to the standard academic period, then you can ignore this feature.

Setup Required

Segmented Security for Time Entry Codes

Segmented security is no available to make time entry codes available to workers based on their security groups preventing the need for complex eligibility rules or time entry validations.

Setup Required

Frontline Agent for Time Approval

A new Frontline AI agent will be availble in Workday to be used by managers for approving time. Approvers can ask the agent questions about time entries and get detailed information before choosing to approve the time directly in the agent. They can also search for all time awaiting their approval and approve some or all of them directly from the Frontline Agent.

Setup Required

View and Report on Schedules in Absence

This is a great feature to allow clients without Time Tracking or Scheduling functional areas enabled to be able to report on Work Schedules. No immediate updates will be needed, but if you have been struggling to get reports for work schedules currently it would be a good idea to test out these fields to get your reports created.

Automatically Available

1098-T Lifetime Consent Policy

This is a long awaited enhancement for 1098-T processing. Workday introduces a lifetime consent policy for electronic delivery of the 1098-T federal tax form. If you wish to update this feature, you will need to configure the policy using the new ‘Maintain 1098-T Consent Policy’ task.

Automatically Available

Streamlined Student Sponsor Invoicing

There are significant improvements to the student sponsor contract invoicing experience. Despite Workday listing the setup effort as ‘Automatically Available’, clients should note that existing student sponsor invoice BIRTs and custom reports using the customer invoicing business objects will no longer function. These must be recreated to use the Student Sponsor Invoice Document or Consolidated Student Sponsor Invoice data sources.

Automatically Available

Correct Change Job

With this release, Workday delivers a new Correct Change Job SOAP web service and more correctable fields in the enhanced user experience.

This feature provides you with the ability to make high volume corrections to Change Job business process events using the new web service, and expands what fields you can correct on the events.

This is a great enhancement! Being able to do high volume corrections for individual events is excellent. It avoids having to rescind and redo if there’s an error for large volumes.

Automatically Available

Restrict Job Profile Visibility by Country and Organization

Workday now enables you to restrict the visibility of job profiles by specific supervisory organizations, companies, countries, or a combination of all three. During staffing transactions, users will only see job profiles that are valid for that event based on your configured restrictions.

This feature ensures users are only able to see and choose from job profiles that are appropriate for certain staffing transactions. It enables you to have distinct job profiles across different portions of your business, which improves the user experience and decreases data discrepancies.

This is a great enhancement that solves a long standing issue we have seen with many global clients and clients that operate multiple businesses in a single tenant.

I would note that the behavior of the existing Restrict to Country field will change with this update so even if you don’t plan on leveraging the new organization feature, the behavior of the existing Restrict to Country option will change. Review your job catalog to make sure that you will not be inadvertently restricting access to job profiles with the Restrict to Country field populated as before that worked more as a warning.

Also note that you may need to update your EIBs to support this new feature when making updates to your job profiles if you use the new organization restriction feature.

Lastly, we wanted to highlight that Workday mentions in the update post that you can still use the “WID:” search pre-fix and the WID for the job profile to search for job profiles if you have exceptions.

Automatically Available