Workday® Comp Year End

The holiday season is a busy time for Workday® professionals who are preparing for a new year. Adjustments to many Workday® functional areas are necessary and must be planned for. One such adjustment that many companies address at this time of year is updating grade and grade profile ranges and making tweaks to their compensation structure. For many companies, this could be a simple EIB updating all existing grade profile ranges. However, a good percentage of companies will have significant changes to make driven by new compensation survey data that can cause changes to the job profile catalog and the corresponding compensation ranges.

For these companies that proactively manage their compensation practices strategically in Workday®, the maintenance necessary to keep relevant ranges aligned to an evolving job catalog is frequently misunderstood and underestimated. Not only are the EIBs involved cumbersome and tedious, but possible related changes to job families/groups, addition of net new ranges, and perhaps hierarchy changes to org structures that drive comp differences (location, region, etc), will mean cascading changes to the population and to numerous eligibility rules. The disconnect happens when these related changes are not properly understood. What the comp team views as just an update will actually involve configuration, eligibility rule changes, testing in sandbox first, and only then do we get to production and move the populations. The expectation gap could be measured in weeks or even months.

The key to healthy maintenance of your compensation framework

• A structure that is flexible to change – Use job families or groups instead of job profiles to drive ranges and rules. Similarly, use hierarchy nodes instead of locations or regions. You will trade some granularity for improved maintenance capability, but this will insulate your organization from the impact of many smaller changes.

• Involve HRIS in major compensation initiatives that alter the job catalog, grades, or plan changes – Workday is highly interconnected. Your HRIS team needs to know the requirements so they can advise and prepare.

• Be ahead of the game, not behind – Future effective dated changes work well. Near term, or retroactive changes, will frequently conflict with in flight processes and cause significant issues to aligning a shared date.

Reach out of you would like more information or some support in getting through this busy time of year. info@teamUpHR.com