Workday Docs – Easy Document Generation in Workday
Creating a document template in Workday already exists for a very long time. Creating a template avoids the need to manually adjust documents based on personal information and sending it via email to request a signature for example. Having a document template makes it possible to generate documents with personal information a part of a certain process. Like providing a document after a salary adjustment.
The new Workday Docs has been introduced to all Workday customers with the 2023R1 release. At that point the new feature was only available for the Offer and Employment Agreement business process in Recruiting. We needed to wait until 2022R2 before it could be used for most of the HCM business process.
It has been more than a year now that Workday Docs is available for most core processes in Workday. Still we have the feeling that a lot of customers are not aware of a few of the great advantages that Workday Docs but also document in general in Workday can offer.
Did you know?
- Documents in Workday Docs can be created more easily, quicker and with more options than the old way of creating documents
- You can easily add a header and footer without the help of an integration consultant, Workday studio or BIRT
- Documents can be signed (by multiple people) in Workday with Adobe or DocuSign
- Multiple documents can be added in one inbox task
- You include questionnaire answers in a Workday Docs
More user friendly
Workday Docs made the creation of a new document template so much easier. Compared with the old feature ‘Create Document’ not only the look and feel of the feature but also the different document options are so much user friendly. Thanks to the Preview option for example, it is possible to preview your final document which saves a lot of testing hours.
With the ‘old feature’ a layout needed to be created with Workday Studio or BIRT, this often meant that the help of an integration consultant was needed. With Workday Docs a header, footer, table or image can be easily added by a consultant/ the internal Workday team of a company.
You can even create headers and footers based on certain condition rules. This allows your company to have another heather depending on the company in Workday for example.
Within a few clicks images or tables also can be uploaded and placed within the document. The same counts for external links that need to be included in the document. Also, the general basic layout options like text, colour, size and bullet points can since 2021R2 finally be adjusted like you would do in a Word Document.
Signing a document in Workday
We still see very often that all kinds of documents are created and signed outside of Workday and afterward added to the document section on the worker profile. This asks a lot of time (and often emails) of HR members. With the required configuration an integration with DocuSign or Adobe Sign can be easily established in the tenant. This makes it possible to sign a PDF or generated document in Workday. An ‘eSign’ button on the inbox task directly opens the integration and makes it easy to sign the document in Workday itself. If needed a document can be routed to multiple employees in Workday in order to get all the needed signatures. Afterwards, the document is automatically stored on the Workday profile.
The ‘eSign’ button is also available to candidates when they sign an offer letter or contract in their candidate home. So not only internal employee benefit for the integration but also potential new hires.
Multiple documents in one inbox task
For some processes in Workday like onboarding, multiple documents need to be filled in and signed. Workday offers the possibility to include multiple documents in one inbox task. This ensures that the employee it not overwhelmed with too many inbox tasks. Unfortunately, it is not possible at this point to include more than one generated document per inbox task, but a generated document can be combined with one or more PDFs to read or sign. In that way, you can ask the employee to sign a generated document with personal information after a location change and add the needed information in a pdf in the same inbox task.
Questionnaires and Workday Docs
Personal information that is currently not in tracked in Workday can be included in Workday docs without the intervention of HR. By using the questionnaire functionality before generating the document, you can easily collect missing information. A questionnaire step, as part of a certain business process step (this is unfortunately not yet available for all BP’s in Workday), can be sent to the employee. Later on, the questionnaire answers can, with the use of calculated fields in the background, be added to the Workday Docs.
If needed a ‘review document’ step can be added, so HR can review the generated document before this is send to the employee for signature for example.
This allows your company to generate documents in Workday that are currently completed (and signed) outside of Workday due to the fact that the missing information wasn’t stored in Workday. With non or limited effort from HR.
Is your company already benefiting Workday Docs to the fullest?
Implementing a document template can save your company so much time and effort. It avoids the need to request personal information from employees by HR and it also avoids the need to fill in documents and collect them by email. Signed or acknowledge documents are automatically stored in Workday so it also skipped the step to upload signed documents into Workday.
Since the availability of Workday Docs in most HCM business processes the use of Workday Docs is now widespread over the whole tenant. We also expect the document review and generation step on more BP’s in the future. For now no new concrete updates have been planned. More updates hopefully to come soon in the coming new releases.
For now, we can definitely conclude that Workday Docs makes the creation of document templates so much easier and quicker once you know how to use it and what it’s capable of doing for your company. We hope your company can to the same conclusion, if not we like to help you to benefit from this feature soon.
If this feature is something you would like to explore with your organization, please contact us via the form below.
