Transcript for "Recording - Don't Just Update Your HCM - Transform it with Workday 2026R1": Okay. Hello everyone and welcome to the looking forward with Workday webinar for our '26 r one HCM release. Thank you for joining us today. Before we dive in today, I'd like to introduce your presenters. I'm joined today by principal product marketing manager Charlotte Mclachlan and senior product marketing manager Taya Burns. You'll hear more from them later on in this presentation. We may have a few forward looking statements that are subject to change, so please note that this is covered under our product statement agreement. Before we get started, there are a few housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded and will be emailed to you within twenty four hours. If you have any questions, you can select the q and a button on the right hand side, and hopefully, will have some time left at the end to answer. We have uploaded some resources for you to view. Just simply select docs on the right hand side to download. And lastly, you will be prompted with a survey after the webinar ends. We would love to hear your feedback. Now more than ever, organizations like yourselves are looking to your HR technology to help create a more productive world of work. You want to eliminate unnecessary administrative burden, get the insights you need to accelerate decision making, and engage your employees more effectively to drive a total transformation. For our twenty twenty six r one release, our focus is laser sharp, driven by three core strategic pillars to help you create that more productive world of work. These pillars guide every innovation we deliver. First, deliver experiences for superior performance. Second, ensure HR operational excellence. And third, amplify human potential. So let's start with that first pillar. How we're delivering experiences that will drive superior performance by delivering exceptional experiences. First, we're introducing the new Workday experience. It's an AI ready interface that marries consumer grade simplicity with enterprise grade power. For years, you've told us that you want power of Workday, but with the simplicity and intuition you've come to expect from consumer applications. Well, we finally delivered. But what does this mean for your users? This new experience features a fluid modern design with an AI ready interface that anticipates needs and surfaces next back best actions. And the best part? No replatforming is required. This is a seamless, exciting update for everyone. So what's changing? Let's walk through it. First, the modern homepage is no longer a digital filing cabinet. It's a dynamic launchpad designed around how people actually work. We've really focused on getting employees to their tasks faster and streamlining those common daily activities. Take a look at the new prominent search bar. This is your gateway to work, and here is our first key principle. Start with what you want to achieve, not which menu you need to open. You shouldn't have to know the specific navigation path. You simply need to type in your intent. But we've taken a search a step further with the AI overview and search. Instead of just returning a list of links you have to click through, the AI the AI quickly delivers consolidated precise answers right at the top. For example, if an employee searches, how many vacation days do I have left? They get the number instantly, not just a link to the PTO policy. This saves valuable employee time and critically reduces the number of support tickets filed for simple transactional questions. Building on that theme of instant report, we introduced the self-service agent. This is our powerful AI powered assistant that is truly transforming how employees interact with their HR and finance teams. Think of it as your personal digital partner. The self-service agent provides instant answers and enables effortless task completion directly within the chat interface. It can handle common requests like updating your address, submitting an expense report, or clarifying a policy. By automating these interactions, we've reduced the volume of cases hitting your HR and finance service teams and freeing them up for higher value strategic work. Here you can see the sleek intuitive new chat interface. It's designed to feel natural and conversational, making it easy for employees to engage with the agent and get the help they need without ever leaving Workday. So let's take a closer look. We're all quite familiar with ChatGPT and Gemini at this point. But imagine, what if your employees had that same familiar concept available directly in their HR technology? Now instead of asking HR common questions, they can use our new front door powered by Sana to get their questions answered. In this demo case, we see a new manager trying to figure out how to submit a spot bonus. This is a process that they've never done before. First, they ask about the policy behind bonuses. Next, they work through creating that spot bonus, the same conversation powered by our Asana self-service agent. It's simple, easy, and intuitive, and gets the job done right without HR needing to receive a single question, saving your team time and energy. Now let's pivot to a set of features that are all about how we're continuing to enhance employee experiences across the HCM suite. First, we have the compensation self-service agent skill. Imagine your employees need to check their total compensation, bonus history, or deferred compensation plan. Instead of opening an HR support ticket and waiting, this new skill offers instant and secure access to that information. It's a win for employees and a reduction in routine support cases for your HR team. And we're also improving discoverability of journeys for your employees with journeys in global search. As you roll out more distributed and self-service journeys for things like return to office, new manager training, or well-being resources, you definitely want people to find them easily. Embedding journeys directly into global search ensures they're surfaced exactly where you you and your users are looking for them. Our next feature focuses on empowering your employees with withholding orders for employee self-service. This update enables workers to independently view details about their active and historical withholdings orders right from their desktop or mobile device. The setup is simple, completed within the edit tenant setup payroll task. The key benefits are clear. It significantly reduces the time your payroll administrator spends responding to basic withholding order inquiries and truly empowers employees with a direct independent experience to access their own payroll information. Other ways we're improving employee ability to act is with the ability for employees to apply unused benefit credits towards their pension or receive them as cash in their paychecks. This enhancement gives your people more options and flexibility when making their election choices, while also providing better visibility into the value and investment your organization has made to support their long being financial well-being. This delivers an improved benefits experience for your employees, particularly for organizations with a global footprint through improved support for global benefits configurations. Another way we're improving our employees' experience is with our new AI spreadsheet time entry. This feature allows employees to update their time entries directly via Excel, which is then intelligently matched with Workday for seamless and accurate integration. This capability not only increases time accuracy, but also minimizes potential revenue leakage while saving your employees valuable time and effort in the process. Moving on, we're excited to share that we've automated the completion tracking of learning steps within journeys. This means the system will now more accurately reflect an employee's true progress and ensure that your reporting on journey completion is precise. This change is designed to reduce employee frustration with tracking, improve their experience, and ultimately increase compliance and the reliability of your completion reporting. Now let's look at features for a manager focused improvement. Our new onboarding manager task visibility. The first few weeks for a new hire are crucial, and their compliance with all their necessary tasks is critical. This feature provides managers with a clear comprehensive view of their new hires task progression. This improved visibility drives better compliance and accelerates the new hires time to productivity. Finally, we have the new compa integration feature. This is a powerful strategic integration that embeds real time market intelligence directly into the core talent workflows, such as change job. What does this mean in practice? It means your compensation professionals and managers have immediate visibility into competitive compensation data right in the workflow where they are making a job offer or salary adjustment. This ensures your compensation decisions are competitive, fair, and aligned with the market, all without leaving Workday. Together, these features significantly reduce friction for employees and managers while providing HR with smarter, more integrated tools. Next, let me hand it over to Charlotte to cover our next pillar. Go off mute. Thanks, Alison. I'm excited to be here and excited to show you all how we're focused on delivering tools that you need to ensure operational excellence. Our goal here is simple, to shift from reactive data management to proactive intelligent operations. The payroll agent is central to achieving HR operational excellence, and it does this by automating complex, time consuming workflows and enhancing your data insights. It is now GA. Through your agent system of record, it's simple to turn on the available skills and update the security categories to determine who can use those skills. The agent is multiskilled and constantly evolving. Its initial skills are designed to tackle the biggest pain points in payroll. For example, a core skill is identifying missing data and configuration. Think about how much time is spent chasing down employees for simple things like payment elections or bank details. The agent surfaces information as a direct task for the payroll specialist, preventing errors before the payroll run even begins. Another critical high value skill is our minimum wage analysis. Staying compliant with ever changing minimum wage laws across different jurisdictions is a constant challenge. The agent can not only proactively alert you to potential compliance issues, but you can also see and understand the strategic insights right away. And finally, the agent supercharges your access to critical information through our payroll data insights. This is where you'll see the biggest shift. We're moving away from looking at static reports for hours and hours to getting critical personalized insights in minutes through a simple conversational UI experience. You're not searching for answers. The agent is bringing the answers and the action items directly to you. This is the future of payroll operations. But let's see what this looks like in practice. To do this, I'm going to quickly share a demo. So please hold while I transfer over. Perfect. We should be seeing the demo now. And when we think about payroll prior to agentic involvement, it was looking at static reports and dashboards and spending hours building complex reports to answer one question. Now with our agent involved, we take finding those critical insights from weeks and hours down to minutes with a conversational UI experience. Payroll administrators ask a question and immediately get the answer they're looking for. And as they see something they might want to ask a follow-up question on, they do it there and then in the same conversation. Our payroll data insight skill means payroll gets a helping hand right where they need it the most. In HR, they get the data they need to make more strategic decisions for the business quicker. And please hold while I go back. The next set of features we'll cover in our twenty six r one release are designed to deliver HR operational excellence with features that truly increase efficiency and accuracy for your teams. First, we have demand forecasting. This powerful feature uses machine learning to forecast based on key business demands, like sales projections or foot traffic, which in turn optimizes your schedules and significantly reduces labor costs by ensuring you have the right people at the right time. This feature is specifically designed for those of you in retail and hospitality industries that use our labor optimization features. Next, we're introducing the ability to auto generate meals and breaks. This feature is a huge win for compliance and schedule management. It automatically places compliant meal and break periods per your meal and break rule sets. This takes the guesswork and manual effort out of a critical regulated task, supporting single or multiple worker updates. You get scheduled improvement management, and your managers get easier schedule creation. We're also introducing the new assigned schedule priority to worker. This will allow you to rank workers based on the factors you define, which then guides automated scheduling decisions. However, you can continuously update the ranking as this is both effective dated and adjustable over time. This change is increasing overall scheduling efficiency and getting the right staffing mix every time. And finally, administrators using our scheduling SKU now have the ability to manage centralized penalty reason types at the tenant level. These reason types can be designated as either penalty or no penalty. This capability is integrated across various scheduling publishing processes. When updating and publishing schedules, managers will then choose from this predefined list. This enhancement is expected to boost manager efficiency while simultaneously improving data collection regarding the reasons for scheduling changes, which is particularly valuable for tracking penalty reasons that may have a financial impact. Next, let's quickly cover some key updates across our core HR and global payroll features that will help some of your heaviest users, your HR VPs and your payroll admins continue to operate at their best possible level. First, the out of order job change feature, which is a huge win for data accuracy. It allows you to insert new job changes behind existing events. Think of a backdated promotion that needs to be recorded after other actions, all without needing to reenter any data. For this for you, this means easier to correct and maintain your staffing events and improve accuracy of work data for better insights. This is a huge win for our global customers. Next, we're enhancing how you manage compensation with calculated reward pools. Instead of relying on static budget entries, this feature automatically determines funding for promotions and adjustments based on the criteria you set. This gives you more granular control over the determination of award pools. And for those of you involved in payroll processes, we're delivering greater workflow flexibility and improving data quality with configurable validations on the request payroll input business process. Key enhancements include workflow flexibility. Initiators can save for later, and approvers can send back. Data integrity. Conflicting changes are reduced by blocking the deletion of payroll input that is already under review. And auditability, we offer a comprehensive tracking of all of the payroll events that's now enabled. And for our global customers using our Global Payroll Connect and our new Global Payroll Hub, we're introducing some new updates to enhance global payroll processing for you all. These include the ability to and capability to support pay groups for payrolls processed within Workday and provide payroll partners and administrators with a single consolidated location for accessing insights related to both Workday processed and externally processed payrolls. We're bringing your native payrolls right into your global payroll hub. Furthermore, users can now create and manage payroll processing checklists, which provide a clear real time view of checklist tasks and key payroll insights for each period. This functionality is designed to reduce manual tracking and auditing while significantly improving control and auditability across your payroll operations. And we're excited to announce several enhancements designed to improve payroll efficiency and clarity, specifically for Australian payroll. For Australian payslips, we've increased readability by offering the option to aggregate retro results, and we now aggregate superannuation contributions by the superannuation pay component, fund name, and member number directly in the UI and on the PDF payslip. Additionally, for a single touch payroll, STP reporting, we delivered new report fields to significantly improve your reporting capabilities, including details like tax year, submission ID, pay groups, and critical exception status. Continuing on for Payroll Australia, we've introduced two key enhancements to superannuation functionality. That is a hard word to say. First, we've improved control over insufficient funds for voluntary superannuation by allowing you to decide what happens when a worker has insufficient funds for the voluntary deductions. You can now set a rule to either allow a negative pay result or suspend the deduction for that pay period. Second, we're providing more support for alternate number format that supports up to 20 characters to align with legacy SAFF guidelines for simplified organizational capabilities. Last year, we introduced payroll for Ireland Ireland, and we continue to iterate on that experience, starting with a revenue employment identifier. This feature empowers consistency and improves the user experience by standardizing how Workday generates employer identifiers. Now when you transfer a worker to a company with a different employer reference number or when you terminate and rehire a workday worker, Workday will automatically generate the employment identifier in the standard format. This helps ensure accuracy and compliance. Secondly, for our customers using payroll for Ireland, we've improved revenue reporting performance. We've enhanced the performance of the integrations with the revenue service to ensure ongoing reliability and significantly reduce the risk of failed submissions, especially during those peak reporting hours. And for those of you using our UK payroll, we've introduced features that help improve your accuracy and experience. We've significantly enhanced statutory sick pay functionality to incorporate new legislative changes coming to effect from 2026 to 2027, including SSP becoming a day one right. Earnings above the lower earnings limit is no longer a criteria for SSP being generated and updates to SSP calculation to use the lower either 80% of average weekly earnings or the weekly SSP flat rate. We've also made enhancements to the statutory parental bereavement pay for Northern Ireland to ensure we're meeting the requirements for day one pay rights that removes the twenty six week service requirement for pay in Northern Ireland and expanded coverage that processes leave and pay for those who suffer a miscarriage prior to twenty four weeks, and new data item fields for full payment submission and employer payments summary to support unique Northern Ireland reporting to ensure accurate statutory recovery from HMRC. We've updated UK payroll to ensure full compliance with HMRC's requirements for the twenty twenty six twenty twenty seven tax year. This includes two major updates, the introduction of a new real time information or RTI, EPS submission event business process, and adding support for statutory parental bereavement pay, specifically for the workers in Northern Ireland. Finally, let me highlight a new AI powered feature, FLSA and FSB Insights. This proactively guides you through the correct configuration for Fair Labor Standards Acts and flat sum bonuses, helping you maintain compliance and avoid costly errors. And the final feature that is going to enable you to ensure operational excellence is making sure people can accurately understand your policies. And to do this, you can use knowledge based articles. To help improve the maintenance of knowledge based articles, we're introducing two new features with Workday Help, article life cycle management and article approval workflows. With our life cycle management, authors can now be added as a publication, and an expiration date can also be included in an article. We know this is a big win. Article approval workflows are also now available, so authors can submit an article to one or more approvers for approval prior to publication. This is going to give you more accurate insights to your workforce and to help improve details. Together, these features improve experiences across the user, providing the tools you need to work, but deliver HR operational excellence. Next, let me hand it over to Taya to cover our final pillar. Thanks, Charlotte. Let's end with our final focus, how we're investing so you can amplify human potential in a world where AI is becoming more and more prominent. We'll first shift our focus to workforce planning, talent optimization, and recruiting. Our goal here is to showcase features that not only cultivate your existing talent, but also significantly improve your recruiting process. We've enhanced our workforce planning offering with organizational design and scenario modeling. This allows your teams to analyze various what if scenarios, helping you build more resilient and adaptable workforce strategies. You'll now be able to more accurately align your workforce plans with your organizational strategy without having to leave the Workday HCM experience. And to ensure that you cultivate your existing talent, we're leveraging AI for clarity and standardization for our Skills Cloud skills. Delivered Skills Cloud descriptions uses a Gemini large language model to generate detailed AI driven descriptions for skills. This not only standardizes the language across your organization, but also deepens everyone's understanding of key competencies. When it comes to recruiting the best talent, we're addressing a common pain point, fraudulent job applications. Our new features expose data signals for malicious activity, which significantly improves the recruiter experience by filtering out bad actors faster. This is phase one of our greater investments in these areas. Simply turn on this feature in your edit tenant setup, recruiting to start collecting the candidate signals to surface those data signals for your recruiters. But we're also simplifying the process to help recruit that best talent faster with AI investments. One is with our core recruiting features that now uses generative AI to help understand interview feedback fast. In this release, our core recruiting customers can now use GenAI to summarize interview feedback across the team. This can be surfaced for both recruiters and hiring managers. Now managers can review faster, improve their decision making, and reduce time to fill. And another way you can improve the experience for your recruiters is with our AI for recruiting powered by HiredScore. Now it's even easier for you to take advantage of our HiredScore functionality with our self-service configuration task. This enhances the existing tenant setup so as you implement hired score, you'll be able to configure more directly within Workday itself. But it's just it's not just external talent we're helping amplify. It's also your internal workforce. We have an update to the succession planning UX. This includes key features like succession plan notes and the ability to compare candidates directly. This makes it much easier to discover and act on key insights for your leadership pipeline. You'll have better insights into internal coverage, so for those of you with an internal first strategy, you can more easily support that. And to help your workers get towards those next steps, later in our twenty six r one release, we'll be introducing Gen AI goals. This is targeted for 26R1 plus and this capability allows workers to generate suggested goals and robust goal descriptions using generative AI based on their specific role in organizational data, improving the goal setting experience, and providing higher quality talent data. For suggested goals, workers may either generate them, similar to how we can generate development items today, And for goal descriptions, we'll take the goal title and a brief description and then use generative AI to build out more robust goals. Both experiences help employees write higher quality goals to work towards their ambitions. Finally, we're enhancing internal mobility with company defined career paths in Career Hub. This is also targeted for 26 R1 plus This feature helps guide your workers' internal development, ensuring their growth aligns perfectly with your overall HR and talent growth strategy. As administrators, you can easily build out and maintain career paths to guide workers through career progression with the abilities to specify lateral and promotional transitions and then make them available for view right from the Career Hub. Next, let's explore how you're able to leverage Workday to give you the data driven decision making tools you need. For our people analytics users, we've introduced several key updates to enhance data accessibility and security. You can now export to CSV for easier external analysis, and we've added multiple hierarchy security giving you more flexible and granular control over who can access specific datasets. For our Pecan customers, customer custom drivers are now also available. We're providing you the ability to combine question sets, including those you've already added into the system. This means you'll more quickly identify emerging themes and trends, but in a way that are more meaningful for you. In the realm of employee feedback, AI is helping us turn raw data into actionable insights. AI topics automatically generate company specific topics from survey feedback, identifying what matters most to your employees. And with our AI topics, you can even track how sentiment evolves across different survey rounds, helping you measure the impact of your initiatives and proactively address emerging issues. We've also made significant enhancements to how you can configure your surveys, giving you much more control. Admins now have the ability to select an independent frequency for each individual question within a survey and we've extended this capability to allow for setting individual driver frequency as well. Users can set frequencies for every question including a never option to completely omit specific questions from a schedule. This means you can create much more bespoke manual surveys enabling or disabling individual questions on a per schedule basis. Ultimately, this change simplifies survey setup, giving you confidence that your listening strategy is ready to schedule for employees and makes the system much more adaptable and configurable to your different listening needs and requirements. Finally, for our managers, we're simplifying the process of managing the total workforce with the Manager Insights Hub. This hub provides a centralized, streamlined location for managers to handle both full time and contingent workers by bringing Venly directly into Manager Insights Hub. This unification doesn't just simplify the manager experience, it also significantly improves compliance and cost management by providing a holistic view of all workers. In summary, our twenty twenty six r one release is laser focused on three core themes. First, delivering superior experiences through the new Workday experience and our innovative AI agent. Second, achieving operational excellence with features like the payroll agent and enhanced scheduling capabilities. And finally, helping you amplify human potential with new AI goals, functionality, and advancements in succession planning. These features are all designed to work together to securely automate complex workflows, maximize your team's potential, and deliver hyper intelligent personalized experiences for every user. It's possible to venture into Workday twenty twenty six r one feature adoption process on your own. If you take this route, it's imperative you embrace a flexible and phased approach. For those who want help, Workday Success Plans are subscription based service plans that offer exclusive, timely access to resources, tools, and expertise to help you easily adopt and configure twenty twenty six r one features. Or consider Workday professional services. Our word world class professional services team is committed to ensuring your success. With better predictability and fewer disruptions, you can deploy twenty twenty six r one with confidence. Lastly, have your organization's dedicated support liaison, your name support contact, submit a customer success manager support request via Workday Community, and we'll guide you along the way. Before we wrap up today, I wanna take a quick moment to remind you that at Workday, partnership and success go hand in hand. We know that unlocking the full potential of your technology requires more than just great software. It requires a roadmap. That's exactly why we offer Workday Success Plans or WSP. A huge part of that enablement is our training and certification offerings. Through a mix of instructor led training, on demand courses, certifications, and our vast library of learning resources, you can drive incredible efficiency and retain your top talent by investing in their skills. And, of course, our services ecosystem doesn't stop there. Whether you need predictable and fast deployment services, specialized partner services, 20 fourseven global support services, or just want to collaborate with peers in the Workday community, we have the resources you need to move your business forever forward. If you want to learn how to get more out of Workday, please reach out to us. We're healed here to help you build what's next. And that wraps our presentation for today. I want to thank you all, thank all of our fabulous Workday presenters who brought this innovation to light, and especially thank all of you who attended for your precious time. We look forward to speaking to you again in September for the Workday 2026 R2 release. Thank you. And now. let's see what we have for Q and A. Looks like we do have some time for additional questions. So I wanted to bring up some common questions we're hearing around our twenty six r one release. One is a question regarding the new Workday experience. This is now in opt out. As of '26 r one, this was a feature that became an opt out experience for our core Workday HCM customers. So you will be able to take advantage of the new AI powered search and also our new home screen in order to more efficiently find and access what you're looking for. Another question that we're getting asked is regarding the access to our agentic experiences. Do we need to have a UMSA? The answer is yes. In order to access details like a sauna self-service agent, a payroll agent, or other future agents, you will need to have the UMSA. This is different than the ISA that will allow you to take advantage and utilize features like our embedded generative AI, such as our job description generation or the future goals creation. To utilize our agentic services, you will need the UMSA. You will then need to access and turn on those agents within our agentic system or record. This is called the agent system administration hub within Workday. You'll be able to set the security for those agents, such as identifying managers, recruiters, or individuals. And then this will determine what skills those individuals can ask for. More information can be available with a Gen six system of record demo from your sales team. Another question that we're getting asked is around the org design scenario and modeling. How is this different than org studio? With org studio, you get this with our core HCM capabilities. However, you do not have access and insights to the cost implications that those work changes. With our org design scenario and modeling utilizing Workday's adaptive workforce planning features, you have the ability to change and update and make designs on what if scenarios. But behind the scenes, you also get new analytics that will allow you to more actively understand and be able to support those changes with the costs identified as a part of that experience. At this time, we are not able to mass execute on those changes, but that will be coming very shortly in the future. This means as you go through and potentially redeploy talent due to AI transformation, you have the insights that you need to go to your HR teams to make those strategic changes. Another question that we're hearing a lot is around our fraudulent job applications. This is just merely phase one of our experience. Right now, we are able to surface the candidate data signals so you can understand and see and access information to help you more quickly understand, is this individual actually one that maybe isn't aware or looks like a real applicant? And from there, you can make the determination and the decision. Like I mentioned, this is just merely phase one of that experience, and we will be investing more into this as well. Another question around some of these features, specifically around those in Pecon, is around our AI topics. This is available to you if you are a Pecon subscription customer. You are able to more quickly understand, and it is different than our topics capabilities because it's using AI to more quickly and easily explain and understand that. So those are some common questions that we hear specifically around our r one. At this point, just a reminder, it is an opt out for that new Workday experience. However, this is available to all of our customers. So from there, I hope you have an absolutely wonderful workday, and enjoy the rest of the day.