Preparing for your upcoming annual compensation review in Workday

PARIS 

This article in this week's The Economist on the pitfalls of badly designed bonuses is a timely reminder that annual compensation reviews are right around the corner. Having spent half of my 12-years' Workday experience implementing the module dedicated to salary review, bonus and stock awards, here are some useful tips:

•  If it’s your first time implementing Workday Advanced Compensation, it pays not to be overly ambitious: Try not to go big bang with bonus, stock and merit. If your salary review scheme is relatively simple (e.g., few items in your matrix) but bonus has a lot of complex scorecards, then start just with Merit and wait for the following cycle to add Bonus.
  
  
  
• Try to anticipate your Advanced Compensation needs when designing and implementing your Core model. There is nothing worse, after having spending time designing, implementing, deploying and training your workforce on one version of Core HR or Core Compensation, than to have to revisit it at the last moment because, say, the way you defined FTE in Core HR is a big No Go in Advanced Compensation.
  
  
  
• Make sure you plan enough time and resources for a dry run in your Sandbox tenant.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• If it’s your second year running the module, then go back to your notes as to what went wrong (despite careful planning, things inevitably go wrong – believe you me, I was there) and make sure you fix those issues for 2025. Check Workday's recent releases: Something that was not possible last year may now have become a standard Workday feature.
  
  
• Clean up your data: A major part of your support during the several months that your review will run will be dedicated to adding employees who were left out of the review when you launched it because they were missing, for instance, a stock plan. Or, conversely, having to remove some employees from your bonus review because you forgot to update their base salary and their bonus payout comes out wrong.
  
  
• Last but certainly not least, test thoroughly your participation rules for parallel events and watch out for those innocent-looking configuration decisions which can translate into major costs for the company. I remember that at one of my clients we were puzzled by the unanimity managers from various latitudes displayed when terminating their employees, until we realized that using that very date and not one earlier, allowed managers to increase their budget (after all, there’s little sense in raising the salary of a departing employee, is there?) Managers from all around the world weren’t necessarily in cahoots but like many other users when they find an opportunity to game the system, they rarely pass up on it.
  
  

 I could go on for thousands of additional pixels, but if you follow the above, chances are that you will mitigate your issues and maximize your chances of success. 

(This is the latest in a long series of blog posts dedicated to Workday and Compensation. Just check the chronological list of posts in the Blog Archive to find articles on these two topics: separately or together.)