Workday 2025R1's hottest HCM features

Human Capital Management features, rated and reviewed

Mia Eisenhandler
February 18, 2025

Read time: 12 minutes

Hey there! Mia here. We’ve got another release deep dive for you today…

One you may have been waiting for 🔥

This week, we’re breaking down the upcoming Human Capital Management features we’re most excited about 😎

Here’s today’s rating scale…

😍 Game-changer
😃 Impactful
😊 Worth-a-mention

If you missed last week’s breakdown of Workforce Management features, you can check it out here.

There’s a lot in this one, so let’s get right to it!

📧 Visiting from the link in your email? Click here to jump to impactful features.

The features, rated and reviewed…

Workday’s Human Capital Management Release Notes include the following sub-products (# of Release Notes this release for each sub-product in parentheses)…

Advanced Compensation (2)
Benefits (5)
Case Management (0)
Cloud Connect for Benefits (0)
Compensation (12)
Core HCM (24)
Journey Paths (2)
Knowledge Management (1)
Onboarding (1)
Org Studio (0)

2025R1 release notes include 47 HCM features thus far. Similar to last week’s Workforce Management review, we felt ~90% of HCM features are, at a minimum, worth a mention.

Here they are, rated (each section’s in alphabetical order by Release Item)…

If you saw our LinkedIn post ratings on Monday, we’ve made a few minor updates since then!

The game changers…

First up, 😍 game-changing HCM features, reviewed in detail (also listed alphabetically)!

[1]

Feature: Configurable Visibility of Pools and Budget Wheels in Compensation Reviews

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Advanced Compensation

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: You can now hide compensation review pool and budget wheel graphics from selected populations within your compensation review users. For example, you can allow Managers who are Director-level and above to see pools and budget while hiding from Managers below Director. In addition to removal from within the compensation review tasks, Workday also hides pool and budget data on the…

Compensation Review Budget Pools report
Compensation Review Status Report
Compensation Review Status Report by Hierarchy

Setup: Create a security group(s) that isolates the population you do want to give access to pool and budget data, and place this group on the new View Compensation Review Pool Data domain. Remove any broader security groups from the domain, activate pending security policy changes.

🔗 Release Note

[2]

Feature: Configure Additional Address Components

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: You can now use the Maintain Address Components by Country task to add additional custom address components for each country. This gives your global organization way more control and agility as you expand your global footprint and meet your changing integration data requirements.

You can also opt in to have Workday sync your Address Component updates with your web services (i.e., ensure your address inputs are reflected on EIBs that include addresses).

Something to consider with this feature—many organizations have already found workarounds for this previous limitation. Our take? It’s likely worth retiring your workarounds (e.g., business process validations) to utilize the new, delivered functionality.

Setup: Run the Maintain Address Components by Country task and click the + button to add row for a new address component.

Notes:

Changing address configurations can impact integrations! Workday includes a validation when you update address components to remind you of this.

Use the updated View Address Components by Country report to view your updated configuration.

You can update Recruiting Address Components on the Recruiting Address Components tab of the Maintain Address Components by Country task.

🔗 Release Note

[3]

Feature: Configure Optional Fields for Change Job

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday expands its optional fields functionality in the Change Job business process with 16 new fields that can be: hidden, required, restricted by security group, or displayed as non-enterable. Using the Configure Optional Fields task, admins now have more granular control over who can view, edit, or enter data—helping to improve data integrity by displaying only relevant fields and limiting inputs to the right people.

Academic - Annual Work Period
Academic - Work Period Percent of Year
Academic - Disbursement Plan Period
Employee Type
Time Type
Working Time
Contingent Worker Type
Select a Job Requisition for this change
This person is a manager. Will their team be moving with them?
Currency
Frequency
Job Profile
Which team will this person be moving to?
Who will be this person's manager after the move?
Work Hours Profile
Location

Setup:

Run the Configure Optional Fields task and select “Change Job” as the functional area.
Configure the fields for your organization, considering you Change Job templates and security setup.
Test your configuration and update your training materials.

🔗 Release Note

[4]

Feature: Hire Employee Task Redesign & Consolidated Hire Business Process with Compensation

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: 2025R1 delivers an automatically available, redesigned Hire Employee task (the 2024R2 opt-in is removed), with the option to add the Propose Compensation Hire subprocess to your consolidated template! The task's consolidated template now has 7 Hire subprocesses available. If selected, these tasks show up in the guided experience in this predefined order:

Edit Government IDs
Change Organization Assignments for Worker
Assign Employee Collective Agreement
Edit Service Dates
Propose Compensation Hire (NEW!)
Assign Pay Group
Payment Election Enrollment Event

Setup:

Click the related actions on the Hire BP > Business Process Policy > View
Click the related actions on the Hire Business Process Policy > Business Process > Configure Consolidated Template OR Configure Rule Based Consolidated Template

To add a rule to your consolidated template, add your BP in the Configure Rule Based Consolidate Template task.

Notes:

While the redesigned task is automatically available, note that consolidating your BP does require setup.
Move all exit validation errors from the respective subprocess initiation steps up to the Hire initiation step. Otherwise, they won’t fire!
Delegation is not yet available on consolidated Hire events.

Add “Propose Compensation Hire” to your consolidated template.

“Compensation” will appear on your Hire Employee consolidated template task.

🔗 Release Note

[5]

Feature: Infinite Scrolling on Compensation Review Grid

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Compensation

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday no longer limits you to 500 results in the popular Search Employees report for the comp cycle—the limit is increased to 2,000! This feature also delivers endless scrolling so you don’t have to click through pages of results.

Why’s this small update a game-changer, you ask? The 500-result limit meant that when you pulled large datasets into your comp grid view, you risked not getting your complete population of interest. You had to get creative with time-consuming, piece-meal workarounds, nearly defeating the purpose of using the grid at all. Now, more organizations can pull their full population in one go!

Setup:

The feature is technically automatically available, as listed by Workday, but you do have to tell Workday what your preferred limit is…

Run the task Edit Tenant Setup - HCM. Scroll to the Compensation section and in the Preferred Compensation Review Employee Awards Grid Limit, enter up to 2,000! The default is still 100 if you don’t change this value.

Notes:

You should only increase this limit if you meet these 2 criteria for infinite scroll…

You only have one plan per award type in the process (this supports the Search Report).
You only have one plan per award type for every employee in the Org and Sub Orgs (this supports the report from My Tasks).

🔗 Release Note

[6]

Feature: Mobile Benefits UI

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Benefits

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: For employee populations who mainly access Workday via mobile, Workday makes electing and changing benefits easier by optimizing the mobile benefits UI to improve their experience on-the-go (and off the desktop). They also add a number of accessibility features to ensure that everyone—regardless of ability—can access and use technology effectively to make the right elections. The UI redesign here is key for highly mobile workforces!

🔗 Release Note

[7]

Feature: Remove Multiple Matrix Members from Matrix Organizations

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: We’ll be honest… prior to the last release we often avoided matrix orgs. Why? You had to add and remove workers one at a time. 2024R2 delivered the ability to add multiple workers to a matrix org at once. And now with this 2025R1 feature, you can remove multiple workers and their associated positions from a matrix organization en masse with a new business process and associated task, Remove Multiple Matrix Members.

This is a BIG win for matrix organization usability 🙌

Setup:

Create and configure the business process definition for the Remove Multiple Matrix Members BP.
Configure and activate the business process security policy.

Notes:

When you set up an approval step on the Remove Multiple Matrix Members BP, the approver can review and approve all workers and corresponding positions for the event.

🔗 Release Note

[8]

Feature: Supervisory Organization Editable on the Change Job Business Process

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Core HCM

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: You can now edit the Supervisory Organization field when reviewing job changes! This allows the person or receiving manager reviewing the change to select the right supervisory organization when a worker is being moved to a new manager. This update is super helpful for completing transfers more efficiently entirely within the Change Job BP.

Setup: None required, but we’ll note here—based on our testing and review of Community user questions, it looks like there may be some bugs with this feature in Preview. No definitive response from Workday yet, but they’ll surely take a look and get this working soon! Keep an eye on the Release Note, and wait to test this one further until WD has worked out the kinks.

Notes:

When the review step is routed to the current manager, they will not be able to edit the Supervisory Organization field.

🔗 Release Note

[9]

Feature: Workday Docs and Document Generation for Onboarding Business Process

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Onboarding

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: You can now configure a Generate Document action step within your Onboarding BP and use a document dynamically created with Workday Docs. You can then add a Review Document step to distribute the document during Onboarding. The ability to dynamically create and distribute documents during Onboarding all within Workday is a huge win for efficiency and flexibility 🙌

You can now consolidate documents that require dynamic sections, customize documents with event-dependent content, update branding and formatting in one place rather than loading PDFs to Workday Docs, and more!

Setup:

Ensure the Drive and Docs domains are configured within your System functional area.
Configure DWXF as a supported file type within your Edit Tenant Setup - System task > System Setup > File Type Setup Instructions.
Create and publish your document templates within your Workday Drive.
Select a document template when you configure a generate document step within your Onboarding BP.

🔗 Release Note

Next up, impactful features…

Here’s a sentence or two on each HCM feature we rated 😃 Impactful (listed in alphabetical order) to help you determine what you’d like to look into further!

Benefit Credit Offsets for Workday Payroll (Benefits - Setup Required)

Configure benefit credits within payroll earnings and deductions to offset the cost of a worker’s benefit election more easily, using two new instance value calculations.

Custom Business Process Validations on Worksheets (Core HCM - Automatically Available)

When you process mass actions through worksheets for Change Job, Change Organization Assignments, End Contract Contingent Worker, or Termination, your custom BP validations are now triggered when you select Validate All. Previously, only WD-delivered validations were triggered here—a significant functionality gap is filled!

Effective Dating for Service Dates SOAP Web Service (Core HCM - Automatically Available)

With version 44.0 of the Edit Service Dates web service, Effective Date becomes a required field to accommodate Effective Dates becoming mandatory on all service dates with 2025R1. Make sure you update your EIB version!

Enhanced Offboarding Resignation User Experience (Core HCM - Automatically Available)

The Submit Resignation task is new and improved with user-friendly(er) labels, configurable quick tips, and a guided experience. Employees can now find the Submit Resignation task in the search bar rather than from their profile only.

Job Description Generation on Job Profile (Core HCM - Setup Required)

Press a button to automatically generate a job description on a Job Profile (using AI) based on the Job Profile Name, Company Name, and Preferred Display Language. 2024R2 brought this feature to job requisitions, and now you’ve got it on job profiles as well, available in 8 languages.

Job Profile Business Process Skill Suggestions (Core HCM - Setup Required)

Skill suggestions are now displayed within the Manage Job Profile task based on information you add to the job profile such as Job Profile Name, Job Title Default, Summary, and Additional Job Description.

Manager Insights Hub (Core HCM - Automatically Available)

Buttons for hiring and staffing tasks, along with a new view of in-progress hires, are added to the Manager Insights Hub, enabling your Managers to more easily support their team.

Minimum Wage in Compensation (Compensation - Setup Required)

A handful of enhancements across Compensation, Benefits, and Payroll make it easier for your organization to meet minimum wage requirements.

Percent-Based Commission Plans for MBT and Web Services (Compensation - Automatically Available)

Workday expands its percent-based commission plan feature delivered in 2024R2 by enabling %-based commission for Manage by Basis Total (MBT) compensation, and updating web services to support %-based commission plans (this’ll be a game changer once percent-based commissions are added to the comp cycle!).

Pre-Hire Segmented Security (Core HCM - Setup Required)

New constrained and unconstrained pre-hire security segments give you greater control over who has access to pre-hires associated with an organization (constrained) versus pre-hires not yet associated with any organizations (unconstrained).

Rescind Manage Job Profile Business Process (Core HCM - Setup Required)

You can now rescind Manage Job Profile business process events 🥳 Edit Rescind action on your Manage Job Profile BP security policy to start using this feature. And… Workday says the ability to correct is coming soon!

Templates for Propose Compensation Hire (Compensation - Setup Required)

You can now include the Propose Compensation Hire subprocess in your Hire Employee consolidated template! Run the Maintain Compensation Change Templates task to configure Propose Compensation Hire fields and sections to appear within your Hire task.

Total Rewards Template Conversion (Compensation - Setup Required)

Workday delivers the new Convert Total Rewards Template to New Template task that allows you to easily convert templates created before 2024R1 to the new template format. This feature also includes a few other enhancements to the Create Total Rewards template task that are worth checking out!

These 6 features are impactful (and potentially game-changing!) for U.S. federal Workday customers…

U.S. Federal Enhancements - Personnel Action Request (Core HCM)

Workday introduces 2 two fields to Personnel Action Request (PAR) under the Agency Data Data Element: Transfer In Agency Code and Transfer Out Agency Code, which help track employee transfers between agencies for accurate record-keeping. Users can now also cancel automatically generated PARs, and specify which blocks in PAR setup should remain empty for a particular action.

U.S. Federal Pay and/or Grade Retention (Compensation)

You can now retain a worker’s previous pay or grade when they move to a position of lower responsibility and document that retention. Note that there’s quite a bit of setup to utilize this helpful feature!

U.S. Federal Personnel Action Requests - Add and End Additional Jobs (Core HCM)

The Personnel Action Request business process is now available as a subprocess within the Add Additional Job and End Additional Job business processes.

US Federal Enhancements (Core HCM)

The Cybersecurity Area field within the Create Position task is now a multi-select field, and a new Occupational Series field is delivered within the Job Family task. Both updates offer greater flexibility within staffing action configuration.

US Federal Personnel Action Request - Create Printable SF52 (Core HCM)

You can now generate a printable PDF of the SF52-Request for PAR events. Your custom report fields will pull data from worker events to populate the printable SF52!

U.S. Federal Personnel Action Requests on Compensation Web Services (Core HCM)

U.S. federal users can now load employee compensation events en masse when running compensation events with PAR processing using web services. The PAR BP is now enabled as a subprocess of the Request Compensation Change and Request One-Time Payment web services.