Connect your testing tenants to the WD mobile app

Read time: 4 minutes

Hey there! Mia here. It’s 2025. That is, almost 10 years after the “future” Marty McFly and Doc time traveled to from 1985 😳

While teens aren’t riding their hoverboards to school in your local town quite yet, you know what is the norm?

A highly mobile workforce.

For those of us whose jobs are Workday-centric, we primarily work on desktop. We’ve typically got a big screen (or 2, maybe 3) that awaits us each day.

But zoom out and consider the average employee’s Workday experience?

It’s becoming increasingly mobile! The Workday mobile app is #15 in Business apps overall in the Apple App Store. And it has over 10 million downloads on Google Play 🤯

The average employee uses Workday to do things like view their pay, request time off, get benefits info, clock in and out, submit expense reports, etc. All of this, and more, can be done on mobile.

The takeaway here? Every HRIS team needs the ability to assess and test Workday mobile.

So, in today’s newsletter, we’re teaching you how 😎 Let’s get into it…

📲 How to test Workday mobile…

This seems to be somewhat of a secret in the Workday ecosystem (or at least something not too many folks are talking about).

Well, today we’re spilling the beans! Here it is…

You can log into your testing tenants (e.g., Sandbox, Preview, etc.) on the Workday mobile app.

When you connect your testing tenants to the Workday mobile app, you can do things like…

✅ Create user guides for mobile

✅ Review and optimize your workforce’s mobile experience

✅ Test new mobile features (extra important for releases!)

✅ Troubleshoot employee-reported mobile issues

Connect your testing tenant…

If you’re downloading the Workday mobile app for the first time, follow steps 1 - 4 below.

If you already have the Workday mobile app connected to your Production tenant, skip to step 5.

To begin, you’ll start on desktop. On desktop, log into the testing tenant you’d like to connect to the mobile app. Click your profile photo in the upper right-hand corner, click My Account, then click Organization ID.

a. Click My Account

b. Click Organization ID

After you click Organization ID, you’ll see your organization’s ID (typically some variation of your company’s name), and a QR code. Keep this page handy as you complete the next 2 steps.

Next, pull out your phone—we’re going mobile! Download the Workday mobile app from the App store or Google Play. Click Log In.

✏️ Note that this guide’s screenshots are on iPhone. However, the process should be similar on Android.

Click the QR symbol and scan your QR code from step 2. Upon your successful scan of the code, you should be redirected to the tenant’s sign-on page. Log in as you normally would, and you’re in business 🥳 If your tenant doesn’t have a QR code, don’t worry—you can add your tenant manually using its organization ID and tenant web address (scroll down to “Managing your tenants”… for cheat sheets that help you figure this out!).

If your Workday mobile app is already connected to your Production tenant, follow steps 5 - 9 below to connect your testing tenant(s)…

Log into your Production tenant on your mobile app. Click the menu dropdown button (typically your tenant’s logo) in the upper lefthand corner, and click Switch Organization.

Click Add Organization.

On a desktop, complete steps 1 - 2 again in the tenant you want to connect to mobile. Once you access that tenant’s organization ID and QR code, click the QR symbol below and scan the code.

Label your tenants with a nickname (no spaces allowed). PROD and SBX have the same organization ID (e.g., ‘wellbuilt’). Look at the tenant’s web address to determine which tenant is which. SBX contains ‘impl’ in its URL.

Once you save your tenant nicknames, you’ll be signed into your newly connected tenant 👏

Switching tenants…

Once you have multiple tenants connected to your mobile app, you can easily switch between them!

To switch before you log in, click the dropdown with your tenant’s nickname at the top of your screen. You can then click on the tenant you’d like to log into:

a. Click the dropdown with your tenant’s nickname.

b. Click the tenant you’d like to log into.

To switch tenants after you’re already logged in, click the menu dropdown button (typically your tenant’s logo) in the upper lefthand corner and click Switch Organization. Then, click the tenant you’d like to log into.

a. Click the menu dropdown button and select Switch Organization.

b. Click the tenant you’d like to log in to.

Managing your tenants…

To edit or remove tenants, click Manage Organizations, located near the bottom of the organization selection screen.

When you edit an organization (a.k.a., a tenant) on this page, you can update the nickname, organization ID, and web address.

Occasionally, a QR code may not be available for a tenant. In that case, you can add your tenant manually using the organization ID and tenant web address, both of which you can figure out yourself!

Here are cheat sheets to help…

How to determine your tenant’s organization ID:

How to determine your tenant’s web address (it’s based on your data center!):

Mobile tips n’ tricks…

Before we wrap things up, here are a few nice-to-knows for mobile setup and testing 😎

👉 Proxy on mobile

Sometime in 2023, Workday delivered the ability to proxy on mobile! This was a dream come true for Workday admins. No more creating “dummy” users just to test mobile 😆 Your Proxy Access Policies apply to your tenants across desktop and mobile. So, if you have proxy access on desktop, you have it on mobile! Just search for the task, Start Proxy.

👉 PIN/Biometrics

When you log into a tenant for the first time on mobile, you may encounter two screens to set up additional sign-on security measures including a biometric (like face ID) or a PIN.

We encourage you to take a moment to add these for quicker, more secure sign-on. You can always use the Delete Mobile PIN/Biometric for Workday Account task on desktop to delete them later on.