2025R1's must-know Workforce Management features

Read time: 8 minutes

Hey there! Mia here. It’s another big week in the Workday world…

The 5-week Preview Testing Window began on Saturday 🤩

2025R1 features and fixes are now waiting for you in your Preview tenant!

In today’s newsletter, we dive deeper into the upcoming Workday release.

Today, we’re breaking down the upcoming Workforce Management features we are MOST excited about!

Here’s today’s rating scale…

😍 Game-changer
😄 Impactful
😊 Worth a mention
❗️ Important to test

Let’s dive right in, shall we!?

The features, rated and reviewed…

Workday’s Workforce Management category includes the Absence, Time Tracking, and Scheduling products.

2025R1 release notes include 20 Workforce Management features thus far. We felt 90% of them were, at a minimum, worth a mention—that’s a pretty great release!

Here they are, rated…

Next up, 😍 game-changing and 😃 impactful features, broken down in detail. The more excited we are about the feature, the more information we provide below. You’ll find any relevant screenshots at the end of each item’s section…

[1]

Feature: Change Job Impacts on Time Off

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Absence

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: With 2024R1, Workday delivered the ability to automatically remove invalid time off entries upon a worker’s termination. Now, Workday delivers the long-requested functionality to automatically remove invalid time off entries that result from a worker’s job change. The feature is a new, optional service step on the Change Job business process that automatically initiates a Correct Time Off event when:

a) A worker is no longer eligible for the time off due to the job change

b) The time off date is no longer a valid working day due to the job change

The Correct Time Off event follows your default Correct Time Off BP definition unless you set up rule-based business process configuration.

Setup: On your Change Job BP, add the “Remove invalid Time Off Entries After Job Change” service step after the Completion and Manage Business Processes for Worker steps.

After you add the step to your Change Job BP, if you see a warning on the BP definition, run the task, “Evaluate and Process Events Impacting Absence”. This is a background job that identifies and initiates correction of ineligible future time off entries and accrual adjustments. After you run it for the first time, Workday runs the job in the background automatically every 15 minutes. If you don’t see a warning on the BP, the job is already running—no need to run the task!

Notes:

The service step does not impact in-progress requests—these are best handled by the Manage Business Processes for Worker step.

The service step doesn’t accommodate Change Job event corrections or rescinds.

We recommend you create a copy of the Correct Time Off BP with rule-based configuration to automatically approve corrections initiated by the service step (see b and c in the screenshot below). Note that if you’ve set up the “Remove Invalid Time Off Entries After Termination” service step on your Termination BP, this rule-based BP fires for that service as well.

Workday also delivers a new report field on the Time Off Event business object called “Initiating Business Process of Remove Invalid Time Off Entries Service”. You can use this field in BP condition rules and reporting.

a) Add the new service step to your Change Job BP
b) Make a stripped copy of your Correct Time Off BP
c) Set up rule-based BP configuration to automatically approve corrections initiated by the service step

🔗 Release Note

[2]

Feature: Effective-Dated Time Entry Templates

Rating: 😍 Game-changer

Product: Time Tracking

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Finally, you can now effective date your Time Entry Templates! This is a huge upgrade for Time Tracking. With this feature, you can easily adapt your Time Entry Templates to accommodate date-dependent changes in company policies, laws, union agreements, etc. And, you can make effective-dated changes ahead of time (rather than having your admins log into WD on New Year’s day for a 1/1 go-live 😅).

Setup: Workday automatically applies a 1/1/1930 effective date to all existing Time Entry Templates. Click the “Copy Effective-Dated Data” button on your Time Entry Template to create a new, effective-dated change.

Time Entry Template settings are now broken into two tabs, “Effective-Dated” and “Non Effective-Dated”. Effective-Dated data includes…

A new Effective Date field.
A panel on the left to:
- Change the effective date for existing template versions.
- Add new effective dates.
Default Time Entry Code
These sections and their settings:
- In/Out Entry Options
- Time Clock Event Matching
- Time Off Calculations
- Shift-Based Check-In
- System Meals and Breaks
- Time Entry Restrictions
- Worktags
- Business Process
- Time Shift
- Totals
- Eligibility

Notes:

Time Entry Template eligibility is derived from the end of the week or the specific day, depending on the specific time entry method or task involved.

Workday also delivers a new report called All Time Entry Template Effective Dates, and two new tasks, Delete Time Entry Template Effective-Dated Data and Copy Time Entry Template.

🔗 Release Note

[3]

Feature: Effective Dating for Service Dates

Rating: ❗️Important to test

Product: Absence

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: With 2023R2, Workday released Effective Dating for Service Dates as an opt-in feature that allows you to define an effective date when changing service dates. On the 2025R1 delivery date, Workday removes the opt-in functionality, meaning adoption of this feature becomes mandatory for all Workday customers.

Review your Absence plans thoroughly to identify references to non-effective-dated service dates. Update these calculations to reference effective-dated service dates instead.

If you don’t, once this feature is automatically available, impacted configuration may yield incorrect accrual amounts, eligibility, etc.

How to find impacted configuration:

Run the Tenant Analyzer
On the Absence tab, filter the “Area(s)” column for “Calculations”.
Identify the Validation that calls out Service Dates.
Thoroughly review the calculations in the “Instances Failing Validation” column for references to non-effective-dated service dates.
Replace non-effective-dated references to service date with effective-dated reference to service date, such as “Recent Time Off Service Date Based on Period End Date”.

Run the Tenant Analyzer and follow the instructions above to identify the impacts of the removal of opt-in for this feature.

Replace non-effective-dated reference to service dates with effective-dated reference to service dates.

🔗 Release Note

🔗 More preparation info

[4]

Feature: Assign Work Schedule Impacts on Time Off

Rating: 😃 Impactful

Product: Absence

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Similar to the first feature we covered today, this feature also enables you to remove invalid time off entries—this time, in response to an Assign Work Schedule event. Workday delivers a Remove Invalid Time Off Entries After Work Schedule Assignment service step that you can add to the Assign Work Schedule BP. This service step automatically removes approved time off entries no longer valid due to a change in a worker’s working days.

Setup: On the Assign Work Schedule business process, add the “Remove invalid Time Off Entries After Work Schedule Assignment” service step after the Completion step.

Notes:

The setup and notes of feature 1, “Change Job Impacts on Time Off”, apply to this feature as well, in the context of the Assign Work Schedule BP.

🔗 Release Note

[5]

Feature: Automatically Submit Time Enhancements

Rating: 😃 Impactful

Product: Time Tracking

Setup Effort: Automatically Available

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: Workday improves the Auto Submit Time task with expanded selection criteria to make selecting specific populations and periods a whole lot easier. The new selection criteria include…

Organizations
- Include Subordinate Organizations
Job Profiles
Worker Type
Locations
Collective Agreement
Work Shifts
On Leave
- Include
- Exclude
- On Leave Workers Only
Workers Selection (you can only select workers you have access to from this prompt)
Exclude Current and Future Periods check box (excludes a worker's current and future periods from being submitted automatically)

With this feature, Workday also renames these fields on the Auto Submit Time task…

Auto Submit ➡️ Auto Submit Periods With
All Time ➡️ Any Unsubmitted Time
Imported Time ➡️ Any Imported Time
Imported Auto Submit Time ➡️ Imported Time With Auto Submit Value True

And lastly, a Worker Status column is added to the Reported Time Blocks for a Date Range report to allow you to automatically submit time for workers based on their employment status.

Before

After!

🔗 Release Note

[6]

Feature: Connected Experience: Scheduled Days to Include

Rating: 😃 Impactful

Product: Scheduling

Setup Effort: Setup Required

Targeted Production Date: March 15, 2025

Summary: With this feature, if you’re using Workday Scheduling, you can now configure your time off plans to validate time off requests against a worker’s working days based on their published schedule. This feature makes your Managers’ lives easier, as they don’t have to check shift dates before approving time off requests. It also ensures workers don’t use time off unnecessarily on their days off.

Setup:

Check the Use Scheduling Shifts box on the Calculation tab of the Time Off Plan under the “Time Off Taken” section.

Notes:

If there’s no published schedule for the worker, Workday follows the Days to Include checkbox setting instead.