Companies that want to compete for the best talent in their industry know that rewarding those employees for their work is a top priority. Tying compensation directly to performance and individual contributions is another significant advantage, as it aligns employee rewards with organizational objectives.

Workday’s Compensation and Advanced Compensation platforms offer a single system approach that organizations can use to manage and optimize employee compensation across the entire organization and achieve competitive compensation strategies. 

Workday’s Compensation Management platforms enable users to:

  • Streamline compensation planning
  • Improve compensation transparency
  • Ensure compliance with compensation regulations
  • Integrate compensation, HR, and talent management data
  • Enable mobile access to compensation data
  • Foster better employee engagement and productivity
  • Align compensation with individual performance

Read on to learn more!

Understanding Compensation Management in Workday

Most employees, regardless of industry, company, or job title, are interested in finding new ways to design more individualized compensation outlines for themselves, access valuable information about benefits, bonuses, and employee salaries/compensation plans quickly and efficiently, and stay on top of change in their Workday investment. But, having a unified compensation system like Workday also allows users to eliminate integrations between multiple systems.

Whether using the core compensation system or the advanced version, Workday cuts out the middleman between your employees and their total rewards information. No more complicated spreadsheets, different strategies for each company division, or segmented systems for each area of employee total rewards are needed.

Workday simplifies the benefits and compensation review process by allowing teams to participate in compensation reviews and maximize their systems according to the needs of each team member.

Why Workday?

With Workday Compensation, it’s easier for your Workday administrators and managers to report and act on your compensation plans in real time, as well as use market data to make informed compensation decisions.

For those employees in search of an all-inclusive system that allows them to track these metrics individually, Workday will give them access to their compensation information on any device, wherever and whenever they need it.

Workday’s compensation management system offers users the ultimate package to fulfill all of their compensation needs in one place, with one system that’s unified across the board. System allowances and features in Workday remain the same for all internal teams, whether that team comprises 5 employees or 500 employees, giving managers, administrators, and team members the same ability to build a compensation plan that meets their specific needs.

Who Benefits?

With the one-stop-shop system in Workday, employees are able to collaborate with their managers to configure specific benefits packages, review any changes to total rewards, and reap the full value of a compensation system that doesn’t cause added stress or headaches.

Workday’s compensation system sets itself apart with ease of use, personalization for each team member, flexibility of total rewards tracking, and increased transparency among all users involved with compensation and benefits. With a system that offers many included capabilities, employees can take control of their total rewards and make their experience with compensation systems their own.

There are two modules available from Workday, and each serves a different purpose to meet the needs of each user and maximize the capability of the system for the whole team. This article breaks down the differences between the two solutions and shares some key features, including one you may have never heard about… 

What’s the Difference Between the Two Modules?

Although both modules of Workday’s compensation management system provide a more comprehensive way to track benefits, manage total rewards, and stay up-to-date on eligibility rules, you may find it useful to know the differences in their capabilities.

Workday Compensation

The core Compensation product is available to all Workday clients. It allows you to design plans to keep track of things like base salaries, allowances, commissions, and talent management.

Workday Advanced Compensation

Advanced Compensation, on the other hand, is an add-on product that allows you to manage bonuses, merits, or any other sort of delayed compensation. Companies often try to create and maintain this process offline, on spreadsheets, or through a different product. But the moment you try to handle that work outside your Workday system, you miss out on creating a comprehensive picture of your compensation plans.

Using Advanced Compensation allows you to manage every piece of the process in a single system with one source of data. If your company processes any regular bonuses or merit increases (such as cost of living adjustments), Workday Advanced Compensation is simply the most accessible tool to use. 

Main Features of Workday Compensation

Workday Compensation allows your administrators to build compensation packages, programs, and plans using accurate data through Workday. (Not to mention that Workday Compensation eliminates integrations between payroll, recruiting, benefits, performance, and your core human resources tool.) And because it’s a global system, you can easily configure compensation elements for employees worldwide. 

The main features offered through Workday Compensation include:

Compensation Plan Creation

This feature allows you to customize compensation plans around various kinds of data such as hourly, salary, allowance stock, or numerous single payment plans.

Compensation Package Development 

Provide comprehensive plan options by combining salary grades, plans, and grade profiles (such as job levels within a specific geography) to provide complete package options. Workday can automatically trigger plan or package analyses depending upon the eligibility rules you set up within the job profile or other attributes. 

Compensation Survey Management 

Compensation Survey Management lets you streamline compensation surveys and connect employees with matched survey jobs. Workday also allows you to maintain multiple compensation survey vendors and items. 

Dashboards and Reports

Everyone—including executives, administrators, and managers—can create dashboards and audit trails thanks to the built-in tools that come with Workday Compensation. It even allows you to set up alerts or other notifications to prompt actions, helping to improve decision-making efficiency.

With advanced features that allow you to store all of your information in one place, access meaningful data for both compensation and benefits, and educate you on specific compensation packages, bonuses, and other benefits programs, you are more equipped to understand the total value of your rewards.

Knowing your rewards and how to access them is an essential factor in creating a workforce centered around individualized attention and focused solutions for anything and everything compensation-related.

The Workday Compensation Feature You May Not Be Using…

One feature we find that companies strangely do not take advantage of very often is Benchmark Job Data. Once you’ve been up and running with Workday Compensation for a while, Benchmark Job Data allows you to analyze where specific job titles are being paid within your pay scale.

Benchmark Job Data also combines multiple data sources within the Workday system, allowing you to assess your total rewards programs to see if you’re offering people what they want from a benefits and compensation standpoint. It also enables you to analyze performance and talent attributes, which will help you improve your reporting capabilities in the long run. 

This allows you to essentially “check up” on yourself to ensure you are offering employees competitive pay and benefits that can stand up against your competitors. If you haven’t taken advantage of this great feature, now may be the time.

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Key Capabilities of Workday Compensation

Workday Compensation puts your admins in the driver’s seat. Using the solution, they can easily define compensation packages, plans, and processes with a highly configurable global system. Here are a few main capabilities Workday Compensation offers: 

  • After the compensation review process, develop custom plans based on different data points, such as hourly, salary, allowance, merit, commission, bonus, stock, and much more
  • Create compensation packages by combining plans and grades for things such as job level with a specific region to include package options
  • Executives, managers, and admins will have access to rich dashboards, comprehensive reports, and audit trails for better analysis on any device
  • Manage the submission of compensation surveys and connect the right workers with matched survey jobs

Common Workday Compensation Pain Points

Over years of implementing and maintaining Workday Compensation setups for our clients, our consultants have noticed that a few common pain points tend to pop up with this sort of project. Let’s take a closer look at these in detail.

Updating Compensation Grades in Core Compensation

Maintaining Workday can require a lot of manual work sometimes, especially when updating compensation grades and grade profiles. Many enterprise companies change their pay bands annually to compensate for inflation or other reasons, which means that the system administrator will need to go into Workday and adjust the rounds every year.

Customizing Advanced Compensation

Workday Advanced Compensation is highly customizable, but because there’s no standard way companies process bonuses or merit awards, creating and calculating your company’s specific reward process might be more challenging than you think.

Testing Advanced Compensation

In addition to tweaking Advanced Compensation to suit your exact needs, testing it can also be a cumbersome process because of how time-consuming it is. Launching a bonus can take 10 to 12 minutes, and merits take at least 12 minutes.

And every time you change a process, you have to relaunch it (so there’s another near-quarter of an hour gone). None of that is a considerable amount of time, but those minutes can add up quickly if you have to make a lot of changes. 

Managing Security Access 

Anytime you’re dealing with sensitive data, security needs to be a top priority. You want to be careful about not giving too much access when reporting on either Core Compensation or Advanced Compensation.  

How Can We Help?

Whether you’re just getting started with Workday Compensation or looking to add Advanced Compensation to your current setup, Surety Systems can help. Our senior-level Workday consulting team has partnered with many organizations to tackle the most significant challenges and share some amazing successes. 

To help you have a better idea about how our consultants can help you, here’s an example profile of one of our top-notch Workday Compensation consultants.

Surety Senior Workday Compensation Consultant

  • 3+ years of experience with Workday and 5+ related to Compensation
  • Comfortable with configuration and testing of merit cycles, bonus plans, compensation review processes, etc.
  • Extensive experience with reporting, dashboards, and analytics
  • Deep understanding of Workday, Compensation, management responsibilities, and hands-on configuration capabilities

Like what you see? Learn more about how we can help you by contacting us today.