Overview of Workday Compensation and Workday Advanced Compensation

Companies that want to compete for the best talent in their industry know that rewarding those employees for their work is a top priority. Workday’s compensation management system is a single system that organizations can use to help attract all-star talent and fill important roles in the system more effectively. 

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 easily 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 different systems.

Whether you’re using the core compensation system or the advanced version, Workday cuts out the middle man between your employees and their total rewards information. No more complicated spreadsheets, different systems 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 review define and maximize their systems according to the needs of each individual 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 is made up of 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 its ease of use, personalization for each team member, flexibility of total rewards tracking, and increased transparency among all users involved with all things compensation and benefits. With a system that offers so many included capabilities, employees are able to 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 of the 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 are beneficial in providing 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, as well as talent management.

Workday Advanced Compensation

Advanced Compensation, on the other hand, is an add-on product that gives you the ability to manage bonuses, merits, or any other sort of delayed compensation. Oftentimes companies will 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 investment, you miss out on creating a comprehensive picture of your compensation plans.

Using Advanced Comp allows you to manage every piece of the process in a single system with one source of data. If your company processes any type of regular bonuses or merit increases (such as cost of living adjustments), Workday Advanced Comp is simply the easiest 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 the fact 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 key capabilities 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 comprehensive package options. Workday can automatically trigger plan or packaged 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 the efficiency of decision-making.

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 full value of your rewards.

Knowing what your rewards are and how to access them is an important 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 certain job titles are being paid within your pay scale.

Benchmark Job Data also combines multiple sources of data within the Workday system, allowing you to assess your total rewards programs to see if you’re really offering people what they want from a benefits and compensation standpoint. It also allows 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 been taking advantage of this great feature, now may be the time.

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 on behalf of 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 it comes to 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 bands every year.

Customizing Advanced Compensation

Workday Advanced Comp is highly customizable, but because there’s no standard way for how 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 Comp to suit your exact needs, testing it can also be a cumbersome process because of how time-consuming it is. The process to launch a bonus can take 10 to 12 minutes, and merits take at least 12 minutes.

And every time you make a change to a process, you have to relaunch it (so there’s another near-quarter of an hour gone). None of that is an incredibly large 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 you’re doing 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 Comp to your current setup, Surety Systems can help. Our senior-level Workday consulting team has partnered with many organizations to tackle the biggest challenges and share in 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.