Workday Newsletter – Jan/Feb 2014

As many of you are aware, Workday will be ‘getting a new coat of paint’ or in other words, they have redesigned their user interface.  During the past couple of weeks, a number of campus folks have been helping Cornell prepare by reviewing, sharing feedback and testing the Workday visual redesign changes.  Right now we are aiming to transition to the new look in mid-February, ahead of the upcoming budget and salary improvement processing cycles.

A big thank you to all the hard work of those who participated in the recent clean-up effort, preparing us for the upcoming Budget cycle.  During this effort, thousands of positions were reviewed and updated, including over 2500 positions were given a default cost value, over 400 positions were closed, and an additional 500 headcount positions were changed to not budgeted.  This was a tremendous effort – not only do we have more accurate, up-to-date data but it has made for a smoother transition as the data is pulled into the Longview system.

We have also taken two steps to ensure ongoing maintenance of this critical information. A system change was made so both the KFS Organization and the default Cost Center fields are now required for all positions.

Reporting Update

The following new data integrity reports are now available for your use:

1. Worker Alternate Work Address Missing: There are a number of requests for employee’s work address for various campus mailings. When “Alternate Work Address” (which is really the primary work address) is not listed, Workday defaults to 377 Pine Tree Road. This causes a lot of work for Cornell Mail Services to send back mail for these workers. This report will help you identify any employee’s in your population with this critical missing information.

2. Ethnicity Audit: To meet our compliance obligations, Cornell must collect ethnicity data as part of our required Affirmative Action reports.  This report will show any employee who either has a blank or ‘Unknown’ value.  Remember, we ask that as soon as possible, and no later than 30 days after their start date, this data is updated to replace the blanks and “unknown” selections.

Quick Reminders

1. Social Security Number (SSN): Hire Initiator must enter the SSN on Edit Government ID step, with a country code value of USA.  The SSN is needed for the employee to set-up a retirement savings account with our vendors -without this critical piece of information the employee cannot participate in retirement contributions (including the Cornell University portion).  If the employee has requested a new SSN, you may leave the field blank until the SSN is granted.
2. Gender and Ethnicity: As communicated in previous emails, gender and ethnicity data will now be system required fields in Workday.  If an employee provided race/ethnicity and gender data during the hiring process in Taleo, this information will automatically be uploaded from Taleo into Workday. If they did not, there will need to be an entry in their race/ethnicity field, which can temporarily be “unknown”, to set up their employee record in Workday. If you select “unknown” we ask that as soon as possible, and no later than 30 days after their start date, a race/ethnicity be entered for the employee to replace the “unknown” selection.  The best way to do this is to reach out to the employee to remind them to self-identify. If an employee does not wish to disclose, you will need to make a determination on their behalf. To meet our compliance obligations, we do need to populate this field with a race/ethnicity as soon as possible to be able to develop all of our required Affirmative Action reports. If you have any questions about making a race/ethnicity determination on behalf of an employee, please feel free to contact Linda Croll Howell (llc36), Darren Jackson (dj39), or Rose Braman (rab69) in the Department of Inclusion and Workforce Diversity for assistance.

Avoiding Pay Issues

• Using Correct Effective Dates: When you wish to extend an appointment, always remember to use an Effective Date of the next day after their original end date.  For example, if the employee had an expected end date of 12/31/13, use 1/1/14 as the Effective Date of their extension.  Using continous dates (no overlaps or gaps in service) helps avoid unnecessary pay-related issues.

• Repeat Allowances with the Same Reason:  If an employee has a current allowance plan with an approaching end date, please be sure to let the current allowance plan end prior to entering any future iteration of the same plan.  For example, an employee has a WRB scheduled for 1/16-1/31 and another WRB on 2/16-2/28, let the 1/16-1/31 payout.  Once the CEED process has run, you will see the 2/1 deleted compensation row and the WRB allowance will become available again.  You may then enter the second WRB allowance.

Centrally Initiated Events/ Pending LTD

• Centrally Initiated Events: While not often, there are times when the Workday Team may need to initiated events such as LTD, Phased Retirement (CURP), Death, etc. If you are listed as an Approver for employee’s supervisory organization, the events will flow into your InBox.  Just a reminder, please DO NOT approve any centrally initiated events. Once we have finished our work, they will drop out of your InBox.
• Pending LTD: When placing someone on Pending LTD, please use an end date of one year from the effective date of the leave.  If any value less than one year is used, then the potential exists that they won’t get billed properly from PayFlex for their Heallth and Dental insurance. For example, an employee goes out 11/1/2013, the last day of leave would be 10/31/2014.

Changing TDA Elections

During the last few weeks, a couple of unique situations have arisen for which we wanted to pass on our learnings:

• Supporting Your Employees: When an employee makes a change to their TDA, it routes to our central office for a review/approval and thus will appear to the employee as ‘In Process’ for the short-term.  The employee shoudl be advised not to create a second event but rather to wait until the change has been ‘Successfully Completed’.
• 100% TDA: If an employee elects to have 100% of their earning put towards their TDA, only pre-tax deductions will be taken from their net earnings.  Post tax deductions (ex. auto insurance) will be forfeited as there are no dollars remaining to take the deductions.  Employee should take this into consideration.

Recent Changes to Workday