Workday Onboarding: Complete Guide to Onboarding New Hires

Onboarding new employees to Workday can end in one of two ways: improved user adoption or a flood of support tickets. The stakes are even higher at scale, where every delay or misstep drives up costs and wastes time.

Workday offers significant benefits, such as the Rehabilitation Hospital of The Pacific achieving 25% faster new hire onboarding. However, its complex interface and advanced features create challenges like low user adoption and difficult navigation.

A strong onboarding plan turns this around.

Take Mattel, for example. The company improved its onboarding strategy and achieved 90% Workday utilization within 60 days. How? A solid plan and a digital adoption platform (DAP).

This guide covers everything you need to get it right the first time, from Workday onboarding phases to checklists, best practices, challenges, and DAP solutions. Let’s dig in!

Why Workday Onboarding Matters

Onboarding new hires to Workday matters because it is complex software with over 1,000 features and 850 business processes. Thorough guidance is required to avoid underutilization or abandonment.

Proper onboarding to Workday also directly influences employee satisfaction, productivity, engagement, and retention, key factors driving organizational success. 

After interviewing 1,000 employees across the U.S., U.K., and Australia, the Enboarders created the 2024 State of Employee Onboarding Report. According to this report, a well-executed onboarding experience delivers measurable benefits to employees:

• 46% are more satisfied with their job
• 34% were motivated to stay longer at the company
• 40% reported higher productivity
• 45% said onboarding made it easier to perform their job successfully
• 42% felt more engaged
• 38% developed a positive perception of company culture
• 40% felt a greater sense of belonging
• 34% became brand advocates

Whereas with bad onboarding experiences:

• 33% regret accepting their role and start job hunting early
• 35% struggle with job performance
• 34% feel disengaged, negatively impacting performance and retention
• 25% share negative experiences, damaging the company’s reputation

Workday Onboarding Phases

Onboarding Workday follows a clear, structured methodology called phases. These phases act as a step-by-step guide for smooth onboarding.

Here are the five phases for better new hire onboarding and increased software usage:

Phase 1: Plan

The planning phase is the first step towards success. Here, you research, speak with stakeholders, set clear objectives, and create a roadmap.

You also:

• Review Project Scope: Understand the full extent of the project and what needs to be achieved.
• Develop Project Plan and Project Charter: Create a detailed plan and charter outlining objectives, timelines, and deliverables.
• Define Roles and Responsibilities: Assign specific roles and responsibilities to team members for accountability and task ownership.
• Project Kick-off: Begin with an initial prototype (PO) to kick off the project and provide a tangible starting point.

Phase 2: Architect

After planning, the architect phase involves designing the system to meet the organization’s needs you identified before. This includes:

• Current Business Practice Discovery: Conduct discovery sessions to understand business practices and prepare a design databook.
• Conceptual Design Sessions: Hold sessions to conceptualize the system design.
• Detailed Business Process Design: Organize further design sessions to detail business processes and prepare a comprehensive design databook.
• Solution/Gap Analysis: Identify gaps between current practices and the new system and analyze solutions.
• Update Project Charter and Plan: Adjust the project charter and plan based on new insights and decisions.
• Document Design Decisions: Record all design decisions thoroughly for future reference.

For example, during this phase, a retail chain may need to define custom workflows for different roles (e.g., store associates vs. corporate staff).

Phase 3: Configuration Prototype

This phase focuses on building and refining the system based on the design created in the previous phase.

Here’s what it entails:

• Configuration Prototype (P1): Develop the first configuration prototype.
• Develop Reports & Integrations: Create and integrate necessary reports with other systems.
• Communicate Tenant Strategy: Ensure all stakeholders understand the tenant strategy.
• Develop Testing and Training Strategy: Plan how the system will be tested and how users will be trained.

Phase 4: Test

Testing your Workday systems ensures they function as intended before going live. These are some tests to run:

• • End-to-end Testing: Conduct thorough end-to-end testing to verify all functionalities.
  • Prototype 3 (P3): Develop and test the third prototype.
  • User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Perform UAT to ensure the system meets user needs. This includes playback sessions to show clients the test scripts and results.
  • Resolve Issues: Address any bugs or usability issues identified during testing.

• Phased Rollouts: Start with a small segment of users, subsequently increasing the number of users and features before a company-wide rollout.

Phase 5: Deploy/Go Live

The final phase is deploying the system and ensuring it is fully operational:

• Training and Roll-out: Train users and roll out the system.
• Gold Tenant: Ensure it’s ready for production.
• Production Data Conversion and Configuration: Complete the final data conversion and configuration for production.
• Go-Live Checklist: Follow a detailed checklist to ensure nothing is missed.
• Transition to Production Services: Provide hypercare support to address immediate post-go-live issues.
• Project Conclusion: Officially conclude the project and transition to ongoing support.

Note: The Gold Tenant is like a starter pack for Workday. It comes with settings and rules that Workday thinks work best for companies. It helps businesses set up Workday the right way from the beginning!

Workday Onboarding Checklist

Onboarding a new hire to Workday involves completing administrative tasks and creating an engaging process that makes employees feel welcome.

This checklist outlines every important step required to onboard new hires successfully:

Stage 1: Before Onboarding (Pre-boarding)

Pre-boarding sets the tone for a positive employee experience even before their first day. You must:

• Send offer letters and collect signed agreements, including employment contracts and NDAs.
• Share pre-employment paperwork such as tax forms (e.g., W-4 or W-9).
• Provide access to Workday’s self-service portal for document submission.
• Request government-issued ID copies for I-9 verification (if applicable).
• Set up the new hire’s Workday profile with personal and job-related details.
• Send Workday login credentials and verify access to features like benefits enrollment and training modules.
• Introduce new hires to their managers and team via email or virtual meetings.
• Share a detailed agenda for their first week, including training sessions and orientation events.
• Coordinate with the IT team to prepare equipment (e.g., laptop, phone) and set up necessary software tools.
• Confirm system access from the new hire.
• Upload onboarding materials such as a company handbook and policies to Workday Learning.
• Create a Workday training program covering company culture, goals, training methodology, and a first-week training schedule.
• Share benefits information and enable access to benefits selection in Workday.
• Initiate and complete any required background checks.

Stage 2: First 30-60 Days

After pre-boarding, the next step is the onboarding phase, where the employees receive role-based training, learn how to use Workday, and familiarize themselves with the relevant features. During this period:

• Complete onboarding tasks, such as verifying personal information, enrolling in benefits, and completing compliance training in Workday.
• Send a welcome email to introduce the new hire to the team and share their background and role in the company.
• Assign a mentor or buddy to guide new hires through their initial weeks and provide support.
• Create a schedule outlining when new hires should complete assigned tasks and when they’ll be available for team collaboration or projects.
• Attend orientation sessions to learn about company policies, tools, and organizational values.
• Schedule a one-on-one meeting with their manager to discuss role expectations, team structure, and short-term goals.
• Provide access to role-specific training materials via Workday Learning to develop skills required for their position.
• Organize regular check-ins between managers and new employees to discuss progress, address questions, and offer support.
• Set clear performance expectations and goals for the first 30-60 days to help new hires understand their priorities.
• Gather feedback on the onboarding experience through surveys or one-on-one meetings to improve future processes.
• Creating a clear meeting summary after each session helps capture key insights, decisions, and next steps, ensuring that feedback is documented and actionable for continuous improvement.

Stage 3: Ongoing Engagement

Onboarding doesn’t end after 60 days. It’s an ongoing process that ensures long-term success:

• Conduct regular reviews to assess progress toward goals.
• Offer continuous learning opportunities through Workday Learning modules.
• Recognize achievements publicly (e.g., during team meetings).
• Encourage collaboration and participation in company events or social activities.
• Solicit feedback regularly to improve future onboarding programs.
• Invest in a DAP like Apty to provide ongoing guidance and contextual support.

Common Challenges in Workday Onboarding

Despite all its advantages, Workday onboarding comes with several challenges. These include:

1. Difficulty Navigating Workday’s Interface

Workday offers hundreds of solutions for automating business processes across HR, finance, and IT, so there’s much to navigate.

As with other HCMs like Rippling, the Workday interface can be overwhelming for first-time users. Complex features and unfamiliar layouts can confuse new hires, causing delays in task completion, particularly for new hires with limited technical experience.

The solution? Apty provides step-by-step guidance, interactive walkthroughs, and contextual tooltips directly within Workday. This ensures that new hires are guided through tasks in real time, reducing errors and boosting confidence in navigating the system.

 

 

2. Ensuring Consistent Onboarding Across Teams

Large organizations struggle to maintain consistency in their onboarding processes across departments or locations. Different teams may interpret onboarding policies differently, leading to gaps in the employee experience.

Multilingual workforces also face challenges with onboarding without tailored solutions.

Apty’s solution allows you to create custom workflows using smart rules that ensure every department follows a uniform onboarding process, reducing inconsistencies.

You can also provide in-app guidance and multilingual support for better comprehension.

3. Low User Adoption of Workday Features

Due to inconsistency in onboarding, features, and interface complexities, new hires may struggle to realize Workday’s full potential. This leads to underutilization and diminished return on investment (ROI) for the platform.

Other factors contributing to this issue include:

• Using only traditional onboarding methods, like in-person training
• Failing to communicate the software’s impact on their role properly

Apty accelerates feature adoption by offering role-specific training usage analytics that identify areas where users need additional support.

New hires also have access to Apty OneX, a feature that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer users’ questions about the platform, as we’ll see next.

4. Lack of Real-Time Support for New Hires

New hires often have questions about completing tasks in Workday but may hesitate to ask HR teams directly to avoid looking incompetent. This causes increased frustration and lowers new-time-to-hire productivity.

Support managers and Workday consultants may also become overwhelmed by answering multiple tickets daily, draining both time and company resources.

Apty helps build a centralized help center with OneX, a robust platform that connects users with all enterprise software in one place. It enables users to leverage generative AI to streamline task execution and provide on-demand assistance.

New hires can also use OneX to perform tasks on Workday, such as summarizing content.

 

5. Measuring Onboarding Success

Organizations often struggle to evaluate onboarding success, relying on subjective feedback, such as surveys, that don’t effectively capture how new hires are adapting.

Identifying bottlenecks, tracking progress, and making data-driven improvements becomes challenging without concrete data on Workday engagement.

Apty PULSE offers real-time insights into onboarding performance and tracking metrics like task completion rates, time-to-productivity, user satisfaction, cost breakdown, and process obstructions. These analytics help organizations identify inefficiencies and improve workflows with data-driven adjustments.

 

 

Elevate Your Workday Onboarding Experience With Apty

Remember Mattel’s use case at the beginning? They faced challenges driving digital adoption with the Workday HCM platform, so they turned to Apty’s DAP to improve their Workday onboarding strategy.

Here’s how Apty helped Mattel:

• Interactive Guides: Provided step-by-step guides to simplify complex processes, boosting employee confidence in using Workday. Consider using an AI Humanizer to ensure your guides sound natural, approachable, and easy for new hires to understand. 
• Customized Solutions: Identified 30 key processes and tailored them for Mattel’s global workforce across six languages.
• Scalable Implementation: Supported 9,000+ employees with in-app guidance, tooltips, and role-specific training for improved efficiency.

These are the results:

• 90% of Mattel employees adopted Workday within two months
• Support requests dropped significantly
• Employees completed tasks accurately and efficiently
• Senior leaders gained confidence in the system’s reliability for key processes.

Mattel still uses Apty to streamline processes, manage announcements, and provide ongoing support for new hires and long-term employees.

Need an effective way to onboard new hires to Workday? Schedule a demo with Apty today!

FAQ

• What is the onboarding process in Workday?

Workday’s onboarding process automates new hire tasks, ensuring a smooth transition. It includes pre-boarding (welcome messages, paperwork), first-day activities (team introductions, IT setup), training and integration (role-specific learning, feedback), and continuous engagement (goal setting, surveys).