Implementing Ethnicity Data in Workday: A Knowledge Sharing Checklist

In this knowledge sharing checklist, you'd walk through the essential steps and considerations involved in implementing the sensitive process in Workday for ethnicity details, so you can take away the golden nuggets from our experience for your own organisation's IDB initiative.

Safe harbour: Tailor it according to your organisation's business case & Workday environment.

Here is the post on the general considerations on implementation.

Discovery & Design

☐ Legal and compliance: Ensure that the country you are designing in is legally allowed to record this information as employer.

☐ Optimising help texts: If you don’t have Workday guidance, you can configure help text on the bp: Change Personal Information. Note that it needs to be general as it would be shown for all personal information.

☐ Security matrix: Create your security matrix by listing out all the stakeholders and security groups they belong. Ensure that the editing and viewing rights are defined correctly for individual data. It is recommended for have extra approval in case of data risks.

☐ We have marked the race/ethnicity field to be mandatory however we always have a field to “prefer not to say” and this is communicated through different channels.

☐ Workday restrictions that we have encountered

• The workday guidance will be global text and cannot be localized.

• There is no possibility for a free text if the employee has identified with anything that’s not on the dropdown list.

• We considered the option to write those in the comment box however there will be potential security breach. The comment box security is not controlled by ethnicities domains. Therefore you have to run the risk of irrelevant people seeing employee ethnicity should they have the domain to access the business process history.

☐ (Optional) Workday guidance: Consider use it for your advantage so that people feel more safe on giving the sensitive information.

Build

☐ Maintain Localization Setting > Personal Information > Fill in the countries for required or not.

☐ Maintain Ethnicity > Fill in countries > List out the level 1 ethnicity names

☐ Maintain Race/Ethnicity Details > Fill in countries > List out the level 2 ethnicity names under the level 1 > Map it back to the level 1

☐ Domain: "Person Data: Ethnicity Details" > This is where people view individual ethnicity details under Profile > Personal tab. Configure according to the security matrix.

• This is the child level for person data: personal information. If someone is unable to access personal information page, then they won’t be able to view ethnicity data there either. Consider building a custom report.

☐ Domain: Self-service: Person Data.

☐ (Optional) We have mass task distribution to existing employees.

Test

☐ Test Scenarios: If you have previously the personal information test scenarios that you have used with an implementer, you can get creative and work on magic for that.

☐ Even though it looks like a straightforward technical process, but I suggest to still give 2 weeks more time for re-test for the editing on inclusion and employee experience.

☐ Involve the right set of testers right from the beginning especially if they are testing for the employee experience.

☐ Some people might be the first time testers so always help to give them more step by step logging into test environment guide such as how to set up authenticator and setting new password.

Move To Production & Go Live

☐ There is no possibility to schedule the task distribution. Ensure the move to production minimum one business day before or consider cut-over time, in case different time zones.

☐ Align with the communication timeline.

Notes

☐ Get your testers right from the beginning especially this is sensitive information that can easily trigger doubts. Every wording counts.

☐ We only have one chance to tempt and convince the employees to fill in the data entrusting the system so do it right than do it fast.

Summary

Implementing ethnicity data recording in Workday might be technically straightforward yet it requires planning and attention to detail.

I trust that this knowledge sharing checklist empower your diversity, inclusion and belonging initiatives in your workplace by incorporating ethnicity data recording into your HR system.