Setup Considerations: Absence Management

Administrator Guide

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of Workday Absence Management. It explains:

Why to set it up.

How it fits into the rest of Workday.

Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.

Security requirements and business process configurations.

Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.

Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Workday Absence Management enables you to track your workforce’s time away from work. Workers can request short-term time off or long-term leave of absence.

Business Benefits

Works seamlessly with the main Workday product areas, including Workday Payroll, Workday Time Tracking, and Workday Assistant.

Provides flexibility by enabling you to create multiple time off and leave types.

Makes it easy for workers to request time off and leave of absence when needed.

Helps your organization to comply with regulatory time off and leave requirements.

Enables workers to view their time off balances and leave requests in a single absence calendar or team absence calendar.

Helps you to respond to General Data Protection Rules by purging absence data for terminated workers.

Integrates with third-party calendar applications to send approved time off events from Workday to your corporate calendars.

Supports benchmarking, enabling you to compare your worker absence rates and policies with peers in your industry.

Use Cases

Workers can:

Enter time off requests.

Correct their time off.

View time off balances.

Record leaves of absence with estimated and flexible end dates.

View approved time off and leave for their teams and organizations.

Managers can view absences for their teams.

Managers and absence administrators can:

Approve or deny time off or leave requests.

Enter time off or leave on behalf of a worker.

Adjust a worker's time off or leave.

Return a worker from leave.

Track and manage time off.

Monitor the number of times and consecutive days workers are absent during a period and the types of absences they take.

Assist workers who are on long-term leave of absence or time off, by creating absence cases to track their progress as they reach milestones to rejoining the workforce.

Administrators can:

Define the parameters of your time off, using:

Time off calculations, business logic, and rules that govern the time off as a period of time.

Accruals, eligibility rules, carryover amounts, upper and lower limits, and other time off values.

Configure Absence business processes so that editable documents are dynamically generated when workers access tasks that initiate the configured business processes, such as

Request Time Off

Request Leave of Absence

You can use report fields or create calculated fields to build leave of absence rules.

Questions to Consider

Question	Considerations
How does your organization differentiate between short-term and long-term time off?	For configuration purposes, Workday classifies short-term time away from work as time off and long-term as leave of absence. The Absence Calendar Experience simplifies absence requests by merging the tasks for requesting time off and leave of absence. The Team Absence Calendar report enables managers and workers to see absence requests for their teams and extended organization to: Coordinate time off and leave requests. Manage team resources.
How do you encourage your workers to take time off?	Encouraging workers to take time off: Ensures that workers make the most of their benefit. Prevents time off carryover expiring. Reduces time off liability for accounting purposes. You can create scheduled distributions that send email and mobile push notifications to: Workers who you want to remind to take time off based on specific criteria. Managers and administrators who have time off requests requiring their approval. You can also run reports with completion analytics to find who has taken action on the notifications received within a specific time period.
Do you want to control access to specific time off and leave types?	You can create security segments for time off and leave types to control who can access each type.
How do you want to manage overlapping time off requests?	You can specify and track thresholds for the total number of workers who can take an absence, as well as the total number of hours available to workers. You can configure thresholds for a given day.
How do you want to track time off for your workers?	Workday enables you to set up time off plans that either: Track balances. A balance period defines the start and end dates of the time off plan. You can identify accruals that add to the plan balance and time offs that subtract from the balance. Don't track balances. You can specify the unit of time for recording and processing time off requests. The period schedule defines accrual frequencies (except for accruals with a custom frequency), and reporting periods for the plan. You can define eligibility and validation rules and rates of pay for different time off plans.
How do you allocate time off balance when workers are eligible for more than 1 time off plan?	You can create absence tables that include 2 or more tiers, each with a priority order and time off plan. When a worker requests time off, Workday processes time off entries against the highest-priority tier. When the worker exhausts the balance, Workday applies the remaining time against the next tier.
Which payroll application are you using?	If your organization is using Workday Payroll, you can use it to pay time off and leave. Absence Management automatically creates Absence Component Related Calculations (ACRCs) for time off that you can use as inputs in payroll calculations to configure time off earnings. You can also configure a payroll effect for leave of absence to: Stop paying workers while on leave. Configure a run category to pay workers on certain leave types when the payroll effect is enabled for the leave type. If your organization is using a third-party payroll application, you can use payroll interfaces to: Connect with the payroll vendor. Send and receive payroll data, including time off and leave information.
How do your absence policies differ between countries?	You can configure time off plans for specific countries, regions, or worker types. Workday also delivers country-specific leave families and their respective leave types. With Workday Payroll for France and Workday Payroll for UK, you can comply with local statutory time off and leave requirements by setting up: Statutory leave payments. Time offs for statutory sick pay. Time offs for holiday pay. You can link a leave type to a statutory leave payment type so that Workday Payroll can process payments based on the leave type. You can configure absence occurrences to report on how many times workers are absent in a period, helping you comply with local regulatory requirements. Absence occurrences are based on absence types.
How do you want to manage worker holiday schedules?	You can set up holiday and work schedule calendars to prevent employees requesting: Time off on a holiday. More hours than they're scheduled to work. Workday excludes holidays when calculating the days to include in absence requests, based on time off plans and leave type settings. When you configure access to the Self-Service: Work Schedule: Time Off and Leave domain, workers can access these reports to view their schedules, which may help them plan their time off: My Schedule My Schedule History
How does your organization track hours worked?	You can use Absence Management with or without Time Tracking. You can configure a time off so that workers can: Request it using the Request Time Off business process. Enter it through Time Tracking. Use both options.
How often do your time off policies change?	Workday enables you to make effective-dated time off configuration changes due to: Evolving regulatory, company policy. Union or collective bargaining agreements.
How does your organization manage time off for workers with multiple jobs?	Workday enables you to create position or worker-based time off plans and leaves. You can also add position-based time offs to worker-based time off plans. When you configure time off plans and leaves as position-based, you can't change this setting after time off and leave data exist for the plan or leave type.
How do you track and assist workers who are on long-term time offs and leaves of absence?	Workday enables you to define conditions that automatically initiate absence cases for workers. Workday bases absence case groups on a set number of days of absence in a defined period.
How do you refer to absence, time off, and leave of absence? Do you prefer to use different terminology?	You can create custom labels for these and other absence-related terms, making it easier for you to align absence management with your organization's terminology. Workday displays the custom labels for employee and manager self-service tasks and reports but continues to display the base values for administrator or specialist-related tasks and reports.

Recommendations

Validate and test your absence time off and leave component configurations to ensure that you meet statutory requirements.

To ensure consistency, use the

Global Library

report to search Absence Management rules and configurations when deploying Absence Management in different countries. You can configure time off plans and eligibility rules in multiple ways, which can lead to inconsistencies.

Use the

Tenant Analyzer

report to get a quick inventory of your payroll, absence, and reporting setup to enable you to:

Verify your tenant configuration against Workday recommendations.

Troubleshoot performance issues.

Recommendations for Deployments in the UK

When deploying Absence in the UK, consider whether Workday Payroll is in scope, a future consideration, or not at all. When interacting with Payroll, your time off configurations can impact your end results. Refer to these sample configurations from the Workday foundry tenant, wdsetup when setting up your time off configuration:

Absence Type	Configuration in wdsetup	If Workday Payroll Is in Scope	If Third-Party Payroll Is in Scope	Additional Information
GBR Annual Leave / Holiday	Time off	Time off with absence occurrences.	Time off	If Workday Payroll is in scope and using UK Statutory Holiday Pay, you must configure absence occurrences to support the payroll functionality. Configure absence occurrences for holiday pay absence types separately. It's important to keep them distinct as changes can impact payroll.
GBR Compassionate Leave	Time off	Time off	Time off
GBR Jury Duty	Time off	Time off	Time off
GBR Sick Leave Unpaid/SSP	Time off	Time off	Time off	Only for Statutory Sick Pay (SSP)
GBR Sick Leave	Absence Table with 100%, 50%, and 0% pay time off tiers.	Time off	Time off	Only for Company Sick Pay (CPS). To ensure that the absence tiers take effect, there's an initial accrual that continues to roll over year to year, from the date the time off request is taken from the balance. It's important that you enable revaluation on the absence table so that Workday considers any corrections or updates to the accrual or balance for the rolling accrual. Workday needs to account for the rolling accrual when loading history, payments against payroll and work schedule changes. Workday doesn't apply work schedule change adjustments (such as FTE) to the rolling dates that apply a year from the date they are taken. Use the Absence Tier Time Off Entry Details report to review recorded dates. You can't use a custom report to review the absence table tier dates and details of the balance and time off taken.
GBR Unpaid	Time off	Time off	Time off
GBR Adoption Leave	Leave	Leave	Leave
GBR Maternity Leave	Leave	Leave	Leave
GBR Paternity Leave	Leave	Leave	Leave
GBR Shared Parental Leave	Leave	Leave	Leave
GBR Unpaid Parental Leave	Leave	Leave	Leave

Go-Live Data Conversion

When preparing for go-live, ensure that:

Someone cleans the company's historical data as soon as possible.

You evaluate any inconsistencies in the company's documentation.

You practice data extraction from the current system.

Doing this enables you to follow these guidelines for loading historical information:

Load your event history in batches and in chronological sequence to aid in rolling accrual calculations.

Follow the Import Time Off Request Event Batch
web service considerations to aid in this process. For details, see the Integrations section.

Review the information to see if any recalculations need to occur for existing modifications to user time off transactions. Example: User data is loaded to align with an absence table tier time off entry against a time off request event, and overrides are entered, or corrections applied.

Enter all historical information prior to entering any current time off or leave transactions in the tenant.

Coordinate with Payroll for inclusion or exclusion of events.

Payroll Considerations for UK Deployments

Scope	Consideration
Absence and Workday Payroll for the UK in scope.	Sometimes it's better to configure sick time off for the UK in hours instead of days. The only caveat for this is that when a worker takes sick time off in hours, you don't know if those hours represent an entire shift or a partial shift. Example: If Sam takes off 4 hours, you don't know if this is the entire shift, half a shift, a third of a shift, and so on. For SSP (Statutory Sick Pay), Workday assumes that any time off in hours is for the full shift. Workday Payroll for the UK doesn't support cascading leave types that are linked to statutory payments, with the exception of Statutory Sick Pay. You can't effectively manage proration for leave of absence across multiple levels in the same way that absence tables can. Example: 100%, 50%, and 0%.
Absence in scope and potentially Workday Payroll for the UK in the future.	To future proof any potential deployments, it's a good idea to set up sick leave as time off unless there's a compelling reason to configure a leave type.

Scope

Consideration

Absence and Workday Payroll for the UK in scope.

Sometimes it's better to configure sick time off for the UK in hours instead of days. The only caveat for this is that when a worker takes sick time off in hours, you don't know if those hours represent an entire shift or a partial shift. Example: If Sam takes off 4 hours, you don't know if this is the entire shift, half a shift, a third of a shift, and so on. For SSP (Statutory Sick Pay), Workday assumes that any time off in hours is for the full shift. Workday Payroll for the UK doesn't support cascading leave types that are linked to statutory payments, with the exception of Statutory Sick Pay.

You can't effectively manage proration for leave of absence across multiple levels in the same way that absence tables can. Example: 100%, 50%, and 0%.

Absence in scope and potentially Workday Payroll for the UK in the future.

To future proof any potential deployments, it's a good idea to set up sick leave as time off unless there's a compelling reason to configure a leave type.

Requirements

Configure the business processes and domain security policies in the Time Off and Leave functional area.

Create holiday and work schedule calendars.

Limitations

If you also use Time Tracking, being on leave doesn't automatically prevent an employee from entering worked time. You can build validations within Time Tracking to prevent an employee from entering time when on certain leave types.

You can only purge absence data for terminated workers and only for these data types:

Absence Case Events for Worker

Absence Occurrence

Worker's Absence Balance Components

Worker's Leave of Absence Events

Worker's Time Off Events

Absence data purging validation ensures that you can only purge workers' absence data after several years have passed since their termination date. Example:

In the U.S., the amount of time is 3 years.

In France, it's 5 years.

In the UK, it's 6.

In Canada, it's 7.

The Absence Third-Party Calendar integration with Microsoft Outlook only works with Microsoft Exchange Online. Workday doesn't support hybrid deployments of on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Exchange Online when setting up the integration.

Tenant Setup

You can configure tenant-wide settings for leave of absence and time off in the

Edit Tenant Setup - HCM

task to:

Control the display of absence thresholds on calendars.

Control whether workers can edit the time off type when they correct an approved time off request.

Edit absence setup components with an effective date older than 12 months such as accruals, time offs, and time off plans.

Hide total balances on absence tasks.

Overlap workers in the same position when the incumbent starts a leave of absence.

Security

To view the different security domains for Absence, access the

Domain Security Policies for Functional Area

report and select the Time Off and Leave functional area.

Security domains in the Time Off and Leave functional area enable users to:

Set up and administer time off and leave plans.

Manage who can request specific time off and leave types through eligibility, validations, segmented security, and absence thresholds.

Set up and administer absence entitlements for both time off and leave plans, and define carryover limit and expiration rules for time off plans.

View worker absence balances including projections and carryover balances.

View worker time off and leave taken, including absence occurrences.

Define time off and leave visibility for teams, managers, and administrators (including third-party calendar integrations).

View schedule information and report on work schedule calendar configurations and assignments.

You can restrict access to designated time offs and leave types, including time offs that are part of an absence table, to members of segment-based security groups.

Workday displays details of the time off and leaves type segments in your tenant and their associated time offs, leave types, and security groups on these reports:

All Time Off Security Segments

All Leave Type Security Segments

You can ensure that members of a security group have access to all time offs and leave types, including those restricted to segment-based security groups, by securing the group directly to these domains, respectively, in the Time Off and Leave functional area:

Access Time Off (Segmented)
domain.

Access Leave Type (Segmented)
domain.

Business Processes

Business Process	Considerations
Absence Case Event	Enables you to enter absence cases for workers who are on long-term leave of absence or time off.
Assign Work Schedule	Workday uses calendar rules to assign work schedule calendars to workers automatically. This business process enables you to override calendar rules and manually assign work schedule calendars to individual workers.
Correct Time Off	Enables administrators, managers, or workers to make a correction to an employee's time off.
Request Leave of Absence	Enables you to enter a leave of absence request for a worker.
Request Return from Leave of Absence	Enables you to enter a return from leave of absence request for a worker.
Request Time Off	Enables you to enter time off for a worker.

Reporting

To view the available reports for Absence Management, access the

Workday Standard Reports

report, and select 1 of these report categories:

Set Up Time Off and Leave

Time Off and Leave

Reports or Dashboards	Considerations
Absence Tier Time Off Entry Details	View absence tier usage by worker time off requests. You can also use the report to confirm that tier priority is working correctly. The report indicates reevaluated events.
All Time Off Plans	Verify the configuration of time off plans as of the effective date, including: Their balance periods, carryover limits, period schedules, and units of time. Whether to process accruals as of the beginning or end of the period. Which accruals add to the balance and time offs that reduce the balance.
All Time Offs	View all time offs and: Their related time off plan, time off type, unit of time. Their eligibility and scheduling rules. Whether they allow adjustments or overrides, negative time off limits, and data entry validations for time off requests.
All Accruals	View accruals and: Their related time off plan, unit of time, and limit amounts. Their eligibility, scheduling, and calculation rules. Whether they allow adjustments or overrides.
All Leave Families	View all the leave families that you can use to group leave types so that workers can easily find and select the types when requesting leave of absence.
Evaluate Absence Eligibility	Test whether a worker is eligible for time off plans, accruals, or time offs as of a selected date.
Evaluate Absence Calculation	Verify whether you configured accruals correctly and identify discrepancies in your configuration.
Leave Results for Worker Leave Results for Organization	Use to predict trends and plan for costs of workers being on a leave of absence.
My Team’s Upcoming Time Off	Use to view all upcoming time off for workers in organizations that you manage or support, enabling you to allocate resources and plan for future time off.
Team Absence Calendar	Use to analyze absence requests so that you can better manage team resources.
Time Off Liability	View the liability of an organization for time off balances. For the time off plans and date you select, Workday reports the plan balance and total liability for each worker.
Time Off Liability for Position	View your liability for time off plan balances for employees' positions in the supervisory organizations that you select.
Time Off Results Detail	View detailed time off information for workers in a single processing period.
Time Off Results Summary	View high-level time off information for workers in the processing periods and organizations that you select.
My Time Off Results by Period Time Off Results by Period Time Off Results by Period for Workers	View accruals, paid, and unpaid time off for each period.
Time Off Approvers with Events Awaiting Action	Use to identify approvers who have unapproved time off events awaiting their action.
View Absence Occurrences Detail	View individual occurrences for workers.
View Absence Occurrences Summary	View the number of times workers are absent per absence type.
Workers on Leave	Use to predict trends and plan for costs of workers being on a leave of absence.
Workers Returning from Leave	Identify workers returning from leave and check that you've correctly configured payroll for them.

Integrations

Web Service	Considerations
Adjust Time Off	Adjust or correct existing time off entries.
Enter Time Off	Add new time off entries.
Get Absence Inputs	Get information for accrual and time off adjustments and overrides for specific employees or batch identifiers.
Get Carryover Override	Get carryover expiration or limit overrides for workers for time off plans.
Get Override Balances	Get time off plan override balances for employees.
Get Time Off Plan Balances	Get the time off plan balances by worker.
Import Request Leave of Absence Events Import Request Return from Leave of Absence Events	Load a batch of either: Request Leave of Absence events. Return from Leave of Absence events. Workday processes the batch in a background process to retain only valid events. When you load business process events using these web services, they complete automatically. When using Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB), you can upload data from a spreadsheet into Workday. The spreadsheets contain worksheets for either the Request Leave of Absence or Request Return from Leave of Absence business processes. Enter: Header keys on the Import Request Leave of Absence or Import Request Return from Leave tab. The same header key on each row on the corresponding Request Leave of Absence Event or Request Return from Leave Event tab, if you want to group all events in the same batch. The header key is a unique identifier for a batch. A different line key for each event that's part of the same header key on the Request Leave of Absence Event or Request Return from Leave Event tab.
Import Time Off Request Event Batch	Bulk upload a high volume of new time off requests into Workday.
Put Absence Input	Add new accrual and time off adjustments and overrides for specific employees or batch identifiers, or update existing adjustments and overrides.
Put Carryover Override	Add or update new carryover expiration or limit override records for a specific worker and time off plan.
Put Override Balance	Add or update time off plan override balance records for a specific worker and time off plan.
Request Leave of Absence	Add new leave of absence requests. This web service uses the Request Leave of Absence business process event and its subprocesses.
Request Return from Leave of Absence	Add return from leave of absence requests. It uses the Request Return from Leave of Absence business process event and its subprocesses.

Workday also provides an Absence integration with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. You can create an integration system using the Absence Third-Party Calendar
template and configure it to send approved time off events from Workday to these online third-party calendars. When you run the integration, Workday automatically creates, updates, and removes approved time off entries, corrections, and cancellations in these third-party calendars.

Connections and Touchpoints

Touchpoint	Considerations
Time Tracking	You can enable employees to enter their time off through Time Tracking or Absence Management.
Workday Assistant	Set up the Workday Assistant chatbot to enable users to: Request time off. View their time off balances. View holiday schedules. You can also enable Workday Assistant in Workday for Slack to access quick time off actions.
Workday Learning	Workday validates whether workers have approved time off or leave of absence requests that conflict with scheduled course offerings.
Workday HCM	Absence Management uses employee data such as work location, seniority, employee type, or position for eligibility rules. You can configure the Change Job business process to transfer balances for employees automatically when they become eligible for a different time off plan.
Workday Payroll	You can configure Workday to pay out absence balances to an employee automatically on termination.
Workday Scheduling	You can define whether Workday counts time off or holiday time towards working hours for the week. You can then apply that configuration to scheduling validations so that they take time off and holiday time into account.

Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.

Setup Considerations: Absence Calendar Experience

Setup Considerations: Time Off Plans

Setup Considerations: Time Off

Setup Considerations: Time Off Adjustments

Setup Considerations: Accrual Adjustments and Overrides

Setup Considerations: Leave of Absence

Setup Considerations: Absence Occurrences

Setup Considerations: Absence Balances

Setup Considerations: Period Schedules

Setup Considerations: Time Off Calculations for Payroll

Steps: Set Up the Absence Calendar Experience

Steps: Set Up Time Off Plans