Setup Considerations: Flex Teams

What It Is

Flex Teams enables workers to create, manage, and participate in internal teams with varying durations and levels of commitment. Using Flex Teams, companies can align their talent resources with the work that needs to get done, while empowering workers to grow new skills and develop their careers.

Business Benefits

Flex Teams enables you to:

Create and manage internal teams that can operate across different locations, functions, and organizations.

Optimize the use of talent resources by matching skilled workers with impactful opportunities.

Increase internal mobility by providing low-barrier opportunities for workers to gain new experience and skills alongside their regular work.

Boost employee engagement by highlighting the specific skills needed for flex teams.

Use Cases

Quickly assemble cross-functional teams with the required skills to address high-priority projects.

Provide a low-barrier framework for stretch goals and side projects that workers contribute to alongside their regular responsibilities.

Enable workers to build, apply, and demonstrate new skills through participation in flex teams.

Create flexible work opportunities for contingent workers.

Enrich your talent data in Workday through feedback and skill endorsements upon flex team completion.

Questions to Consider

Questions	Considerations
What types of internal work opportunities are there in your organization?	If you have informal project teams with no representation in Workday, you can use Flex Teams to help organize these teams and support their leaders and participants. If you want to reduce barriers to creating, organizing, and staffing some of your teams or projects, you can use Flex Teams to reduce the amount of structure and administrative work involved in running these teams.
Does your organization have leaders and administrators responsible for creating and managing multiple informal teams or projects at once?	To save time when working with many flex teams, you can enable hosts and administrators to create and manage flex teams using Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB). Example: You want to create flex teams for each organization and each development cycle in the upcoming year. You enable your HR administrator to use the Manage Flex Team EIB, so they can mass load flex teams from a spreadsheet. See: Concept: Manage Flex Team EIB.
Who do you want to be able to join, create, and approve flex teams?	You can enable any employees and contingent workers to create and join flex teams. You can also add approval steps to the Manage Flex Team and Add Flex Team Member business processes to ensure oversight for workers hosting or joining flex teams. Example: You enable all employees and contingent workers to join flex teams with their manager’s approval, and you enable managers to create flex teams with the HR administrator’s approval. Workday provides the ability to enable contingent workers to use Flex Teams as a configuration option for use at your discretion. You must always verify any configurations in your tenant and should consult with your own legal counsel to determine if the configurations meet your business and compliance needs. For details, see Steps: Set Up Security for Flex Teams.
Do you want to use machine learning suggestions to support internal mobility?	Workday surfaces machine learning suggestions for flex team opportunities based on the match between workers’ skills and skill interests and the skills needed for the flex team or role. We surface machine learning suggestions for different roles depending on which capabilities you implement. When you implement: Flex Teams on its own, flex team hosts and administrators can view suggested candidates. Opportunity Marketplace in the Career Hub , you can enable workers to view suggested flex team opportunities. The Manager Insights Hub , you can enable managers to view suggested flex team opportunities for their direct reports. Workers can also find flex team opportunities using the Browse Flex Teams report, which does not include machine learning suggestions. For details, see Concept: Flex Teams.
Do you want to use AI to help hosts create flex teams?	While creating, editing, and revising flex teams, hosts can use generative AI to quickly add consistently structured, action-oriented details based on their initial descriptions. To disable this feature, select Disable AI-Generated Flex Team Descriptions on the Edit Tenant Setup - HCM task.
How do leaders of projects and informal teams assess and endorse their team members?	When completing a flex team or role, hosts can provide skill endorsements and anytime feedback to the participants. See Steps: Set Up Feedback and Steps: Set Up Skill Endorsements and Ratings. You can also enable flex team hosts as additional managers in performance reviews for their team members. See Steps: Set Up Additional Manager Evaluations.

Recommendations

For a first-time implementation, consider starting with a small part of your organization. Use the feedback and experience from this group to refine the setup before a broader rollout.

For a limited rollout of Flex Teams, consider using the

Browse Flex Teams

report only, instead of enabling recommended flex teams in the

Career Hub

.

Before giving workers access, create some flex teams and ensure their status is In Recruiting
.

To ensure that opportunity matching works in your implementation tenant, access the

Maintain Weekly Machine Learning Activation for Implementation Tenant

task and select the

HCM ML Features and Third Party Connectors GA

service check box. This task enables Workday to refresh matches every Monday. To refresh matches manually once every 24 hours, access the

Run On-Demand Machine Learning Activation for Implementation Tenant

task. These tasks are specific to your implementation tenant only, and are not supported in Production or Sandbox tenants.

If you've opted into

HCM Machine Learning Early Access (EA) Features

using the

Innovation Services Opt-In

task, you must select both this service check box, and the GA option, when running the

Maintain Weekly Machine Learning Activation for Implementation

task.

Similarly, to refresh matches manually, you must select both GA and EA check boxes when running the

Run On-Demand Machine Learning Activation for Implementation Tenant

task.

Unless both GA and EA are selected when running either task, neither service will complete successfully, and models for both selections won't be created.

Requirements

You must set up Skills Cloud to use Flex Teams.

You might need to take additional steps to enable this feature depending on your organization's subscription service agreement. For more information, see this Community article.

Limitations

Workday does not use crowdsourced skills for suggesting flex team opportunities or candidates.

You can't configure help text for the Add Flex Team Member
business process.

Match analyses and candidate recommendations only update every 24 hours, Monday through Friday, so when:

You expand access to flex teams to new workers, Workday can't immediately suggest them as flex team candidates.

Workers update their skills, their career development opportunities update immediately, but flex team hosts won't immediately see updated match analyses and candidate recommendations.

You create or update a flex team, workers' career development opportunities in the

Career Hub

don't update immediately.

A worker is terminated, Workday won't immediately remove that worker from candidate recommendations.

For Career Hub customers, the

Save to Plan

option isn’t available for suggested projects.

We support Flex Teams in:

Chinese (Simplified)

Chinese (Traditional)

Danish

Dutch

English

Finnish

French (Canada)

French (France/Continental)

German

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Norwegian

Portuguese (Brazil)

Spanish

Swedish

You can create intersection security groups to limit access to locations or organizations that support these languages.

Tenant Setup

On the

Edit Tenant Setup - HCM

task, in the

Talent

section, you can:

Enable flex teams, jobs, and projects as opportunities within the

Career Hub

.

Enable suggested learning courses for workers viewing their flex team match analysis.

Enable workers to include a note when expressing interest in a flex team.

Disable AI assistance for generating flex team details when creating, editing, or revising a flex team.

On the

Edit Tenant Setup - Notifications

task, in the

Notification Delivery Settings

section,

HCM

category, you can configure notification settings for Flex Teams. SeeReference: Flex Teams Notifications .

Security

Configure these security domains in the Talent Marketplace functional area.

Domains	Considerations
Flex Team Worker Data	Enables users to view a flex team candidate's availability, skills, and skill interests.
Flex Teams	Enables workers to: Access flex teams. Express or remove interest in flex teams. Display as a candidate when they're a match for a flex team. Receive notifications for flex team promotions. Access the Flex Team Hosts prompt category when adding additional managers to a performance review.
Manage: Flex Teams Host Access	Enables users to access the Manage Flex Teams landing page, where they can: Create flex teams. View all flex teams that they manage.
Manage: Flex Teams	Enables users to view and edit their flex teams and flex team members, and generate flex team descriptions with AI assistance. You can create and assign a: Constrained role-based security group for flex team hosts to manage only the flex teams that they create. For these hosts, the Modify with AI prompt isn't available until they submit their first flex team. User-based security group for flex team administrators to manage all flex teams across your tenant.
Manage: Flex Team Types	Secures flex team types. By default, users with the ability to create flex teams can create all flex team types. You can create a segment-based security group using the Flex Team Type security segment to restrict access to certain flex team types. When you configure segmented security, update the Manage: Flex Team Types domain security policy by adding the segment-based security group and removing the All Users security group.
(Optional) Opportunity Marketplace in Career Hub	Enables workers to access suggested flex team opportunities on Opportunity Marketplace in Career Hub .
Reports: Flex Teams	Enables users to access reports about the usage of flex teams and their impact in your organization. Some reports secured to this domain require additional domain access to view, because they contain data secured to a different domain.
Self-Service: Flex Teams	Enables workers to view their own flex team history, including flex teams they've expressed interest or participated in.
Set Up: Flex Teams	Enables administrators to maintain flex team types, categories, and availabilities. To enable flex team administrators to view flex teams created by other flex team hosts, they must have Modify permission on the Set Up: Flex Teams domain.
Set Up: Career Hub	Enables administrators to configure the Career Hub , including customizing filters for browsing flex teams.
Worker Data: Flex Teams	Enables users to view another worker's flex team history, including flex teams the worker expressed interest or participated in.

Business Processes

Business Processes	Considerations
Add Flex Team Member	Configure to enable users to add workers to a flex team. We recommend adding an approval step for workers, including contingent workers if you want to enable them to join flex teams.
Manage Flex Team	Configure to enable users to create and edit simple and advanced flex teams. Ensure that users who can initiate this business process have access to either the Manage: Flex Teams or Manage: Flex Teams Host Access domains. Workday automatically assigns the flex team host role to the flex team creator. Workday recommends adding the same security groups to the Create Flex Team and Edit Flex Team business process initiating actions to ensure that flex team hosts can always edit their flex teams. To edit a flex team they've created, flex team hosts must be part of a security group secured to the Edit Flex Team initiating action that has the Workday assignable role of Flex Team Host . Administrators and flex team hosts can edit a flex team from the Manage All Flex Teams or flex team detail page. Edit Flex Team automatically approves and doesn't use any of your configured approval steps or routing rules on the Manage Flex Team business process definition.
Give Feedback	Configure to enable flex team hosts to provide feedback for workers in a completed simple flex team or flex team role.

Reporting

Reports	Considerations

Browse Flex Teams	Provides access to flex teams outside of the Career Hub . Workers can view and express interest in flex team opportunities.
Manage Flex Teams Flex team hosts can manage and create flex teams. Members of a user-based security group with access to this report can view all flex teams.
Flex Teams Participation Rate	Provides visibility into the rate at which workers participate in flex teams by organization.
Internal Job Application Rate by Flex Team Membership	Enables you to compare the internal job application rate for workers who participate in flex teams against workers who do not.
Internal Movement Rate by Flex Team Membership	Enables you to compare the rate of internal movement, such as transfers and promotions, of workers who participate in flex teams against workers who do not.

My Flex Team Events	Flex team hosts and administrators can view business process events and information, including Flex Team Name , Flex Team Status , Flex Team Approved Members , Flex Team Start Date , and Flex Team End Date .
Simple and Advanced Flex Teams	Flex team hosts and administrators can report on flex teams across their organizations. Includes a calculated field, Team Type for Flex Team . The team type attribute is on the Flex Team related business object.
Total Number of Flex Teams by Status	Provides insights about the lifecycle of flex teams in your organization by showing the total number of flex teams by status.
Total Number of Flex Teams Created	Provides visibility into the total number of simple and advanced flex teams created.

Integrations

Web Services	Considerations
Manage Flex Team	Enables you to create or update flex teams using the Manage Flex Team business process. See Concept: Manage Flex Team EIB.
Get Flex Teams	Enables you to retrieve simple and advanced flex teams.
Complete Flex Team	Enables you to complete simple flex teams and flex team roles. Advanced flex teams become complete when all of the roles are complete.
Add Flex Team Members Get Flex Team Members	Enables you to add workers to flex team roles and simple flex teams, and to retrieve approved flex team members.
Get Flex Team Availabilities Put Flex Team Availability	Enables you to add, update, delete, and retrieve the levels of availability that your workers can set for flex teams, and to set the default availability for new Career Hub users.
Get Flex Team Categories Put Flex Team Category	Enables you to add, update, delete, and retrieve the categories that are available when creating flex teams.
Get Flex Team Types Put Flex Team Type	Enables you to add, update, delete, and retrieve the flex team types that are available when creating flex teams.
Get Flex Team Endorsements Put Flex Team Endorsements	Enables you to upload and retrieve data for endorsements of flex team members, including specifying which worker is giving the endorsement. Flex team members can receive endorsements after their flex team or role is complete. Endorsements include: Recommending the worker for other flex teams or not. Optional public feedback. Optional skill endorsements. These skills are added to the flex team endorsement but not to the worker's profile. Use the Manage Skills web service to add skills for a worker.

Connections and Touchpoints

Features	Considerations
Anytime Feedback	When flex team hosts mark simple or advanced flex teams as complete, they can give anytime feedback to each flex team member.
Interests	From the Career Hub , employees can view recommended flex teams that can help them develop their skill interests.
Learning	You can enable Workday to recommend learning courses to workers when they view their flex team match analysis. Workday recommends learning courses based on the skills required for the flex team that are missing from the worker's profile.
Skills	To promote skills-based talent development, Workday uses skills as the foundation for machine learning suggestions in Flex Teams, with Skills Cloud determining similar and exact skill matches between workers and flex team opportunities.

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.