Setup Considerations: People Analytics
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of People Analytics. 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 People Analytics uses augmented analytics technology to surface prioritized insights in the form of key metrics and business questions, along with their underlying drivers. People Analytics uses explanatory summaries to help you understand these insights and act on the most critical trends and gaps in your workforce.
Business Benefits
The out-of-the-box, AI-powered insights provided by People Analytics enable you to:
- Identify important opportunities and risks around key workforce metrics.
- Detect patterns that you might not see or have time to discover.
- Eliminate time-consuming, manual analysis, enabling you to focus on strategic work.
- Track workforce developments with clearly written narratives in natural language.
Use Cases
You can track key metrics and trends in these topics:
- VIBE Index™
- Diversity and Inclusion
- Organization Composition
- Retention and Attrition
- Hiring
- Talent and Performance
- Skills
Questions to Consider
Question | Consideration |
|---|---|
What topics are you interested in exploring? |
You can opt in to each of these
topics for your People Analytics application:
Each topic comprises 1 tab in the application UI, with the exception of Employee Sentiment, which is part of the VIBE Index tab. Topics also have different field selections requiring your attention as you configure People Analytics with a Workday consultant. Raise a Customer Care ticket to request information if you're interested in:
|
What metrics would you like to track? | Work with your Workday consultant to select KPI metrics you would like to surface in your People Analytics report. You can select up to 9 metrics for each topic. |
What
fields do you want to include in your analysis? | A Workday consultant will guide you through the selection of fields to map to the structure of the People Analytics data model.
These field choices have a direct impact on how insights are created and on the quality of these insights.
For each topic and metric you select, some fields are required and some fields are optional. You can also customize each field display name. |
Which workers do you want to include in your analysis? | When configuring People Analytics, you can determine which worker populations will be included in the analysis and featured in the People Analytics content. You can also refine your population in the People Analytics report to generate content only for specific predefined populations. |
Can you filter data in the People Analytics application after filtering out populations during installation? | You can use the Refine Data panel in the application to select a worker population for which to generate insights. You can do this for the entirety of the population brought into People Analytics as well as distinct worker subgroups as defined in your configuration. To narrow down existing insights, you can refine your content view by dimensions. This enables you to view insights for different areas of the organization based on worker population classification or organizational structure. Learn more about this in Concept: Refining in People Analytics. Example: An HR business partner who represents multiple supervisory organizations can configure their content view to only see insights for non-union workers in North America. |
Which time frame do you want to use for your analysis? | To better align our analysis with your organization’s business processes, you can select a fiscal schedule predefined in the Set Up Fiscal Schedules and Years report. Your fiscal schedule determines the time frames by which People Analytics should run. |
Recommendations
When configuring People Analytics, consider the target audience of the application: HR Business Partners and executives within an organization. Configuration choices (mapped fields, included or excluded populations, and so on) impact the content made available for these users.
We recommend that you run People Analytics Data Quality and correct any defects in your configuration before installing the application. Data Quality also runs automatically when you install the application. You can run Data Quality from the
Configure People Analytics
report and view the results by accessing the People Analytics Data Quality
report.Data Quality module doesn’t check the data obtained from Peakon.
You can support the People Analytics development team by sharing your Workday Peakon Employee Voice data with our Machine-Learning Development Environment (MLDE) for research & development purposes. By opting in, you authorize Workday to use data related to Peakon questions and responses, as well as employee identifiers for design and development of future planned features for People Analytics. MLDE will receive data on a weekly basis. This will help the development team innovate capabilities that blend Peakon sentiment data into focus insights across existing topics in People Analytics, which will then be made available to you.
If you opt out of this initiative at a later time, MLDE will stop receiving your data immediately, and any data collected up to the point of the opt-out will be deleted after 14 days.
Requirements
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.
To access the Employee Sentiment topic, raise a Customer Care ticket to enable the API data export toggle in your Peakon account and activate the VIBE Index topic in the
Configure People Analytics
report.In order for People Analytics to perform analysis successfully, you must have at least 4 months of transactional worker data in Workday. You can select 4 to 36 months of historical data to load into People Analytics from Workday for analysis. Any transactional history converted during deployment is considered part of the initial data load.
The amount of data history you have in People Analytics determines the analysis type. Year-over-year analysis requires at least 14 months of data. Rolling 3 month analysis for business questions is available with 4 to 12 months of data.
When you install People Analytics, you automatically enable the automated update activity, which includes a recurrent data refresh running according to the fiscal schedule you set up. This enables the application to continue to load and analyze the latest data into Workday on the first Sunday following the end of the fiscal period. If the initial data load is less than 13 months, the analysis type for business questions automatically changes from rolling 3 month analysis to year-over-year analysis when 13 months of data are available and loaded into People Analytics. The maximum amount of data history you can have in People Analytics is 36 months.
For the Belonging metric in the VIBE Index, only the data collected after the Peakon API data export toggle is turned on can be incorporated into the VIBE Index. Even if you don’t intend to use the metric at the time, you can still enable the API data export to accumulate a more extensive dataset for potential future analysis.
Limitations
You can create custom reports and discovery boards using People Analytics data sources for ad hoc reporting purposes or to validate your data. They become invalid only if you run an installation that fails and then try installing
People Analytics
again. Resources created with the Data Quality
dataset must be deleted before running Data Quality
to ensure the its successful completion.In the
Configure People Analytics
report > Field Mapping
step for a given pipeline, the related actions icons next to business objects and source fields return an error when clicked if the selected source field is a Workday-delivered calculated field. For all other Workday-delivered fields, People Analytics enables you to use these related action icons to view data for business objects and source fields when:
- the selected source field is a custom field added to a Workday-delivered standard report.
- the selected source field is a custom field added to a custom report.
People Analytics
performs analysis on up to 400 thousand employees. If your People Analytics
deployment exceeds the limit of 400 thousand workers, we recommend contacting Workday Support.Tenant Setup
No impact.
Security
These domains in the People Analytics and Prism Analytics functional areas:
Domains | Considerations |
|---|---|
Manage: People Analytics | Can maintain People Analytics. |
View: People Analytics | Can access the People Analytics application. Use this domain when you want to provide access to view People Analytics without removing access to particular fields. Supports unconstrained security groups and role-based constrained security groups. Doesn’t support Aggregation or Intersection groups even when they are role-based. |
View: People Analytics Business Leader View: People Analytics HR Business Partner View: People Analytics Custom 1 View: People Analytics Custom 2 View: People Analytics Custom 3 | Can access the People Analytics application. Use these domains when configuring field level security in People Analytics to remove access to sensitive data in particular fields. Supports unconstrained security groups and role-based constrained security groups. Doesn’t support Aggregation or Intersection groups even when they are role-based. |
For the initial deployment of People Analytics, you can work with a Workday consultant to:
- Configure the security settings during the configuration and installation of People Analytics.
- Add security groups to a People Analytics domain. You can:
- Add an existing Workday security group, or
- Create a new security group specifically for People Analytics users.
- Add more than 1 security group.
If necessary, you can make post-deployment changes using the
Configure People Analytics
report. People Analytics supports:
- Constrained role-based security groups.
- Unconstrained role-based security groups.
- Unconstrained user-based security groups.
Business Processes
No impact.
Reporting
No impact.
Integrations
No impact.
Connections and Touchpoints
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.
The Employee Sentiment topic interacts with Workday Peakon Employee Voice through API.