Setup Considerations: Student Appointments

What It Is

The Student Appointments feature enables your students to schedule appointments with their advisors using Workday. Staff members, such as counselors and advisors, are able to create and maintain their schedule and availability in Workday. Staff supervisors or front-office staff can view appointments-related current and historical data on Workday-provided as well as custom reports.

Business Benefits

Student success depends on frequent interactions with their advisors, and knowing the appropriate advisor to contact. Institutions using Workday Student might be using other appointment applications. As a result:

Students have to work with different appointments processes adopted by different institutions. There's no uniformity for scheduling and working with appointments. They aren't always sure who to meet with for their specific need.

Staff members (faculty and advisors) pull in data from multiple sources, resulting in manual administrative work.

Institutions have little or no reporting capabilities.

The Workday Student Appointments feature:

Provides a convenient task for students to request appointments with advisors. They can select the best advisor, based on their need and schedule preferences.

Provides a task for advisors to request appointments with students if they need to.

Enables the use of questionnaire to gather more information from students about the purpose of the appointment. Questionnaires can also provide context for the advisors so they can prepare.

Integrates and stores appointments data with the student profile and other student information within Workday.

Pulls in the institutional holidays, time off, and teaching schedules of advisors.

Enables advisors and staff to view Workday-generated reports or create their own custom reports using appointments data. This historical data can provide valuable insight into appointment trends. Some trends might include how frequently students are meeting with advisors, the appointment categories students most need help with, advisor availability, and so on.

Use Cases

Students can use the appointments task and reports to:

Schedule or cancel appointments.

Find appropriate advisors based on their need.

View advisor availability.

View their past, upcoming, and canceled appointments.

Advisors can use the tasks and reports in Workday to:

Request appointments on behalf of a student.

Set up schedules for the different institutions to which they belong, and maintain their availability.

Manage and view their current and upcoming appointments.

Block unavailable times, including Holidays, time off, and class schedules.

Select a student as a no-show.

Resolve student holds if the hold resolution is to meet with the advisor.

Front desk managers can:

Create and view reports to track waiting times, appointment reasons, missed appointments, and other analytics.

View and manage the schedules of their staff, either individually or view all of them on a custom report.

Questions to Consider

Questions	Considerations
Who will be able to request appointments?	Students can request appointments for themselves. For students to request appointments for themselves, make sure that the group Student as Self can initiate the business process. Other security groups can request an appointment on behalf of students. Make sure all security groups that act as advisors, counselors, and instructors can initiate the business process.
Which groups will be able to manage appointments?	Groups that are in the counselor, advisor, and instructor roles can create their appointment schedules and manage them accordingly.
What appointment categories and reasons does the institution offer? Which groups can create and maintain appointment categories and reasons?	You configure the appointment categories task for the different services that your institution provides. Example: Financial aid counseling Career counseling Academic advising International student counseling services Categories are specific to your institution. You can create as many categories as you want. You can also create categories that are specific to the academic level for your institution.
Which appointment categories will the different advisors be available for? What reasons will each category include?	To ensure that students are making appointments with the appropriate advisor, advisors can configure appointment times for specific categories and reasons. When the student requests a specific appointment, only those advisors that offer that appointment category display. You can create reasons under each category. You can create reasons for an institution under the superior academic institution. You can also create reasons that are specific to an academic level.
How long will the duration be for each appointment category?	When you create the appointment category, you can enter a duration. Advisors have the option of updating the duration.
Do you want to use questionnaires? Do you want to enable staff to view questionnaire responses?	You can include questionnaires as an action step to get more information before students meet with advisors. You can also use questionnaires as a post-appointment feedback survey. You can configure questionnaires on the business process as a condition for a category or reason. Example: An International Advising category could have a reason that would require the student to fill in a questionnaire before the appointment.
Which appointments will require approval?	You can configure an optional approval step for the entire business process to route to the staff member or student. You also have the option to create condition rules on the appointments business process. Example: A career counseling appointment will require an approval. If you want the advisor to be able to cancel, deny, or send back appointment requests, make sure that they have the permission to do so. If not, these options won't display on the appointment request.
Do you want students and advisors to be able to cancel appointments?	Make sure that students and all security groups that act as advisors, counselors, and instructors can initiate the Cancel Student Appointment business process.
Do you want buffer time between appointments? Do you want lead-time for an appointment request?	Advisors can manage their own schedules. They can create as many schedules as they require. They can create both granular schedules and generic schedules. Example: They can create a schedule from Monday to Thursday to meet with students for specific categories and reasons. They can create another schedule for Fridays from 8:00 am to 10: am for general purposes. Advisors can use schedule overrides to create a lead-time for appointment requests. They can also block off times, which won't display to the student who is making the appointment.
Do you want to block off time?	Advisors can set up their teaching schedules and time off. In addition, they can block off time that they're not available to meet.
Do you want your appointments in a specific location and format?	Advisors can specify the location of each available appointment, such as a specific campus, and the format of the appointment, such as in person, by phone, or virtual. Example: Availability in person at Location A on MW, in person at Location B on Fri, and virtual appointments on TTh.
Will you use appointments to resolve certain types of student holds?	You can apply student holds on students if they’re not meeting their requirements, or if they have outstanding balances. You can apply a hold on a student because they need to meet with an advisor. You can configure the business process to remove the hold on the student after the appointment. Workday provides the option of adding a remove student hold action step on the appointments business process.
How will students, advisors, and staff view appointments?	Workday has built-in reports and report fields for appointments. We provide reports for students, advisors, and staff supervisors. You can also create custom appointments dashboards: For students and advisors so that they can view their past, canceled, and upcoming appointments. For staff managers to view all of the appointments across your institution. You can define different analytics, such as appointments by staff or by category. Example: The Admissions Director might want to view the number of admission-related appointments, the appointments by specific advisors, and other data points.

Recommendations

Create some appointment categories that are general and available to all students. Doing so, doesn't restrict students from meeting with advisors from other departments. Example: A student looking to switch majors requesting a meeting with an advisor from another department for academic counseling.

Configure these security groups to provide staff members and students permissions to approve, cancel, and rescind appointments:

Employee As Self

Contingent Worker As Self

Student As Self

Configure staff and institution holiday calendars.

Configure the Workday teaching schedules.

Use condition rules to manage routing.

Consider creating security groups for some appointment categories. Example: A student looking to discuss an immigration issue.

Requirements

No impact.

Limitations

No impact.

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

Domain	Considerations
Manage: Student Appointments	Enables advisors to manage and view their appointment schedules and availability. It also enables them to select whether a student showed up for the appointment. Advisors can also view appointment categories and reasons.
Manage: Student Appointment Staff	Enables office managers and staff supervisors to manage and view the appointments scheduled by their staff.
Reports: Student Appointments	Enables advisors to view their past and future appointments.
Reports: Student Appointment Staff	Enables office managers and staff supervisors to view their staff appointment data. They can also create custom reports to view staff activities related to student appointments.
Self Service: Student Appointments	Enables students to request and view their own appointments.
Set Up: Student Appointments	Enables you to configure the appointments categories and reasons for your institution. It also enables you to use the web services for retrieving and creating appointment categories and reasons.
(Optional) Questionnaire Creation and Distribution and Questionnaire Results	Enables you to create and maintain questionnaires. The Questionnaire Results domain enables you to view responses and survey results. You can use segmented security to restrict access to questionnaires and responses.

Business Processes

These business processes enable you to configure the feature:

Request Student Appointment

Cancel Student Appointment

You configure which security groups can initiate it, manage approvals, manage cancellations, and so on. You can add conditions to manage routing appointments. You can configure questionnaires on the business process as a condition or for surveys.

Reporting

Report	Considerations
View My Student Appointments	Enables students to view their past, canceled, and upcoming appointments.
View Student Appointments	Enables advisors and counselors to view their past, canceled, and upcoming appointments.
View Student Appointment Availability	Enables student administrators and staff managers to view student appointments by staff.

We provide the

Student Appointments

data source (secured to the Reports: Student Appointments
domain) and include these filters:

All Future Appointments

All Past Appointments

All Canceled Appointments

We include a number of report fields on the

Student Appointment

business object (secured to the Public Reporting Items
domain). Some of these fields include:

Academic Level for Primary Student Appointment Reason

Academic Unit for Primary Student Appointment Reason

Marked as No-Show

Primary Student Appointment Reason

Student Appointment Category

Student Appointment Staff

We also provide these report fields on the

Student

business object (secured to the Reports: Student Appointments
domain):

Number of Student Appointments

Student Appointments

For staff managers, we provide these data sources (secured to the Reports: Student Appointment Staff
domain):

Staff Setup for Student Appointments

All Student Appointment Staff

Staff managers can create custom reports to view staff activities related to student appointments.

Integrations

Web Service	Considerations
Get Student Appointments	Retrieves all student appointments (past, upcoming, and canceled).
Get Student Appointment Busy Times	Retrieves all student appointment busy times.
Get Student Appointment Categories and Reasons	Retrieves all student appointment categories and related reasons.
Import Student Appointment Busy Times	Imports busy times for student appointments.
Put Student Appointment Busy Times	Updates or adds busy times for student appointments.
Put Student Appointment Category and Reasons	Updates or adds a student appointment category and related reasons.
Submit Student Appointment Cancellation	Cancels a single student appointment event for an existing upcoming appointment.
Submit Request Student Appointment	Creates a new student appointment request event.

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.