Workday is a cloud personnel management system that is increasingly being adopted by international corporations. Integration ensures transparent HR processes, as well as simplifies planning and budgeting systems and allows faster decision-making.
Russian companies face challenges that need to be addressed within the timeframe set by the global office. In this article, we will cover the problems an HR department in Russia may face when implementing the system at the global level and how they should be approached.
Data Customization Issue
Workday is not planned to be customized in line with the local characteristic aspects. To put it briefly, for instance, a Russian team which is responsible for the transfer and entry of data needs to enter local data into the international system Workday.
And here lies the risk of discrepancies. The reasoning capability of the international organizational structure may be dramatically different from the Russian strict hierarchy. And it is often simply impossible to match.
In the Russian system, an employee often answers to one manager, while in the global system he or she is also subordinate to a group of people. In such a situation, a project team will have to come up with different mechanisms to collate the correct data from 1C database in line with the Workday global logistics to ensure correct representation.
Configuration Logic
Many HR professionals shift responsibility for migration to Workday to technical experts and are not eager to delve into the key point of the process.
This is a great mistake: a technical expert really does a lot within the project; however, it is the HR specialist who lays down the comparing logic between the local system data and the global one.
A simple example: in Russia, there are 25 causes of dismissal, while Workday offers only five of them. A technical expert will link five causes to each group as this is the easiest way. But how adequate would that be?
After all, this information will affect the accuracy of the dismissal statistics throughout the company. Therefore, the better an HR specialist understands special characteristics of the Workday configuration, the better the migration will be.
Workday grants a workbook to each company that details fields, their values, meanings standing behind that values and how to manage them.
Law Issues
Setting up Workday always brings difficulties with Federal Law On Personal Data No. 152-FZ. The project team must work out the issues: how and where data is stored, in what form it is transmitted and what main exchange direction is.
We recommend to select the exchange direction from 1С to Workday as the main one: in other words, all data of Russian employees are to be recorded and stored in Russia. Moreover, the employer must sign consents to cross-border transfer of personal data with its subordinates.
System Update
The Workday system is updated twice a year. And there is a risk that an update will disrupt data exchange. For example, the section “Reception” had ten columns with data; Workday added the eleventh one.
As a result, one needs to re-accumulate data. However, this situation is not that bad. The system developers always notify about the time period of updates in advance. Everything that the project integration team needs to do is to modify the files if data exchange fails. But it won’t take more than one or two days.
No Support
The global office typically passes on the integration instructions to colleagues in the field and sets a timeline for migration. Workday does not have an office or an authorized supplier in Russia. Therefore, local teams will have to solve the problems of customization, lack of experience and knowledge of Workday setting on their own.
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