Workday’s Delegation: Helpful tool for Sharing responsibility
It’s important inside a workplace to have a great and comfortable work environment, where every supervisor, manager and employee know their responsibilities. Sometimes there’s the need for an individual to delegate tasks or operations to another person, from superior to subordinate.
Delegating a task is completely different from reassigning it. Reassignment means to permanently remove responsibility for a task from its original user and assigning it to another user. On the other hand delegation allows one person(delegate) to perform tasks on behalf of the original task owner(delegator) for a period of time. We all know the benefits of delegation are many, itdrives collective success and efficiency, and also helps save time to focus on valuable tasks.
Delegation can also be handled within Workday. There is an additional need to be able to delegate tasks, in some Workday Business processes, all steps are mandatory, if the responsible for approving or denying them is away, the delegated can complete these steps.
Delegation on Workday
Workday allows two types of delegation, Business processes and Inbox Tasks, both of them are intended to create flexibility and reduce workload unfinished while someone is away. In Both types the delegated can be any user specified by the original taks owner. Once the delegate performs the task, Workday is able to differentiate the current user and identify him as the delegate, in terms of security, it will be evaluated for the original owner.
- What to bear in mind before enabling the Delegation.
Once an employee knows that he needs to delegate a task, there are a few tenant configurations that need to be done, before he can start a delegation. After deciding who or what group of people could be delegates( there can be alternate delegates), the tenant configuration allows the delegator to specify his delegate(s). Also, the delegator must specify the end date for inbox delegations.
Security policies are also important at the time of creating a delegation, any individual business process that a delegator wishes to delegate, must have configured the required security.
Now, how can a Workday employee delegate a business process or a task?
Let’s look at the next example: Steve is the manager of a company and he needs to leave for business. Steve(delegator) needs to delegate several tasks meanwhile he isn’t available, with the help of Workday’s tasks, he can choose who can help him for as long as he needs, configuring the start and the end date and what tasks he needs help with. So he chose Laura as his delegate, now Laura can perform tasks on behalf of Steve during his absence.
Depending on Workday’s configuration and the delegated task’s own configuration, it might require extra review and approvals. In this case, both delegator and delegate will receive notifications once the delegation goes into effect.
During the duration of the delegation, Laura will act on behalf of Steve, this means that she will receive any task that would have been directed to Steve For the specified process. Additionally, any related process notification and alerts, will be directed also to Laura.
Delegates have the possibility to request reassignment for any delegated task, but, it’s important to specify: Delegate can’t delegate any delegated task to any other worker.
Finally, what if Steve wished to end the delegation? With the same task he created the delegation, Steve can stop and finish the delegation any time he wants.
On the other hand, if one or more delegations need to be modified, though Workday, Steve can access the page corresponding with delegations, in which it will display all delegations and the user’s delegation history, now any new information or correction can be done to any current delegations.
Can all business processes be delegated?
This is a big question regarding delegation, and the answer is no. It is the case of ‘To Dos’. The delegator can delegate “To Do” steps, but, in the case that a task is embedded in a “To Do” step, and this task doesn’t allow delegation, the task will not appear in the delegate inbox as a “To Do” step.
To conclude
Managers usually are unavailable or take absences for different reasons(like Steve) and it’s important to them the ability to use delegations. In Workday, delegations can be a great ally for every employee, with the two main types of delegation that we learned, projects or tasks will not have to be put on hold until the responsible returns.