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HR Management

Workday HCM

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: 1 of 4 dimensions proven

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Workday, Inc. · www.workday.com

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Works Council Advocate

Weighted verdict

Sits on the Betriebsrat and has to approve this rollout under BetrVG §87. Reads every feature for whether it can monitor behaviour, and asks what is logged, who can read it and what can be switched off. A tool that cannot answer those questions does not get installed, however good it is.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Works Council Advocate

Digital personnel file & data model

How this is scored

The system of record: employee master data, the digital personnel file, org structure, custom fields, and whether history is kept rather than overwritten.

0 — A contact list with job titles; no document storage, no org structure, no history — changes overwrite what was there.

3 — Employee records with document upload, but a flat structure: no org chart, few or no custom fields, and no dated history of contract or salary changes.

5 — Digital personnel file with structured document types, an org chart, custom fields, and change history on the core employment fields.

8 — Complete record: versioned contract and compensation history with effective dates, document templates with e-signature, org structure supporting multiple entities and cost centres, and granular field-level permissions.

10 — The file is the single source of truth an auditor could work from: full effective-dated history on every field, retention rules per document type, delegated administration per entity, and export that reproduces the record intact.

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The Works Council Advocate

The captured pages name a personnel-management module and the employee data it holds — tax data, demographic personal data, attendance and compensation information — with self-documenting audit trails and segregation of duties claimed. But we found no public information on document storage, an org chart, custom fields, or whether contract and salary changes keep dated history rather than overwriting it; without that history I cannot tell an employee what their file said a year ago, which is what a works council needs at a dismissal hearing. 1 4 10

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Payroll handoff

How this is scored

Whether the month closes cleanly into payroll — DATEV, Lohn und Gehalt, an in-house system or an external tax adviser — and how much of that is automated rather than re-typed.

0 — No payroll path stated at all; whatever leaves the system leaves as a spreadsheet somebody retypes.

3 — Generic CSV export said to be usable for payroll, with no named payroll system, no defined format and no handling of mid-month changes.

5 — A named payroll integration or a documented export format for at least one major system (e.g. DATEV LODAS/Lohn und Gehalt), covering the recurring monthly fields.

8 — Certified or vendor-maintained integration with a named payroll provider, covering variable pay, absences and mid-month joiners and leavers, with a documented pre-payroll check.

10 — Payroll is a first-class part of the product: maintained bidirectional integrations with several named systems, an auditable approval and lock step before transmission, retro-accounting for backdated changes, and the tax adviser given their own access.

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The Works Council Advocate

Certified, bi-directional, real-time integrations are documented for payroll in 180+ countries, with native payroll for Australia, Canada, France, the UK, Ireland and the US, and Germany, Austria and Switzerland covered through Workday Payroll provided by Strada — named providers, which is what I want to see. The pages do not show variable pay, mid-month joiners and leavers, or a documented pre-payroll check and approval-lock step before transmission, so I hold it just below the certified mark. 3 4

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Absence & working-time

How this is scored

Vacation, sickness and working-time recording — including whether the product meets the German recording duty (BAG 2022, ArbZG) rather than merely offering a timer.

0 — No absence or time handling; both live in a spreadsheet elsewhere.

3 — Vacation requests with an approval step, but entitlement is manual, carry-over is not handled and there is no working-time recording.

5 — Automatic entitlement and carry-over, sickness recording, an absence calendar, and basic working-time capture with a report per employee.

8 — Configurable per country and contract: pro-rata entitlement, public-holiday calendars per location, break and rest-period rules, overtime accounts, and an export the employer can hand to a labour inspection.

10 — Working-time recording built as a legal obligation rather than a feature: tamper-evident records, documented compliance with the ArbZG recording duty, works-council-configurable monitoring limits, and shift or on-call models handled without add-ons.

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The Works Council Advocate

Leave requests, balances and accruals run on one platform together with time tracking, scheduling and payroll, with a policy and absence-plan library, automated approvals and reminders, and one-click absence reporting. We found no public information on sickness recording, carry-over, public-holiday calendars per location, break and rest-period rules, overtime accounts, or anything on the German working-time recording duty — for a German rollout that silence decides the score, because recording time is a legal obligation, not a nice-to-have. 5 6

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Recruiting & onboarding

How this is scored

The join path — vacancy to signed contract to a person who has an account, equipment and a plan on day one.

0 — Neither applicant tracking nor onboarding exists; hiring happens in a shared inbox.

3 — A basic applicant list with statuses, or an onboarding checklist — one of the two, without the handover between them.

5 — Applicant tracking with a careers page, structured stages and rejection handling, plus a checklist-driven onboarding that carries the hired candidate over into an employee record without re-entry.

8 — Multi-posting to named job boards, interview scheduling and scorecards, GDPR-conscious applicant retention and deletion, e-signed contracts, and onboarding that triggers tasks in IT and payroll.

10 — The whole join is one governed flow: approval-gated requisitions with budget, structured and bias-conscious evaluation, automated applicant deletion at the stated deadline, and provisioning driven from the record so day one needs no HR intervention.

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The Works Council Advocate

AI-driven candidate grading, automated sourcing from existing databases and partner networks, and integration with Workday Recruiting are documented, including hiring-manager support through Microsoft Teams. We found no public information on a careers page, structured stages, rejection handling, e-signed contracts, applicant retention and deletion, or any onboarding flow at all; and automated candidate evaluation is precisely the kind of feature whose scope and deactivation must be documented before a works council can agree to it. 7 8

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Employee data protection & co-determination

How this is scored

How the product handles the most sensitive personal data a company holds — retention, deletion, role separation, subject rights — and whether it can pass a works council (BetrVG §87) rather than merely a procurement checklist.

0 — No stated retention or deletion handling, no role model beyond admin-or-not, and no DPA offered on the site.

3 — A DPA exists on request and roles are coarse; retention and deletion are described as something the customer arranges themselves.

5 — A signable DPA is published, roles are configurable per module, applicant and employee retention periods are stated, and deletion can be executed rather than only promised.

8 — Field-level access control with an audit log of who read what, configurable retention per data category with automatic deletion, documented subject-rights support, and monitoring or analytics features that can be switched off for co-determination.

10 — Built for the works council to say yes: published processing documentation and subprocessor list, per-entity data separation, tamper-evident audit trail, evaluation and behavioural-analysis features off by default with their scope documented, and a data-protection impact assessment the customer can build on.

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The Works Council Advocate

The privacy policy grants access, deletion, portability and objection rights, states that customer user data is neither sold nor monetised through advertising, and product pages mention configuring user access and monitoring audit logs. But we found no public information on a signable data-processing agreement, retention periods beyond 'as long as necessary', field-level permissions, an audit log showing who read what, or whether AI candidate grading, real-time anomaly detection and manager absence analytics can be switched off — under BetrVG §87 a tool that cannot answer what is logged, who reads it and what can be turned off does not get installed, however good it is. 2 9 10

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where the data lives, who the contracting entity is, who the subprocessors are, and whether the answer is documented rather than assumed. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as the buyer would weigh it.

0 — US-headquartered vendor, US contracting entity, hosting region unstated or US, subprocessors not named.

3 — EU hosting is offered as an option but the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is incomplete or absent.

5 — EU hosting stated as standard and an EU contracting entity, but the subprocessor chain includes non-EU providers without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU or DACH hosting with a named data-centre provider, an EU contracting entity, the full subprocessor list published, and any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, contracting entity, hosting and every subprocessor in the EU, certification of the data centres published, and an on-premises or private-cloud option for buyers who need it.

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The Works Council Advocate

For users in the EEA, UK and Switzerland the controller is Workday Limited in Dublin, with standard contractual clauses and Data Privacy Framework certification for transfers, but for all other persons the controller is Workday, Inc. in the USA. We found no public information on where the data is hosted or on a named subprocessor list — recipients appear only as categories such as IT and hosting, data analytics, call recording and chatbot technology — so an Irish entity alone does not carry the weight. 2

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Pricing transparency not rated — the vendor publishes no price

How this is scored

Whether an HR lead can compute the real annual invoice for their headcount — including the modules they actually need — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — An entry price per employee exists, but the modules most buyers need are unpriced, or a minimum headcount, setup fee or mandatory onboarding package is not stated publicly.

5 — Per-employee prices are public for the main tiers with the billing period stated, but at least one commonly needed module (payroll, time, recruiting) hides in an unpriced bundle.

8 — Every tier and module priced publicly with per-employee maths, billing period, minimum term and VAT treatment stated; only genuinely custom enterprise work lacks a number.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator or table that produces the annual invoice for a given headcount and module selection, including setup, minimums and renewal terms.

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The Works Council Advocate

The captured pages contain no prices at all; the only path shown is 'Ready to talk? Get in touch. Contact Sales.' An HR lead cannot compute any part of the annual invoice from public pages, and for an enterprise rollout that absence is itself information the council has to weigh. 5

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European sovereignty — proven facts

1 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined — uncited Report an error

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (10)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 HCM overview www.workday.com Checked 15 Sep 2026 +2 earlier captures: 11 Sep 2026, 30 Aug 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Privacy policy www.workday.com Checked 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Payroll handoff — found from sitemap www.workday.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Payroll handoff — found from sitemap www.workday.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Absence & working-time — found from sitemap www.workday.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Absence & working-time — found from sitemap www.workday.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Recruiting & onboarding — found from sitemap www.workday.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Recruiting & onboarding — found from sitemap www.workday.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Employee data protection & co-determination — found from sitemap www.workday.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Employee data protection & co-determination — found from sitemap www.workday.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →