Expat rotations a Workday Absence and Reporting only solution for paying shift based International Assignments in Workday

In the oil and gas industry, temporarily locating workers in far flung destinations is part of daily life for HR teams. During a recent prime implementation, an O&G customer asked Kainos if they could deliver a very important part of the payroll puzzle for a particular group their 'expat rotators '. These expat rotators are workers who are placed on a remote shift rotation for a year. Rotators work approximately 180 days (variable) in a rolling year defined by their contract, with each day worked accounting for 1/180^th of their paid salary. However, such workers often require additional days of travel outside of their contractual number to reach their remote base. Once there, the same workers will frequently be subjected to extended stays due to the logistical issues of extracting someone from these remote locations for example a sandstorm or monsoon stopping the outbound plane for a day or two. All of these hours add to the base hours over the contractual year and (along with reductions for absence) the resulting discrepancy in days is then paid as a single additional payment at the end of the 1 year 'rotation '. The current process followed by the customer required paper timesheets to be fed into a spreadsheet for the end of year tally to be completed. Can Kainos and Workday offer a better solution to how these hours are captured, managed, and paid? Your first thought might be Workday Time Tracking. While a good fit, this would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Instead the solution delivered by Kainos was built simply around the Absence and Reporting modules that formed the core of their Workday subscription.

Time on as time off

For these workers the Time Off Calendar was effectively repurposed as a time recording sheet. Word of caution: doing this does require clear communication with workers who will need to be understand the concept of requesting 'time worked ' via the Request Time Off business process. Workers who fell under the 'expat rotator ' heading were granted access to the following time offs (or time 'ons '), in addition to their existing time off plans:

Days On	A time off plan that represents the worked days defined by the worker 's contract and work schedule (outside of Workday). This 'time off ' was restricted to manager (and above) usage only and we helped the customer set up an EIB for bulk loading via spreadsheet so that the events could be quickly loaded for new hires. Workday work schedules were not appropriate due to the reporting requirements, and the irregular patterns that the schedules created. The worker work schedules were always well defined and known in advance. Any changes to the 'days on ' would be corrected and approved by manager and above.
Extra Days	Additional works days that caused the worker to remain on site for an extended period. This time off code could be entered by a worker and approved by a manager to agree that the extra time was worked. Extra days could not be entered on a day already worked or spent travelling.
Travel Days	Those days spent en route to the facility or home. Similar to Extra Days, this allowed workers to record their travel directly in Workday.

None of these plans were configured to have any balance restrictions; they are only used to represent the worker 's activities for a particular day. Once entered, the worker 's time off calendar would show the additional activities alongside the core working time. In addition to their specific time offs, the workers would also enter their regular time off in to the calendar, as any Workday Time Off user does. This fully realised view of time off and time on then allows us to report on the additional days worked.

Reporting (the science bit)

Workday is great at storing your company 's data, but without a strong and concise report, you are not fully utilising the value of that data. Kainos ' extensive experience in calculated fields and reporting (particularly in the absence and time off area) allowed us to build a concise report for our customer. Simply input the last day of the worker 's rotation, and a myriad of different data views can be presented. The key calculation delivered is simple enough: This can be delivered as a 'report ' of a single figure, or broken down into various combinations. In fact, by storing in Workday, the data can be mined easily and far more rigorously. This allows managers and HR to report on:

• Travel days by location
• Sicknesses by region
• Current status for workers towards their 180 rotation days target
• Alerting for workers who are not on schedule to make their 180 rotation days

This solution greatly simplified the recording and reporting process for our customer, and with the tools and functions that were already part of their core HCM subscription.

Considerations

1. Time on as time off requires buy in from those entering it, reporting on it, and seeing it you don 't want to keep explaining the concept.
2. Absence should only be entered on days with a Days On. This can be enforced by validation, but is also easy for managers to monitor.
3. Existing reports will not know a time off from a time on. Take care!
4. Leave cannot be included in the same report directly (see below). Any leave had to be entered into the time off calendar to allow the calculations to proceed correctly. It was very unusual for leave to occur during a rotation, so this was considered a small overhead.
5. Workday can store work schedules, holiday calendars, leave, time off (and time on as time off) why can 't we just report on all that without Days On? Unfortunately leave, calendars, and time off are still somewhat distinct worlds in Workday. Although they have become ever more integrated, there is only one place to get access to all of those fields and that is on the Time Day object that is part of the Time Tracking suite.