Twice a year, system updates from Workday can reshape workflows, reporting and compliance — and without a structured approach, these releases may create disruption or missed opportunity:
In a recent release, Workday introduced more than 350 new features and updates. Within five weeks, those capabilities were already live across thousands of customer environments globally.
Some organizations approached the release strategically. They identified which changes would have the highest impact on their operations, tested critical processes in their sandbox environments and prepared targeted communications for different user groups. When the release went live, their teams knew exactly what to expect. Others scrambled. They learned about changes only after employees began asking questions.
What made the difference? A clear, repeatable approach to release management.
If you manage your organization's Workday system, this cycle feels familiar. Twice each year, hundreds of features arrive. You're responsible for figuring out what's changing, what actually matters for your organization, what needs immediate attention and how to communicate it all to your users. And somehow, you need to do this on top of everything else already on your plate.
The good news? With the right framework and a clear, repeatable process, you can turn Workday releases into genuine opportunities that allow you to extract maximum value from your software investment. This guide shows you how to build that process while minimizing operational risk.
Workday delivers two major feature releases each year, known as R1 and R2. These typically arrive in March and September, providing a consistent framework that allows organizations to plan ahead.
These biannual releases represent significant moments in Workday's evolution. They include new capabilities, enhancements to existing features, security updates, platform improvements and deprecations of older functionality. While Workday does push smaller updates throughout the year via weekly service updates, the R1 and R2 releases are when the most substantial changes occur.
Before each release, Workday provides access to an exclusive sandbox Preview Tenant approximately five weeks before the production release date. This gives you a critical window to review features, conduct testing and prepare your teams for what's coming.
During this time, Workday also makes the What's New report available in Workday Community, the company's secure, customer-only portal. Here you can access official release notes, feature deep dives, testing guidance and enablement resources.
The What's New report lists all the features and enhancements enabled in the Preview Tenant for the upcoming release, with detailed release notes for each. You can then run this report in a preview environment and filter by functional area, module and region to quickly see what's relevant to their configuration.
From there, your teams can identify which changes need setup or training and plan regression testing. When combined with release center documentation and adoption checklists, this allows you to prioritize high-impact features, catch deprecated items that might change existing processes and build a targeted test and communication plan before the production release.
Not all features in a Workday release are created equal. Understanding the difference between mandatory and optional features is essential to prioritizing your time and resources.
These are features that Workday will activate in your production environment on the release date. They're often foundational updates that improve security, enhance performance or fix underlying issues. Recent examples include changes to payroll calculations for multi-jurisdictions or updates to how certain report fields are handled.
Mandatory features deserve your immediate attention during the release window. You’ll need to understand how they'll impact your day-to-day operations, identify any established processes that might be impacted and prepare your team for changes in the user interface or workflow.
An example of a mandatory feature is the New Absence Calendar Experience from 2025’s second release. The old absence calendar was deprecated. Updating the SBX Preview environment, testing and creating change communication for your end users supported a seamless transition.
These are enhancements that become available with the release, but don’t automatically activate in your Workday system. Organizations can choose to implement them based on their specific business needs, readiness, priorities and, perhaps most importantly, on their own timeline. This flexibility allows teams to evaluate the potential value of a feature, assess downstream impacts and plan adoption in a thoughtful, structured way rather than reacting under a fixed deadline.
A prime example is Workday’s updated onboarding experience, which significantly reimagined how organizations manage the employee onboarding journey. This introduced a guided experience with enhanced templates, improved task orchestration and a more intuitive interface for both new hires and administrators. When this onboarding experience was first released, it was designated as setup-required rather than mandatory.
This experience allowed organizations to evaluate how it fit within existing onboarding processes, identify needed configuration or training updates and plan a rollout aligned with available resources. Over time, as companies prepare for the eventual retirement of the legacy onboarding functionality, this phased approach gives you the breathing room to adopt the experience thoughtfully, capturing the value without creating unnecessary disruption.
This example also highlights how today’s optional feature can become tomorrow’s standard. As Workday continues to evolve the platform, older functionality is periodically retired in favor of more modern, efficient approaches. The process is similar to an iPhone update: the system continues to function even if you delay the update, but installing it leads to a smoother, more up-to-date experience. In the same way, organizations that consistently track and evaluate optional features are better positioned to transition smoothly, having already planned for adoption rather than needing to make changes under a compressed timeline.
Companies that handle releases most successfully view them not as routine IT upgrades, but as opportunities to drive business value. With a roughly five-week window between preview and rollout, adopting a clear, repeatable approach can make all the difference.
Rather than reacting to hundreds of updates at once, these organizations use a structured process to assess impact, focus testing where it matters most and make deliberate decisions about feature adoption. A typical approach might include these phases.
When the What's New report becomes available, resist the urge to dive into every single feature. Start by filtering the list to focus on features that actually apply to your Workday configuration.
Run the What's New report in your production environment and filter by the SKUs your organization uses. For example, if you only have Core HR, Benefits, Absence and Time Tracking, you can immediately eliminate hundreds of features related to Financials, Student or other modules you don't use.
From there, separate mandatory features from the optional ones. Your immediate priority is understanding the automatically available features that will hit your production environment in a few short weeks. The optional features can be added to a strategic roadmap for future consideration.
This is where your sandbox preview environment becomes invaluable. Workday pushes all release features to this preview tenant, giving you a safe space to see exactly how changes will look and behave before go-live.
Focus your testing efforts on the areas of highest impact. Payroll is one example. If there are calculation changes or updates to how payroll processes, run a parallel payroll in your sandbox preview environment. Compare it to your current production payroll to identify any differences in outcomes. Your payroll processors need to see how things will work after the release as no one wants surprises on payday.
Beyond payroll, take a look at how mandatory features might affect your custom reports, integrations and workflows. Workday designs releases to be backward compatible, meaning most custom-built items will continue to work. Ensure that your end users have an understanding of the major UI changes being released to minimize confusion.
Once you understand what's changing, it’s time to prepare your organization. Not everyone needs the same information; trying to communicate everything to everyone may just create noise.
Segment your communications based on who will actually be impacted. Your Workday super users — think HRIS analysts, HR administrators and finance analysts — need detailed information about more features than the average employee. They're in the system daily and need to understand changes to functionality, process updates and capabilities they can leverage.
For general employees, it’s best to focus on visible changes to the user interface or workflows they interact with regularly. For example, if the way employees enter time is changing, or if they'll see an updated dashboard when they log in, give them a heads-up. Provide simple, clear explanations and updated job aids if necessary.
Mandatory features come on Workday’s schedule, but optional features put organizations in the driver’s seat. The question becomes which Workday enhancements to prioritize and when.
The best decisions come from an intimate knowledge of your organization's challenges and goals. For example, if you've been frustrated by the limitations of your current onboarding process, the new onboarding experience naturally becomes a high-priority optional feature. Similarly, if your payroll team spends hours each week manually compiling reports, new AI agents that can surface that information on demand become immediately valuable.
This is where having a partner who knows your business becomes crucial. Organizations working with consultants who understand their day-to-day challenges often hear, "I actually think this feature could solve that problem you mentioned last month."
It's the difference between reviewing a list of more than 300 features in isolation versus having someone help you connect the dots between what's available and what you actually need.
Workday's release of AI agents offers a compelling example of how optional features can deliver substantial value when thoughtfully adopted. These aren’t generic AI tools that try to do everything at once. They’re built to focus on and solve specific industry challenges, all within the Workday platform.
Consider Workday’s Payroll Agent. Instead of creating a report, running it and then analyzing the data to answer simple questions, you can now type, "How much overtime was worked last month and what was the cost?"
The agent processes the question and delivers the answer in seconds — no manual analysis required — while adhering to built-in guardrails that ensure secure access and compliant data use. Ask, “How many workers are missing payment elections and who are they?” and it instantly generates the list and can trigger notifications automatically, all within governed workflows.
Workday’s Time Approval AI Agent, meanwhile, tackles a different pain point: the repetitive burden on managers who approve similar timesheets week in and out.
Instead of requiring manual approval for every timesheet, the agent processes them and flags only the anomalies that need human attention.
These features represent meaningful time savings and operational improvements. But here's the key: not every AI feature makes sense for every organization. The decision to implement should be based on whether it solves a real problem you're facing, whether your team has the capacity to configure and train users on it and whether the juice is worth the squeeze for your specific situation.
Skipping releases or failing to stay current with Workday updates carries risks, though they often feel abstract until they become urgent.
The most immediate risk is deprecation. When Workday deprecates functionality you rely on, you suddenly face a compressed timeline to adopt the replacement feature. What could have been a thoughtful, planned implementation then becomes a scramble to get something in place before users lose access to tools they depend on.
There's also the opportunity cost to consider. You're paying for Workday's full capabilities, but if you're not implementing fresh features that could streamline operations, reduce manual work or provide better insights, you're not getting full value from your investment. Those hours your team spends on workarounds for problems that could be solved by features released six months ago. That's money and precious time left on the table.
For organizations that have fallen behind, catching up requires a structured approach. It starts with education — understanding what features have been released that could benefit your operations. From there, prioritize based on business impact. What will save the most time? What addresses your biggest pain points? What aligns with your strategic objectives for the next 6 to 12 months?
This is where strategic road mapping becomes essential. You can't implement everything at once, nor should you try. Map out a realistic timeline that considers your team's capacity, your organization's change management bandwidth and the complexity of various features. Then execute systematically, measuring the impact of each implementation before moving to the next.
Smaller organizations with strong internal Workday expertise and straightforward configurations can often manage releases in-house. They review community release notes, conduct their own testing in sandbox and handle communications internally.
However, as organizations grow larger and more complex — with multiple SKUs, numerous stakeholders and intricate configurations — the value of partnership increases dramatically. Instead of having questions come from a myriad of different directions without coordination, a partner can drive the release process systematically. They provide specific milestones, conduct structured workshops, create tailored presentations showing before-and-after screenshots and help prioritize what matters most for your specific configuration and business model.
The best partnerships bring both technical expertise and functional understanding. Anyone can read a release note and explain what's changing technically in Workday. But true value comes from understanding how that technical change translates to business impact—what employee populations it affects, which business processes need adjustment and what use cases become possible that weren't before.
Workday’s biannual releases are structured opportunities to improve processes, reduce manual work and unlock greater value across your organization — but only with a disciplined approach to prioritization, testing and adoption. Find out how Armanino’s Workday release management experts can help you maximize your investment.
Learn more about implementing Workday or how to continue the journey to the next phase with your existing Workday platform. Reach out to our Workday experts to build your Workday roadmap and maximize your technology investment.
