Tracking exempt status in Workday

A reader recently sent me a note, asking about how to track Exempt/non-exempt status.  I thought this info might help others, so here it is.

Workday allows you to track exempt status on a job profile, as do most HRMS these days.  A nice thing about Workday, however, is that you can attach different exempt statuses to one job profile based on location:

In previous HR systems that I've seen, you'd be stuck creating new jobcodes, profiles, positions, etc., each time that an exemption status changed, in order to track that status.  Prior to version 11 WD was in a similar situation, so nice to have seen them build out this functionality.

A few things to keep in mind though:

• You need to have your processes locked down tight, as to how you will use this tab.  Will you assume that any state values are exceptions to the country value?  
• Who is pulling any government reports, and where do they come from?  The use case presented on this one is that employees in California may be in the same job as someone in Texas, but due to California legislation, they are non-exempt rather than exempt.  There are a variety of ways to accomplish this reporting....

1. Put the exceptions into WD.  Document that a country is the norm and only exceptions are documented.

2. Don't put the exceptions into WD.  Establish your procedures outside of the system to assume all California jobs of a certain profile (grade level x etc) are non-exempt--in which case put employee work location into your report.

3. You could always put ALL the data into WD...so 49 exempt states and 1 non-exempt.  I'm not endorsing it, but I'm saying it's an option.

There are lots of options here and WD offers a lot of flexibility on this front.  To be successful, you need to ensure that your data entry procedures are watertight and that the reporting folks are working off of them consistently.