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hello and welcome to today's edition of ask the expert my name is madeline countess and i'll be your moderator for today's panel by way of introduction i'm a director in our consulting services organization i've been with collaborative for a little more than eight years primarily focusing in the hcm implementation space prior to joining collaborative i spent the better part of the decade working as an hr practitioner in the financial services industry during my tenure as an hr practitioner i had the unfortunate experience of becoming overly familiar with today's topic of severance so while we appreciate that this is not the most glamorous and energy giving topic we certainly recognize the currency of this topic given today's economic and business climate so our agenda today is really going to be gathering together our best experts to help our customers understand best practices and tips for utilizing severance should your business needs require you to use this functionality our agenda is the standard i'll be introducing our panel of experts saying a little bit about collaborative and then we'll jump into the prepared material if you have any questions during the presentation please feel free to enter them into the chat and we'll be happy to answer them after that prepared material has been delivered so first up on our panel of experts we have jackie smith hi everyone i'm jackie smith i am a senior consultant in our hcm practice at collaborative solutions i have been with collaborative for five years and i've been in the ecosystem for about nine years now i am uh i specialize in compensation and talent and i am one of the workday compensation product leads so i get to see all the stuff coming down the road map i'm excited to talk with you all today thanks jackie next we have angie from our post-production support services group hi everyone as she mentioned i'm angie honeycutt i have been working here at collaborative as a principal consultant for the last year and a half almost soon to be two years prior to that i worked in the on the client side where i was a compensation manager and as madeline was i was in a position where i ended up using the exact functionality we're going to talk about today and for the other half of the last four years that i've been working in the ecosystem two of almost two of those years were here supporting hcm core compensation and advanced compensation so looking forward to giving you as much information as we can today about severance great thanks angie now let's introduce michelle turner from our payroll team hi everyone my name is michelle turner i have been with collaborative solutions now for a little over two years i am the i'm a principal consultant and i've been working on the work day system for about eight years and about 14 years in payroll so i was on the client side for six years and then moved over and i'm really excited to share what we have with severance today thank you thanks angie and last last but not least from organizational change and training alexa abdullah hi good morning everyone alexa abdallah here i'm a manager in our ocnt practice and i've been with collaborative for almost five years now i started off on the functional side and actually implemented severance for a couple of our customers but happy to talk you through any communications and training needs that you guys might have today thanks thanks alexa right so now just a little bit about collaborative i think most of our participants today are current collaborative customers so i won't spend a lot of time on this slide since i think you already know us um as you of course know we are an hr financials and and student transformation organization and we provide a full range of services including implementation post-production support strategy transformation and ocmt what you may not know and what is new is that over the last year or so we've expanded our offerings to include a couple of strategic partnerships that you'll see on the right hand side of your screen and in really this is our response to the growing and changing needs of our customers as we continue to evolve with you another new item are some new best work workplaces awards that we've recently won and if you know if you've been with us long you know that we are firm believers in the idea that happy consultants make happy customers and we are very proud of the culture we've built and the awards that we've won for that culture so without further ado we'll jump into our best practices for severance so when we think about severance in workday the first thing that we really need to talk about is is what really does that mean what does workday offer high level what is really included in that particular area of workday so angie if you can jump in and share your thoughts on that that would be very helpful thank you alrighty so the severance functionality in workday basically includes a severance package a matrix and a worksheet the severance package basically defines the types of severance pay components that an employee can receive basically things like lump sum payments or like ongoing severance payments the matrix this is basically where you define the compensation basis that you want workday to use in the calculation for the severance and it also defines the duration of the severance payments that a worker is eligible for by eligibility rules and then the worksheet itself is actually what will get generated and that's where the calculation will be displayed it'll show you the duration so they are entitled to eight weeks based on the matrix eligibility rules and the dollar amount that that severance was calculated for and then basically once that worksheet is completed and every all the approvals and everything is done that's when a transaction gets created for a one-time payment that work based payroll can pick up or if you don't use workdays payroll you can then pull that information out using a report to pass it on to like adp or something like that so those are the key the key functionality items that come into play with severance okay thanks angie that's super helpful um as we think about the components um jackie can you share a little bit with of your experience on what are the most important components for our customers as they think through configuring and utilizing separates yeah so um like angie already mentioned so the the most important components that go into um using the severance functionality are the severance package so thinking about the compensation components the items that you want part of um the severance that's being offered so is it um continuation of pay and a bonus payout is it a severance lump sum payment um so those are the types of things you need to consider when you're creating your severance package and then the severance matrix is also a key component it's a required element as part of the severance functionality like angie mentioned the severance matrix is what's driving um the parameters for the severance the severance package so who's eligible and it's gonna in turn calculate the severance payout for that worker and then in addition you have the compensation elements and the payroll earnings code so those are obviously um very important you want to make sure that the compensation elements are linked to the correct payroll earnings codes and those are set up correctly to calculate the severance in payroll okay thanks that's super helpful um i heard you mention um a little bit about lump sum and and ongoing payments and so can you tell us a little bit about the difference and how those things would flow through to payroll what would that look like from an employee's standpoint yeah i was going to say i'll give it i can pass it to angie angie if you want to take it okay okay if you want to jump into that no problem so think of lump sum as it's one time some companies choose to pay out in at the end of termination they pay one dollar amount at that time severance is over with so that's what a lump sum would be and an ongoing severance is when you want to pay someone for let's say they are eligible for 24 weeks of severance based on the eligibility rules then the ongoing would basically pay them just like a normal pay cycle would pay them if they were employed up to that 24 week period or whatever the number of weeks that they were eligible for okay so that ongoing payment is really replacing the income stream it looks similar to the income stream from the employee standpoint but they are actually terminated in workday correct that is correct great thanks angie that's super helpful um now as we think about the workflow that would be involved in a process like this um i'd like to ask jackie to walk us through what the basic steps are and and how do we normally see that configured i'm sure there's lots of options but what do we see most commonly used and what works best for our customers yup yeah so the the two key basic steps in the business process flow for severance are creating the severance worksheet and delivering the severance worksheet and typically what we see is the hr partner creating the severance worksheet so they're initiating the process they're um you know they're selecting the worker that's getting the severance checking that the payout calculation looks correct all the components are there correctly and then typically we do see um a review and approval step by compensation to make sure that everything is accurate um and then the hr partner with the final step to deliver the severance worksheet and part of this step entails communication with the employee outside of workday so it might be the hr partner putting together the severance documentation um and then you know delivering that to the worker and then coming back to this deliver severance worksheet step and really documenting the dates of communication the sign-up date from the worker um any any additional dates um that need to be documented and then um once they click submit essentially the worksheet um will be completed that that business process thanks jackie that's that's super helpful um i think we are turning to angie next to talk about when these tasks are normally performed so that's a that particular question is pretty open-ended because it truly depends on the company's business practices and the process but typically what we see is there's usually decisions made that a number of people are going to be severanced at that point typically you will find that the worksheet gets created as uh my mind just went blank what i was going to say as jackie was saying uh as far as the business process goes so typically it is make the decision on who's going to be severanced if those people are already employed and not terminated already which is typical but not out of the norm with work days 32 changes you can now create a severance worksheet if the employee is termed or not but typically we see that's decided before they are termed so that worksheet gets created it gets routed as jackie was mentioning and then once the approvals then you start putting together legal documentation what that actual severance agreement is going to look like you will already have the calculations of what the severance payouts going to be what the remaining vacation pay that they earned but had not used is any any information about benefits about cobra about out placement services all of those are usually determined at that time then the termination will take place and then that severance agreement with all of that information will be presented to the worker and then you kind of sit because a worker has a certain amount of time depending on their age on when they have to sign the agreement so it kind of sits in lowell until that agreement is signed once it is signed then that business process jackie was mentioning will come to a closure and then the pay payroll will start picking everything up and start paying so that's kind of what i see in the environment that i've worked in here at collaborative as well as what we did when i was on the client side thanks angie um and i think you kind of mentioned this and started to um you know tee this next topic up but i know in the past many of my customers have looked at workday severance functionality and and they've decided that it really wasn't flexible enough for their use but i think i heard that there were some recent updates and that the functionality has been um augmented by some you know new features that make it more applicable to more customers can you share a little bit about how this has evolved over the last couple of releases actually i think jackie would be a better person for that so jackie i'm gonna push that question over to you if you don't mind thanks angie and welcome jackie i will take this one because i was super excited about um one of the biggest enhancements with the with severance recently is the ability to um create and deliver severance worksheets when a termination is in progress or completed so believe it or not previously you had to complete the severance worksheet process before trimming the worker and that was a huge gap for a lot of customers um and a big pain point um because they want you know customers want to um you guys want to get in there and turn the employee right up right away not keep them active so um this was this was a big win being able to get the termination process and then do the severance worksheet and then in addition to that um you now have the ability to um give a worker more than one severance worksheet um i think this is especially helpful for retires before there was a big um gap or error when you tried to give um you know employee that received severance before was rehired and unfortunately is getting it again you weren't you couldn't do that um and and now you have the option to round um the length of service results so you know if i resulted in um you know 3.75 years of eligibility for severance before it would just it would be just that you'd be calculated off of that and now you can round that it to your choosing so if you round up i could be you know eligible for four years for example so those are probably the three three biggest enhancements i would say over the past couple releases there is some ui configuration um changes but uh these would probably be the biggest impact okay thanks jackie that's super helpful and i can see how those additions might make this functionality much more applicable to a broader group of customers um so we've we've talked quite a bit about what we have to do on the hcm comp side and how we might get that set up but obviously it's critical to have this flow over to payroll correctly um because that is actually the goal we are trying to pay people this the severance pay whether it be lump sum or ongoing pay so now i'd like to turn to our payroll expert michelle turner to talk a little bit about how this looks in payroll and what considerations we might want to think about as as we're getting to the point where we're ready people have signed their agreement and we're ready to pay them out guys so as jackie mentioned um there is one thing that you there's a there's a piece of the payroll initial process you have to have done before you can actually see what it looks like in payroll so you have to get your pay component set up you have to get the run category set up for non-active which includes your pay components which in case you might not know the terminology of everything a pay component is your earnings code that you're going to get set up and on that part there is a piece in there that will tie to the compensation element and that's what pulls this in so before you can ever see it actually flow into the payroll calculation you have to make sure that key piece is done and i'm from from feedback that i've been talking to some of the my co-workers is a lot of the clients will leave certain pieces of that off and they're like oh it's not pulling in so key part main main thing you need to always have set up once that's done payroll doesn't have a lot other to do except run the pay calc and it will just flow in if it's a lump sum payment it will roll in depending on when the um severance document is signed by the employee if the current payroll is still open and it's a term period it will pull right into that payroll if it is after they've already termed and that pay period is complete it will pull into the next one there's a catch to that if you have retro if you do not use retro um you will have to do another step which is you'll have the hr person will have to go in and actually change the date of the payment to make sure it pulls into the next open payroll but if you have retro when you run it normally it will pull in the lumps on payment you will have no issues and then the ongoing payment will start after they term on the next open pay period so payroll doesn't have to go in and do any extra manual work or anything it just flows in wonderfully um and some of the things i wanted to bring up is testing when that is kind of like um as on the slide says one of the best practices and watch out is testing always make sure that you test from beginning to end to make sure you don't leave any of these key elements out and that will help the process run really smooth um let's see anything else i think that's all right now um in case we have some questions i think you covered it thank you very much michelle um now let's turn back to angie to talk a little more about testing and and of course jackie you are always welcome to chime in if you want to share any additional thoughts so take it away angie all right so testing is pretty simple i think with the severance process because you most of the time you already know kind of what the calculation should look like in most cases there's a budget that you're considering you're already kind of thinking in advance but some of the key things that you have to test is definitely the matrix eligibility rules because that is truly what's dictating who is eligible and if the calculation is going to produce the right number of weeks for the the workers for their agreement so the compensation rounding rules that jackie mentioned is something new and that will control if you think about it her point of 3.75 years if you don't have the rounding rule set correctly then you could underpay someone because it only calculates that they get a number of weeks for three years versus it could give them too much and give them four counted as four years so the matrix eligibility rules is key the compensation rules is key and then the business process flow as well you want to make sure that it is routing correctly depending on your routing rules i have seen clients who have routing rules if you are in x country then it goes to this group of hr people if you're in a different country it goes to a different group and so you want to make sure that your business process is routing to the correct location and then after it is completed it's going to calculate it's going to add the one-time payment to the worker so of course you want to validate that that took place and the checkbox to send to payroll is definitely checked which is a default but someone can actually uncheck that so you want to validate that and probably i would think the most critical one is michelle's part talking about the pay components you must run apparel calc to make sure that it is actually picking up that the pay components are earnings codes and everything was configured correctly and that that payroll cycle is picking that up so definitely each part of the the process really needs to be tested thoroughly to make sure the end result comes out to be the the final dollar amount that you need i think that's very helpful it sounds like you know we have to test each component separately but then we also need to make sure that we test that entire flow and and to ensure that everything's working properly i think michelle had um a little bit that she wanted to add from a payroll perspective um yes i just wanted to also bring up um there are some reports out there that you can pull in severance but depending on your security level in payroll you might not have access to those reports so you can ask your team the hr team if they can add it into the severance vp um to have a notification sent to payroll if you wanted to have that because auditing is also another another big thing you always want to make sure everything is flowing through correctly and you do your correct audits just like you do with any other any other um calculations that you know are coming through so i just wanted to bring that up also to see if you wanted your payroll team to get a notification you could try to work that into that business process also okay yeah i think that's a good call out michelle i mean this is something where you know we are dealing with an employee population who are you know a little bit more sensitive and um you know we certainly want to make sure that you know we handle their payments with as much care as possible so adding in that extra step you know as a double check for payroll is is probably a really great idea um so before we turn to our questions from the from the participants here um one last thought i would like to ask alexa to share a little bit about our thoughts on training and and how we might roll this out um if we're dealing with a large population we might have quite a few hr business partners who are involved in a process like this so absolutely thanks natalie um so i've seen this rolled out a couple different ways and i really think it depends on how you will be utilizing this process so for example is it more for one-off um severances or do you does your company do big reductions in force once every time you know once a year um so kind of taking that into consideration as well as what kind of training works well for your organization are you fundamentally opposed to job aids because they don't get used which is you know can be pretty typical um before covered were you more instructor-led training in person training can you get people away for an hour to do a webinar so we do like to take all those things into consideration when making a recommendation but what i've seen work really well is for those customers who only will utilize this process um you know once or twice a year for those big reduction enforce severances to do a job aid that way they have something that they can refer back to but i also like to see um a 30 to 60 minute webinar so that they can walk through the functionality also talk about some of the outside of the system processes that still need to occur because as we know workday doesn't take the place of those conversations um so those are two things i've seen work really well additionally um that's more specifically for hr i've also seen um as my colleagues have talked about you know there are some um items that payroll will need to process as well and so not necessarily a full job aid but maybe just a list of tasks that they need to perform or keep in mind as they're going through um whether it be a one-off severance or um you know a mass severance from a communications perspective obviously this is held pretty close to the cuff usually i've seen um very targeted communications to hr and payroll specifically um you know you may let the c-suite know as well i'll just hey we're implementing this functionality just so that you're aware nothing you need to do this all be handled by by hr but just so that they're in the know um so those are the the predominant things oh i'm sorry those are the predominant things that we take into consideration for for severance training and communications um but i know we we have a question and answer time so please let me know if there's anything that you guys have specific questions on for your organization all right thanks alexa um we do have some questions from our attendees and um we'll we'll just run through them um our first question is really about the workflow and um wanting more understanding about specifically which bp is going to drive that severance process and is that an end-to-end process for capturing the signatures so does that process actually involve the employee similar to submit resignation or is that process really more of an hr facing process um and and kind of what considerations about it moving to the next step in terms of whether we are paying out a lump sum or ongoing and so i think let's start with jackie on that and um we may also hear from angie depending on what jackie shares with us sure so it is not an employee-facing business process to answer that question it is um it is really strictly an hr process to um you know produce the severance amount that needs to be paid and you know get it approved um and they are documenting the dates that the employee is signing the severance agreement outside of workday so while that will be documented within that business process the employee is not receiving the information um within the within that business process the cpp the bp in workday is called create severance worksheet just to formally put the name out there what it's called but yeah the employee is is not part of that business process okay and i think jackie our next question we probably already know the answer to based on your answer to the last question um but our next question is does workday have the ability to generate the legal document or the service agreement that the employee signs um so i'm sure you know the customer who's asking this has seen all of the enhancements in the employee agreement functionality where we now generate employee agreements in recruiting we are able to generate faculty agreements when we add appointments to faculties do we have that document generation capability within the severance process or is that something still that has to happen outside of workday so i actually have implemented that for a customer um we use the generated document um functionality that exists in workday so you're able to you know create documents um and you know i don't know if everyone if everyone has seen it you know you might not get the full look and feel that you have um you know at your your paper copy outside of workday but it can generate um you know it can generate a document kind of the same way off the letters are so you can have variable text flaps like if you need something for um 40 and over that you don't need for um you know uh you know under that age group so i did do something like that for a customer and it worked out for them it it it doesn't definitely isn't um i'm not gonna say there's a lot of formatting options but it got the job done okay and would that be then something that you would print and then hand to the employee exactly so there's not an e-sign capability but actually there is the ability to generate that document that's fantastic i wish i'd had that when i was an hr practitioner um all right our next question um is about the severance period and can that severance period be adjusted um so so i think um really if i'm reading this question correctly it's about flexibility of the severance worksheet once we've configured that matrix are we locked into that rules what happens if for some reason we want to give somebody something extra do we have that flexibility or capability um and maybe i'll turn to angie and see angie if if that's a question that you feel comfortable answering yes and the answer is yes madeline you can uh if let's talk about if it's lump sum versus ongoing so with lump sum it's generating one dollar amount you can add to that dollar amount in my experience uh on the client side we had people who were on bonus plans and as a part of their severance if they worked during depending on the our bonus policy they were still entitled to a bonus payment so we actually modified that lump sum payment to include the bonus amount that they needed to be awarded so that's one example if it's an ongoing severance and let's say they the rules said that they got six weeks but you wanted to give them eight weeks you can change the duration to eight and it'll automatically recalc for you um the additional two weeks in dollar amounts there so you do have flexibility with lump sum or ongoing severance to change that amount all right thanks angie that's very helpful um we do one final question in the chat um and it's really about um the eib for the request post termination process so so maybe jackie if you can share a little bit about how that eib would work can you change compensation you know could i change someone's uh base pay after they're termed and and how would that interact with this business process yeah so the request post termination compensation bp is unrelated to the severance worksheet business process just to be clear there um they're they're not connected to each other so that business process is really just changing a person's a terminated workers compensation you can change salary and allowance plan information um as part of that business process and that's it nothing else but um so if you so some customers do use that business process for um you know for their terminated workers um instead of the severance functionality and so they may add a severance salary plan for instance on there and then change the um the pay um but you can't add like a severance lump sum payment using that business process so it is strictly to change somebody's um salary okay thanks jackie i think and and i see we actually have a few more questions coming in um and i think the next question jackie is something that you touched on in some of your earlier comments then and the question is can you use the severance calc for modeling so in other words can you create um one and then you know based on that calc um maybe delete that and create a second calc before deciding on the final one so if we think about um and and i can certainly imagine a use case where we are maybe looking at someone at a higher level in the organization and and we want to be careful we might be looking at several options for them where we would want to compare different options um perhaps a lump sum compared to ongoing pay and and really make an informed decision about what we wanted to offer that person and so i think i i'm going to come back to you jackie to see if that's a question that you feel comfortable answering based on your knowledge of the current functionality yeah so i i don't know so modeling i'm not sure if it fully if it really would be capable right because you have to be eligible for what when you're creating the severance worksheet you have to be eligible for one and only one of those parameters for it to really work and calculate um so you can always change the severance amount that is that was calculated so um you're not stuck with the calculated amount but i don't there there isn't really a way to um you know kind of change the where the where the worker is falling in the parameters yeah so this sounds like a case for sandbox to me yeah i can add to that a situation that i had with the customer i will call it quote-unquote modeling but it did meet that need and what they did is they created basically two packages and two different matrix matrix in matrix one the rules gave them two weeks for every year and the other matrix it gave them three weeks and so they would create the worksheet picking the package for package number one for that worker see what it calculated cancel that run it again pick package two which had a completely different matrix and had different rules to see what that value is so it's not it's not a great modeling tool but it is doable it just requires you having to start one cancel it start another one cancel it okay thanks sanji that is very helpful um so our next question um is about a little bit about the process and i think it's really going to end up falling in michelle's court from a payroll standpoint so once the employee signs and returns the worksheet do all the payments go to retro or to that to that term date or do they start paying book like do it does it start paying when the agreement is returned or or go to retro and and true ups can you talk a little bit about that and i think um michelle maybe separate that out into whether we have a lump sum or ongoing pay because i imagine those two things would work differently in this situation well lump sum is just going to be one payment so when you run your retro and if it goes back it's just going to pay that on that next paycheck that's available so that's that's you know it's not going to like double up or anything as far as the um ongoing severance it goes back in it the your severance worksheet uses the date um after termination date to start those that's the date that it uses when it goes back to retro it goes back to if they term on the 11th and the 12th is when your ongoing starts that's what it's going to go back to to do start doing the weeks there is an actual community post out there right now on workday community that um they i guess workers want an option or clients want an option to be able to change that because they same thing that she's the question was um they don't want it to start until after the documents signed and that's what the date they want to use for the retro but right now that's not the way it's set up from what i'm understanding from the community post that's out there it's something that they're trying to work on to see if there's a way to change that and i can provide the um the um post out there for you guys when this is over so you can go look at it and you can make and vote on it brainstorms and everything that's out there because i believe that that's what they're trying to push towards but you can also you have that option if you don't want something to retro you know back for a further date you can change that workers um no retro processing prior to date if you change that to be the day that they signed it it's not going to go back further but again you want to test that and make sure it's going to bring in the results that you want because you're still going to have to add out i think put your pay through date out um so that's just you gotta you know work through that part of it does that make sense i hope so i did and that's super helpful and i think you know great idea um when we do post the written answers from this we will include the links to those brainstorms in that document so that those of you who have signed up and listened can vote for those brainstorms and and upload some of that functionality um so michelle i think the next question is actually really for you um so really just tips any tips for those customers using severance with a third-party payroll system and and since i know your workday payroll you may not actually be the right person for this so i will leave it to the team um because this might end up being an angie question yeah i think this is more an angie question i know the process with workday but as far as third party you just wouldn't send it to payroll because there's not a payroll system to attach it to they'd probably have to take the worksheet and deliver it to the third party but i'll let you take that energy no problem so it actually depends on how your current setup is with that third party if you have an integration that's built in workday that feeds over like to adp then you could build an integration to pull that one-time payment for that worker let's say you i have clients who actually produce an excel document that they actually send not via an integration at all and if that is the case then there are reports that you can build to pull out that calculated one-time payment that is already set up for you if it is a one a lump sum that's easy one time but if it is an ongoing one then that's an internal process that you're gonna have to do on a every week until that person is paid which can be a little more challenging but can be doable it just requires you to monitor it in a different way to make sure that each week you're sending it over for ex-employee until his weeks are finished so it really truly depends on if you have integration set up or you don't have integration okay thanks angie so we are nearly at time and we actually do have quite a few additional questions in the chat um we're gonna answer one more and then i think what we'll do is um we will follow up and in our q a document that we publish up afterwards we'll make sure we hit any questions that haven't been answered um and and since there's been a lot of questions i do want to mention that um obviously if you are you know a current customer engaged with us you are welcome to um to socialize the questions that you have with your contact on our side either in the implementation side or on the cbs side as we know this is definitely a topic that's very that's of of interest to many of our customers um the last question that i want to tackle is um can you use electronic signature i see that in here actually twice um do we have the opportunity for the employee to e-sign and i believe jackie um you said that this is not an employee-facing business process so we don't actually have that opportunity we would have to print the agreement out and to um have the employee give us a wet signature for that can you confirm that for me jackie yeah that's correct madeline um unfortunately right now the um employee as self cannot be part of the severance process so um there is no way to you know send that document to them um you know a great idea for a brainstorm for sure um and i'll have to check and see if there isn't one if there's one out there um i'll definitely include that in the um the documentation that we put together afterwards all right thanks jackie and thanks everyone for joining um this has been a great discussion if your question did not get answered as i said we will answer it in the faq and i want to encourage you to sign up for our next ask the expert which is coming up two weeks from today and our topic will be interactions between leave and payroll and and how we can ensure again that employees are being paid properly and so lots of good look forward to lots of good conversation and discussion there and thank you very much for joining us today um we definitely look forward to hearing from you further and and we'll be responding to your questions shortly thanks all