Business processes are the part of Workday employees and managers touch most often, and the part least likely to get a formal review after go-live. Testing gets attention when a release breaks something. Core HCM gets attention when an audit flags it. Business processes just quietly get slower; one well-intentioned change at a time, until nobody remembers why a routine transaction takes as long as it does. For a Head of Enterprise Apps, these five signs are usually visible well before anyone files a formal complaint about them, and catching them early is far cheaper than waiting for the complaint to arrive.
1. Approval Chains Longer Than the Org Chart
If a compensation change needs five sign-offs, but the organisation only has three levels of authority above the requester, the process has drifted from reality. Extra approval steps are rarely added deliberately. They accumulate one incident at a time, each one in a reasonable response to a specific problem, until the chain reflects historical anxiety rather than actual accountability. The fix is not to remove approval altogether; it is to check that every step in the chain still maps someone with genuine authority over the decision.
2. Notifications Nobody Reads Anymore
When notification volume grows past what any manager can reasonably act on, the instinct to automate awareness has the opposite effect. People stop reading them, which means the one notification that matters gets missed along with the dozens that do not. High notification volume is not a sign that the system is thorough. It is a sign that nobody has pruned it in a while.
3. A Step That Exists Because of One Incident, Years Ago
Every organisation has at least one approval step, validation rule, or condition that exists purely because something went wrong once, a long time ago, and nobody has revisited whether the underlying risk still applies. These steps are almost always defensible in isolation and almost never worth their ongoing cost once the original context is gone.
4. HR or Finance Routinely Works Around the Process, Not Through It
The clearest sign a business process has stopped serving its purpose is when the people who use it daily have quietly built a workaround. A spreadsheet tracking approval outside the system. An email chain that substitutes for a step that technically still exists on Workday. When the workaround becomes more reliable than the configured process, that is not a training problem. It is a design problem, and no amount of reminding people to “use the system properly” fixes a process that genuinely takes longer than the workaround it is competing with.
5. Condition Rules Still Reference a Structure That No Longer Exists
Reorganisations happen. Business process condition rules, built to route approvals based on reporting lines or cost centres at a point in time, often do not get updated to match. The result is approvals routing to people who have moved roles, left the organisation, or never had the context to make the decision in the first place, while the person who should be approving has no visibility into the request at all. This is one of the harder signs to spot from the outside, because the process still technically runs. It just runs to the wrong people.
What a Reset Actually Involves
None of these five signs require re-implementing Workday to fix. A business process reset means auditing existing BP designs against current organisational reality, removing steps that no longer earn their place, and automating the low-risk approvals that do not need a human at all. This is precisely the kind of untangling work that AMS and optimisation services are built around, taking a business process from accumulated technical debt back to something that matches how the organisation actually runs.
Business process design is one of three pillars, alongside testing discipline and Core HCM hygiene, that determine whether a Workday tenant keeps pace with the organisation it serves.
Read the full framework in the pillar guide, Adopt Without Disruption: The Complete Post-Go-Live Playbook, and see how many of these five signs apply to your own tenant.