Custom Labels in Workday

I mentioned yesterday about struggling a bit to come to terms about Workday's functionality in this area, in relation to not being able to change labels and field behaviour as it relates to Address fields in Workday.  So as a follow-up today, a few thoughts on where Workday does have some Label Customization options.

What is the functionality?

• Workday delivers Maintain Custom Label task, so for certain field labels in certain areas, you can choose to override those with your own company specific terms.

 

What are the areas?

• It centers around three areas:  Global, Merit or Talent.

 So how does that work?

• For these areas, WD allows you to override certain field labels with your own field labels.
• 'Global' includes these three items: 'Workers', 'Contingent Workers' or 'Employees'.  So if your company calls them 'Team Members', 'Temps' or 'Minions', you can replace these terms globally in WD with your own terms.  'Global' does not include any other terms/labels, aka address labels. (boo-hoo!)
• You also then have to include the possessive and plural forms too.

 My thoughts:

• We have not changed any 'Global' labels, as we currently use the terms of Employees and Contingent Workers, and we'll get people used to the new 'Worker' term over time.
• Merit and Talent are a little more useful as some of the fields in this area ('merit', 'competency', 'target', etc.) are ones where we use company specific terms such as 'year end process'.
• Although some of their other terms in this area such as 'development' or 'goal' are fine for us, but recognizing how other companies often have specific terms in these areas.

 Usability

• It's easy functionality to use.  It's just a list of fields and you can choose to fill in overrides where you want to have them.
• It is multi-language enabled, so you can do label overrides in multiple languages.  That being said, when we have a company-specific term, we tend to keep the English version. 

 Following the Debate

• I see that customers have requested the ability to change the above listed labels and these have been added over time.
• Some customers think that there should be more of an option to make these changes across the application.  As an example, it can be confusing if you have multiple HRIS for recruitment vs core HR and use different terms for 'employee' and 'worker'.
• Other customers think that different label options dilute the application's power of standardization.

 The Workday technology behind the scenes?

• I wish I knew what it was or why this is so complex to do.  As a counter example, we have another major SaaS provider as our recruitment system, as we can change label names and even had the option to provide an Excel of label translations.
• When researching the address option I mentioned yesterday, and looking at the Brainstorms out on Customer Community, I see that someone had requested that 'Postal Code' be renamed as 'Zip Code' when the country is US.  The response from Workday was to clarify whether a Label Override for customer entry was being requested, or rather that Workday should make that change overall in the application (so that every customer with a US address would see 'zip code' instead of 'postal').  
• So I guess address label overrides are not as pressing a need as some of the development or performance ones.  

But I'm still curious as to whether this is a technical limitation of how the application is built, to not open up labels globally for customer entry, or more of a strategic direction to lock down this option.