✉️ Workday Reference Letters

The Request Reference Letter business process can be used by administrators or employees to automate creating and delivering reference documents for employees. HR teams frequently create reference docs for things like visa's, proof of employment for mortgages and rentals, or bank accounts. As best as I can tell, this functionality has existed in Workday since late 2019. As of writing this post in October 2023, the Community documentation can be found at Steps: Manage Reference Letters.

Set up Reference Letters

1. Configure the security domains:

   • Set Up: Reference Letters: try giving HR Admin type roles Edit and HR Ops type roles View
   • Worker Data: Reference Letters: try giving HR Admin & HR Ops type roles View access

2. Through the Maintain Reference Letter Categories task, create a category named Employment Verification to help organize the letters.

3. Use the Maintain Reference Letter Templates task to create a reference letter template.

4. From Drive, Create New Document Template¹, named US Employment Verification Letter

   • Source: Request Reference Letter
   • Category: Workday-delivered "Reference Letter" or create your own with the task Maintain Document Categories to have more granular control over the document security.

5. Set up the Request Reference Letter business process. Business processes can be set up one of two ways:

   • One "Default" business process with condition rules for the reference letter categories and templates.

6. Multiple business process definitions defined by reference letter categories or templates.

7. Configure the business process security policy. Consider giving HR Ops and HR Admin type roles "Create" + "View All" policies and give employee as self "Request" policies.

8. Configure the steps for the business process. A simple starting point would be:

   1. Initiation
   2. Action - Review Reference Letter Request step for HR Ops type role(s)
   3. Action - Generate Document step for HR Ops type role(s). Skip this if you don't need someone to review or potentially amend contents of the document.
   4. Review Document Step - Configured for the employee as self and/or any other "Request" BP policy groups to review the document from the previous generate document step.

9. Test. Update security, business process steps, and document contents until it works the way you want it to.