Your Workday home page is the first thing employees see when they log in. For some organizations, that means a cluttered dashboard full of apps they never touch. For others, it’s a genuinely useful launchpad that saves time every single day. The difference usually comes down to one thing: intentional configuration.

Whether you’re a Workday admin looking to improve adoption, an HR leader tired of fielding “where do I find that?” questions, or a people ops team trying to cut down on repetitive communications, your home page is one of the most underutilized tools at your disposal. Here’s how to make it actually work for your team.

What’s Actually on the Workday Home Page

The Workday home page is built around apps, which are containers that hold worklets, dashboards, reports, and tasks. Out of the box, Workday gives you a standard set of apps based on your licensed modules and security roles. It’s a reasonable starting point but it’s rarely the right fit long-term.

The good news: you have significant control over what shows up, who sees it, and how it’s organized.

Custom Worklets: Your Shortcut to What Matters

Worklets are the individual tiles employees click to access specific functions, think “Pay,” “Benefits,” “Time Off,” and so on. But beyond the standard set, you can also configure custom worklets that link to external URLs, internal Workday reports, or specific tasks within your tenant.

This is where things get genuinely useful. A few examples of what this looks like in practice:

• A “Quick Links” worklet that surfaces your employee handbook, IT help desk, or benefits enrollment portal
• A manager-specific worklet that pulls up a curated report of their team’s headcount or open requisitions
• A custom worklet pointing directly to your organization’s ACA or compliance-related tasks during open enrollment

The key is thinking about what your employees are actually trying to do on any given day, and removing the steps between them and that goal.

Announcements: More Than Just a Banner

The Announcements feature is one of the more flexible tools on the home page, and also one of the more underused ones. You can configure announcements with custom images, text, links, and even embedded video. You can target them by security group, so your managers see something different from your frontline workers, and your finance team isn’t wading through HR-specific content.

A few practical uses:

• Open enrollment reminders with a direct link to the benefits worklet
• A welcome message for new hires pointing them to onboarding tasks
• A training video embedded directly on the home page during a system update or policy rollout
• Seasonal reminders for performance review cycles or compliance deadlines

Unlike a company-wide email that gets buried, an announcement lives where your employees already are.

Personalization vs. Standardization: Finding the Right Balance

One of the trickiest parts of home page configuration is deciding how much to standardize across the organization versus how much to leave to individual users or admins.

Too much standardization, and you end up with a one-size-fits-none experience. Too much flexibility, and you lose consistency and make it harder to support users when things go sideways.

A good starting point is to set a strong default experience that works for most employees, then layer in role-based or department-specific customizations for groups with genuinely different needs. Managers and executives often have meaningful use cases for additional data access. Finance, HR, and operations teams may need worklets that aren’t relevant to the broader workforce.

What doesn’t work: building a highly customized home page once and leaving it alone. Business needs shift. Roles change. New Workday features get released. A home page that worked great at go-live can become a source of confusion 18 months later if no one’s tending to it.