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Workday + riteful: Development throughout the year
What Workday already offers for goals, check-ins and development, where its features overlap with riteful, and when an additional tool makes sense.
MarkusIn January, Nora and her manager agree on a goal in Workday: by December, she should be able to lead a section of a project independently. Her performance will be assessed at the end of the year. What matters for her development is what happens in between: which tasks does she take on, when does she need support, and how do experiences translate into next steps?
This is the starting point of our article on SAP SuccessFactors. With Workday, it is worth examining the existing features closely: goals, feedback and development items can already be managed throughout the year. Workday can also include them in formal reviews.
The potential value of riteful lies in organizing ongoing development support into a connected workflow. Whether this addition makes sense depends on how the company uses Workday today and where managers and employees need further support.
For the following comparison, we assume a configured Workday connection: goals and agreed context data flow to riteful; designated goal updates flow back to Workday. The scope is defined separately for each data area. Formal assessment and compensation decisions remain within the Workday process.
What Workday already covers as an HR system
Workday supports individual and organizational goals, configurable review templates, and requested and unsolicited feedback. These features provide a framework for clarifying expectations, sharing feedback and assessing performance.
Compensation can also be connected: overall ratings from completed performance reviews can feed into merit, bonus or stock processes under specified conditions. The review period and configured compensation matrix are among the relevant factors. Achieving a development goal does not automatically trigger a payment.
For a company already using these processes in Workday, a useful division of responsibilities is to retain Workday as the reference point for formal goals, reviews and compensation decisions. For everyday support, the company explicitly decides which work belongs in Workday and which work riteful should handle.
01 · Responsibilities
One shared goal. Clear responsibilities.
Workday
- Goals and success criteria
- Reviews and performance assessment
- Compensation decisions
riteful
- Plan the path together
- Proactively gather conversation needs
- Observe, discuss and follow through
Workday also supports ongoing development.
Consider check-ins, development items and Manager Insights Hub when assigning responsibilities.
Where Workday and riteful overlap
Additional software should address a specific work problem. The comparison below shows which tasks Workday features already support and where riteful places its emphasis. It does not establish superior outcomes.
| Task | Existing Workday feature | riteful's emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| Plan development | Manage goals and development items outside a review | Build a shared development and conversation plan covering weeks or months |
| Have ongoing conversations | Check-ins with topics for one-on-one conversations | Proactively gather conversation needs and adapt timing and agenda accordingly |
| Explore development opportunities | Manager Insights Hub with insights and suggestions for direct reports | Continue the shared plan through current concerns and outstanding commitments |
| Prepare conversations with AI | Talent Highlights as editable drafts of strengths and development opportunities | AI assistance for agendas, summaries, observation analysis and one-on-one plans |
| Discuss concrete work experiences | Talent Highlights use Workday data as sources | Record observations in the journal or use connected systems such as Microsoft Teams and Jira |
A check-in, a development plan or AI assistance alone is therefore not unique to riteful. The full workflow needs to be assessed: do current concerns reach the agenda in time? Do experiences lead to useful next steps? Are both people's commitments revisited later?
How Workday organizes the work differently
Goals, development items and conversations serve different purposes
For Nora, the goal describes an outcome: independently leading a section of a project. A development item describes a way to work towards it, such as preparing a meeting and reviewing her facilitation afterwards. A check-in provides space to discuss that experience. This distinction also helps when introducing another tool: a conversation topic does not need to become a new formal goal.
Workday treats goals, feedback, development items and competencies as separate building blocks of ongoing performance work. A review can bring information from them together. Dedicated development plan templates are also available for more extensive development processes.
Goals can include milestones and status information. When approvals are configured, submitted goal changes cannot be edited further until approved. Goals in ongoing reviews can also be locked against changes outside the review. For the proposed workflow, this means the next learning step can change in a conversation, while a change to the formal goal's scope must respect the designated HR process.
Manager Insights Hub already supports ongoing management
Manager Insights Hub brings together information and actions for direct reports. Insights can become check-in topics. The available areas depend on subscriptions, enabled features and access permissions, among other factors.
Workday also offers its own AI features, including assistance with development item descriptions. Talent Highlights prepare existing talent data for discussion; managers can edit the drafts and must confirm that they have reviewed the content before saving it.
Talent Highlights have product and data prerequisites. The documented feature uses Workday data; this boundary applies to Talent Highlights and is not a general statement about all Workday integrations.
This makes the evaluation more specific: do the Workday features already in use cover preparation and follow-up sufficiently? Or does the team need a workflow that connects conversation needs, observations from work and agreed actions more closely?
Skills need a shared meaning
Workday Skills Cloud provides a skills foundation used in areas such as learning and development opportunities. riteful can prepare roles using occupational and competency data from ESCO and AMS BIS and adapt them to the organization.
When the systems work together, these concepts need to align. “Project coordination” in a role profile and a similarly named skill are not automatically equivalent. Companies should clarify which capability they mean, which responsibility it relates to, and which observations are relevant to the conversation. Automatic mapping between Skills Cloud, ESCO and AMS BIS is not assumed here. See our article on roles and structured occupational data.
Visibility of conversation content needs deliberate design
Workday check-ins distinguish shared content from private “My Notes.” The latter are excluded from the “View Check-Ins” report. Access to other check-in data depends on configured permissions; informal check-ins do not require their own business process.
riteful's confirmed product model keeps notes private: HR can see whether one-on-ones take place, but cannot access conversation content or private notes. The connection should therefore explicitly define which information is to be exchanged. A goal update does not authorize the transfer of a conversation record.
What carries over from the SAP example
The underlying idea remains the same: a formal goal becomes meaningful in everyday work through tasks, feedback and support. Automatically assigning the annual review to the HR system and everything in between to riteful would be too broad. SAP SuccessFactors also supports ongoing activities, achievements, conversations and feedback through Continuous Performance Management.
The difference lies in the specific building blocks and their configuration. In the Workday model, goals, development items, check-ins and Manager Insights Hub need to be considered together. Technical integration also requires more than renaming the SAP approach: SAP documents OData entities and their metadata, among other interfaces. Workday provides REST endpoints and versioned SOAP web services with their own operations.
The management workflow can carry over. Data objects, permissions and process states require separate assessment. An SAP connection therefore cannot be transferred to Workday unchanged.
How riteful can support development throughout the year
A useful starting point is a team that manages formal goals and reviews in Workday while distributing conversation preparation and follow-up across individual notes, chats and calendar appointments. In this situation, riteful can bring four tasks together.
Turn the goal into a shared path. Nora and her manager agree on the project tasks she will gradually take on. This includes which decisions she can make independently and what support her manager commits to providing. The development and conversation plan provides a reference for the months ahead.
Gather current conversation needs. riteful proactively asks for topics and supports timing and agenda planning based on those needs. If an approval is missing, resolving that issue can become the reason for the next conversation. The annual goal stays connected to current work.
Make experiences available for discussion. Observations from the journal or connected work systems provide concrete situations: Nora collected open decisions before a meeting, clarified responsibilities or overlooked a dependency. Both people can consider what this means for the next step. An observation is not a final assessment of a skill; see our article on recording leadership observations.
Revisit commitments later. AI assistance for agendas and summaries helps connect open actions with previous conversations. Nora takes on a task; her manager clarifies a responsibility. At the next conversation, they examine the results and adjust the plan. People remain responsible for content and decisions.
The value of this model needs to show up in everyday work. Less duplicated preparation, clearer support and consistent follow-up are useful evaluation criteria. They are not product outcomes demonstrated here.
02 · Two possible workflows
Development throughout the year.
Workday
- JanuaryGoal in Workday
- February – NovemberSupport in WorkdayCheck-ins · Development items · Manager Insights Hub
- DecemberReview in Workday
Workday + riteful
- JanuaryGoal in Workday
- February – NovemberSupport in ritefulPlan · Gather topics · Discuss · Follow through
- DecemberReview in Workday
Example: Nora's development goal from January to December
January: Clarify the goal and responsibilities. The formal goal is recorded in Workday. Nora and her manager derive their first practical steps from it. The configured goal data is synchronized with riteful. They agree where to maintain the operational plan and who is responsible for required changes to the formal goal.
Spring: Review the first tasks. Nora facilitates a project meeting. In their one-on-one, they discuss a concrete situation and agree on the next exercise. A workflow organized entirely in Workday can use the configured check-ins and development items. In the proposed combined model, riteful handles ongoing preparation and continuity of these conversations.
Summer: Distinguish support from a goal change. A missing approval is initially a task for the manager. If the project scope changes instead, they consider whether the formal goal needs to change. That change follows the configured Workday process.
Autumn: Support greater responsibility. Nora takes on a larger section of the project. Conversation needs emerge from current tasks and previous commitments. A topic already discussed continues in the system the team uses for development support; it does not need a second parallel conversation history.
December: Assess performance within the agreed HR process. Nora and her manager evaluate the outcome against the criteria. Goal updates included in the synchronization scope flow back to Workday. Processing follows the configured connection and its process rules; this does not turn private conversation notes into review content.
Nora and this annual journey are fictional. The months illustrate the workflow and do not represent a required Workday schedule.
Is synchronization in both directions possible?
Yes. Workday provides read and write interfaces for this purpose. Individual goals can be retrieved through the Performance Enablement REST service. Workday documents the SOAP operation “Manage_Goals” for creating and editing goals, among other options. Exchange in both directions is therefore technically possible; available fields and permissions must match the specific configuration.
However, “written back” does not always mean “finally approved.” A goal change may first initiate a business process. Its handling also depends on integration parameters. The documentation includes an automatic completion option that skips approvals, for example; existing approval steps cannot simply be assumed to remain in effect.
For the workflow described here, a focused division is useful:
| Data area | Workday → riteful | riteful → Workday |
|---|---|---|
| Goals | Configured goals and agreed fields as the basis for the development plan | Designated goal updates according to ownership and the Workday process |
| Organizational context | Information needed to identify people and reporting relationships | Workday remains authoritative in this model; no blanket write-back of master data |
| Development items and skills | Separately defined scope and semantic mapping | Separate assessment required; full mirroring is not assumed |
| Conversation content and private notes | Not assumed to be part of goal synchronization | Not assumed to be part of goal synchronization |
During setup, HR and IT clarify unique identifiers for people and goals, ownership of each field, handling of pending approvals and reviews, and concurrent changes. This also includes update frequency, error handling and checking what was actually accepted. Interfaces alone guarantee neither real-time updates nor automatic conflict resolution.
When an additional tool makes sense
If Workday check-ins, development items and Manager Insights Hub already form a well-functioning workflow, an additional tool should offer clearly identifiable value. Otherwise, it creates another place to maintain information and potentially conflicting versions.
If managers instead have to reconstruct goals, current concerns and open actions before every conversation, that workflow is a useful starting point for riteful. A demo can use an existing development goal to explore how the shared plan, proactive topic gathering and conversation follow-up fit the company's Workday process.
References
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SAP. (n.d.-b). Setting Up SAP SuccessFactors Continuous Performance Management. SAP Learning. Accessed November 2, 2026.
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Workday. (n.d.-b). Concept: Talent Highlights. Administrator Guide. Accessed November 2, 2026.
Workday. (n.d.-c). Create or Edit Individual Goals. Administrator Guide. Accessed November 2, 2026.
Workday. (n.d.-d). Employee Review Template. Workday Education. Accessed November 2, 2026.
Workday. (n.d.-e). Goals Management. Workday Education. Accessed November 2, 2026.
Workday. (n.d.-f). Manage_Goals. Performance_Management, Workday Web Services API, v47.0. Accessed November 2, 2026.
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Workday. (n.d.-i). Setup Considerations: Check-Ins. Administrator Guide. Accessed November 2, 2026.
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Workday. (n.d.-k). Setup Considerations: Skills Cloud. Administrator Guide. Accessed November 2, 2026.
Workday. (n.d.-l). Setup Considerations: Talent Highlights. Administrator Guide. Accessed November 2, 2026.
Workday. (2026). Workday Web Services (WWS) Directory (v47.0 / 2026R2). Updated October 30, 2026. Accessed November 2, 2026.