Workday Training Videos Employees Actually Use
Vorec Team · 2026-06-10 · 10 min read
Workday is supposed to be self-service. Yet every pay period, every open enrollment, every quarter-end, your HR team answers the same questions: How do I request time off? Where's my payslip? How do I submit this expense? How do I update my direct deposit? The whole promise of employee self-service breaks down because employees can't figure out the self-service — so they default to the one thing that always works: emailing HR.
The problem isn't Workday exactly; it's that Workday looks different in every company (your org structure, your business processes, your custom tasks) and most employees use it only a few times a year. They forget between visits. What they need is a short, clear video of the exact task they're trying to do, in your tenant — available the moment they need it. This guide shows how to produce those videos without scripting, voiceover, or pulling HR into a video project.
Self-service only saves HR time if employees can actually serve themselves. Every "how do I…" email that lands in HR's inbox is a self-service feature that failed because no one showed the employee how to use it.
Why employees can't self-serve in Workday
Workday is powerful but not obvious, and a few factors make training essential:
- Infrequent use. Most employees touch Workday a handful of times a year — time off, a payslip, open enrollment. They forget the steps between visits.
- Tenant-specific navigation. Your org's tasks, inbox items, and business processes are configured uniquely. Generic Workday help doesn't match what an employee sees.
- Self-service is unintuitive. Finding the right task in the search bar, completing a multi-step business process, knowing what happens after submission — none of it is obvious to an occasional user.
- Seasonal spikes. Open enrollment and performance review windows create predictable floods of identical questions.
So employees do the rational thing: they stop hunting and email HR. Multiply that by every employee and every recurring task, and HR spends a huge share of its time on questions a 90-second video could answer.
Why a Workday help PDF doesn't get used
Most HR teams write up instructions or screenshot guides. Employees don't read them — a wall of text for a task they do twice a year is more friction than just emailing HR. And the moment Workday ships an update or you change a process, the PDF is wrong and nobody notices.
The Workday tasks worth recording
Cover the recurring, high-volume employee tasks — the ones that generate the most HR questions.
1. Time off and absence
Requesting time off, checking balances, canceling a request. One of the highest-frequency tasks and a constant source of questions.
2. Pay and tax
Finding and downloading a payslip, updating direct deposit, viewing or updating tax withholding. Sensitive, recurring, and frequently asked about.
3. Expenses
Submitting an expense report, attaching receipts, checking reimbursement status — a multi-step process people get wrong and resubmit.
4. Personal info and onboarding tasks
Updating contact details, completing onboarding inbox items, the new-hire checklist. New employees especially need a guided path through their first-week Workday tasks.
5. Open enrollment
The seasonal big one. A clear walkthrough of your enrollment process, available during the window, deflects an enormous spike of questions.
Record from an employee's Workday view, not an HR admin's. Employees see a different home page, different worklets, and different tasks than HR partners do. A video that matches the screen they actually land on is the difference between "got it" and "I don't see that."
How to produce the videos without an HR video project
HR teams fall back on PDFs because making videos sounds like a project — scripting, recording voiceover, editing, and re-doing it every time Workday updates twice a year. Nobody in HR has time for that.
Vorec removes the overhead. You record a silent screen capture of yourself completing the Workday task, then upload it. Vorec's AI watches the recording, detects every action — searching for the task, filling each field, submitting the business process — and writes a narration explaining each step, then generates a synced voiceover. No script, no microphone, no editing.
The loop:
- Record the task silently, from an employee's view.
- Upload to Vorec.
- AI narrates — it detects the steps and explains the task.
- Share the video in your HR help center, onboarding flow, or — best — link it right where employees look.
When Workday ships its twice-yearly update or you change a process, re-record that one task and let the AI re-narrate. And because Vorec also generates a written step-by-step guide from the same recording, your help center gets a narrated video and a current written guide from one capture.
HR PDF vs HR ticket vs self-serve video
| Factor | HR help PDF | Emailing HR | AI-narrated video (Vorec) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employees actually use it | ❌ Rarely read | ✅ But costs HR time | ✅ Short and watchable |
| Shows YOUR tenant | ⚠️ Until it changes | ✅ HR walks them through | ✅ Yes |
| Available 24/7, no HR needed | ✅ Yes | ❌ HR must respond | ✅ Yes |
| Conveys the full task flow | ❌ Static | ✅ Live | ✅ Yes, in motion |
| Stays current on updates | ❌ Goes stale | ⚠️ N/A | ✅ Re-record once |
| HR effort | ⚠️ High to write | ❌ High, recurring | ✅ Low (record + upload) |
Placement: where the videos cut the most tickets
- In the HR help center / portal, linked from the relevant topic
- In new-hire onboarding — a short playlist for first-week Workday tasks
- In seasonal comms — embed the open-enrollment video right in the announcement email
- At the point of need — link the time-off video wherever you tell people to "request time off in Workday"
A practical rollout
- List the top recurring employee tasks — time off, payslip, expenses, personal info, enrollment.
- Record each one from an employee's view.
- Let Vorec narrate and generate the matching written guide.
- Place them in the help center and onboarding, and in seasonal comms.
- Re-record on update to keep the library current.
The 200-credit free trial covers your first set of employee-task videos, so you can watch the HR ticket volume drop on your own tenant before committing.
A narrated Workday walkthrough produced from one screen recording with AI — no script, no voice talent — is what makes "a video for every recurring HR task" realistic instead of a project HR never starts.
The bottom line
Workday self-service only saves HR time if employees can actually self-serve — and occasional users forget the steps and email HR instead. PDFs go unread and out of date. Generic help doesn't match your tenant.
Record your recurring employee tasks once, let AI narrate them, and place the videos where employees look. Self-service finally works, HR's inbox quiets down, and your team gets the time back to do real HR work instead of answering "where's my payslip?" for the hundredth time.
Make Workday self-service actually work — record each task once, let AI narrate, cut HR tickets. Start free with 200 credits