Workday Government Unveils Personnel Action Request (PAR) Agent to Modernize Federal HR and Strengthen Mission Readiness

New Agent Reduces PAR Cycle Times by Up to 60% and Improves Decision Accuracy

New Agent Shifts Time from Paperwork to Mission Work, Strengthening Fiscal Stewardship and Taxpayer Value

Workday Government, the enterprise AI platform for managing people, finance, and agents, unveiled a new Personnel Action Request (PAR) Agent. Designed specifically for federal agencies, the PAR Agent modernizes how agencies manage critical HR transactions while keeping missions moving forward and delivering more value for U.S. taxpayers.

PAR Agent will Help Speed Up Hiring, Lower Costs, and Strengthen Mission Delivery

PARs are the backbone of federal HR operations. They capture every agency hire, promotion, reassignment, pay change, and separation, which are then fed into critical systems like payroll and benefits. But for many federal HR teams, the process is prone to human error and still runs on disconnected systems and paper. It takes an average of 22-45 days for routine actions like pay changes and an additional 80-120+ days for hiring and recruitment. This results in delayed hiring, impeded mission delivery, and increased costs for taxpayers through avoidable mistakes and rework.

The PAR Agent tackles these issues head-on by putting automation, checks, and real-time visibility right into the PAR process, while ensuring human oversight at every critical step. Integrated into Workday Government, the PAR Agent uses an unrivaled, clean dataset to automate routine steps, proactively catch errors by validating data against policies, and send alerts to prevent missed deadlines.

“Federal HR leaders are under pressure to fill critical roles, retain top talent, and ensure every personnel action supports mission readiness – yet they are often constrained by legacy, paper‑based processes,” said Lynn Martin, general manager, Workday Government. “With our PAR Agent, we are helping agencies move beyond manual PAR processing to an integrated, AI‑enabled model that improves accuracy, accelerates cycle times, and gives leaders the real‑time visibility they need to manage their workforce more effectively.”

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Transforming Federal HR with Up to 60% Faster PAR Cycle Times

The PAR Agent is designed to make life easier for federal workers, managers, and HR teams. By automating workflows and standardizing inputs, it can reduce PAR processing cycle times by up to 60%, cutting average timelines from 22-45 days to about 9-18 days. That means new hires, promotions, reassignments, and pay changes show up faster in people’s jobs and paychecks, while HR spends less time chasing paperwork and more time on higher‑value mission work.

Just as importantly, it changes the experience for everyone involved: instead of endless emails asking, “Where is my PAR?”, employees, managers, and HR can see real‑time status, understand what’s happening next, and spend their time serving the mission – not tracking down forms.

Reducing Errors and Strengthening Stewardship to Deliver Greater Value for Taxpayers

The PAR Agent also reduces late and erroneous actions, cuts thousands of manual payroll corrections, and embeds the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) requirements into a complete digital record that strengthens audit readiness and preserves data integrity. At scale, the impact of this agent could be significant. A high-volume agency, for example, with 10,000 employees processing around 5,000 PARs monthly could save over 64,000 internal labor hours and an estimated $3.56 million annually*, allowing resources to better steward public funds and deliver more taxpayer value.

This is the latest innovation from Workday Government dedicated to meeting the needs of the public sector. Workday Government is the enterprise AI platform that helps federal agencies modernize by unifying finance, HR, and planning on one platform with real‑time visibility into mission-critical data. Powered by Sana, Workday’s AI foundation, AI agents work inside federal controls so every action is permission‑aware, auditable, and tied to a single source of truth—delivering a better experience for employees and greater value for taxpayers.