- teamUpHR
Is it time for an Open Enrollment check-up?
My first 6 years in the Workday® Ecosystem was with a partner who grew quite large quite rapidly. I soon found myself not working directly with clients as much as I would have liked. I’m happy now to be part of a small team of Workday® experts focused on making Workday® work for our clients. This is my first blog, well timed for open enrollment season.
Is it time for a check-up?
Like checking in with your doctor for a physical, open enrollment season is a good time to examine your benefits in Workday®. It’s easy to ignore symptoms in the hustle & bustle of everyday. The same can be true for Workday® benefits. Use open enrollment as a good excuse to evaluate your overall setup. What’s working well? What’s not optimal? Are there areas you’d like to see improvement or feel like could work more efficiently? Keep reading for tips on keeping Workday® benefits in tiptop shape.
If you are adding new plans as part of your open enrollment period, think through how employees will enroll in those plans. If you are simply changing carriers but keeping the same coverage levels, you can easily leverage Workday’s plan mapping function to default employee’s existing enrollments into the new plan. Keep in mind this only works if your plans have identical coverage levels. If you are changing coverage levels, employees will need to make an active enrollment in the new plan.
Along the same lines, if your new plans require new coverage types, be sure to double check your enrollment event rule. The enrollment event rule is where waiting periods and enrollment options are driven in Workday. Your evidence of insurability rules for life insurance plans are also configured here. It’s a good idea to review your other events like hire, rehire, qualifying life events, etc. while you’re here. If coverage start and end dates are not calculating properly, an incorrect enrollment rule is often the culprit.
Open enrollment is also a good time to update your passive event rules and scheduled jobs. Passive events run in the background and trigger enrollment events for things like dependents aging out of a plan or to make an offer of coverage for ACA purposes. Chances are you have at least one passive event running, if not several. Passive events can only be scheduled through December 31st of the next calendar year so passive events need to be updated annually.
If you’re using Workday to report for ACA, there are some important items to review during this time of year as well. Now’s the time to create the measurement period and validate that measurement period history has been generated for your workers prior to launching open enrollment.
Is your organization going paperless? Instead of handing out paper open enrollment packets or sending an e-mail, consider leveraging the document distribution feature in Workday. It allows you to upload documents and links and deliver them to employees’ Workday® inboxes. The feature can be part of a business process so you can time the delivery to happen before the launch of OE if needed. You can customize who receives the documents and as an added bonus, you can also require an acknowledgement.
With the launch of release 31, Workday® has embarked on a redesign of the benefit enrollment experience, starting with mobile. You can now configure Workday® to allow employees to complete their open enrollment event from their mobile device. Employees can pick and choose their benefits in a non-linear, shopping cart like experience. This type of experience is expected to extend to the desktop in coming releases.
Want real-time information on how your open enrollment is going? Workday® delivers the Open Enrollment Status report which is your command center for managing open enrollment. From here you can track progress, send reminder emails and close, finalize and extend the open enrollment period as needed. You can also configure a dashboard to provide progress and status data for HR and benefits administrators. The dashboard can be configured to present the data in a variety of ways that are most useful for your end user.
There is a lot to manage with open enrollment, but it is a great time to showcase the power of Workday to your employees. Planning and preparation are the keys to success.
Need help? Community is your friend! There you can find open enrollment checklists and configuration help. It’s also a great place to connect with other organizations using Workday. Here’s the link to the OE checklist on Community : https://community.workday.com/oeyechecklist
Have questions? Contact me at: KelleyT “at” teamUpHR.com
