Workday® OE: Are You Ready for Open Enrollment?

Are You Ready for Open Enrollment?

It’s that time again – Open Enrollment Season! Whether you’re just beginning to plan or you’re ready to go, check out our top tips and tricks for a successful open enrollment in Workday.

• Check the list! The Workday Community is your friend. Click here <Community.workday.com/oeyechecklist> for the latest open enrollment checklist published by Workday.

• Workday 33 will arrive just in time for most open enrollments. Workday will introduce a new user experience for OE, as well as changes to how dependent and tobacco usage data is collected. Are you up to date on these key features? <link to What’s New WD 33 Benefits blog post>

• ICYMI: Open enrollment is mobile! Workday introduced OE for mobile last year ahead of open enrollment season. If you decided not to deploy the mobile functionality, now might be the time. Click here <Community.workday.com/OE Video> for the latest mobile open enrollment video published by Workday

• (Don’t) Set it and forget it – You likely have multiple passive events and scheduled jobs working away in the background. Avoid unpleasant surprises next year and update those expiration dates. Click here <Workday.com/reader/Manage Scheduled Future Processes> for the Manage Scheduled Future Processes documentation published by Workday.

Planning

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.

Communication

Is your organization going paperless? Instead of handing out paper open enrollment packets or sending an e-mail, consider leveraging Workday to communicate.

• Announcements – with WD33, you’ll now be able to link directly to the open enrollment event from an announcement worklet. Announcements can be configured to signal the start of open enrollment and send users directly to the task they need to complete. Leverage this feature to eliminate the need for users to hunt through a busy inbox looking for their open enrollment task.

• Document Distribution - 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.

• Embedded Analytics – Leverage business process embedded analytics to make helpful information like plan descriptions, video tutorials, or links to third party tools readily available for employees.

• Instructional Text - With the WD33 open enrollment re-design, enrollment instructions are moved from the top of enrollment page to sit alongside the enrollment changes, making the instructions more visible and in line with the task at hand. Leverage the new real estate to call employee’s attention to important information including links and who to contact for help.

Reporting

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.

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.

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.

Have a question or need help? Contact one of our Workday experts at info at teamUpHR.com