We understand that OE season can be a stressful time of year. We are here to help you with your Workday Open Enrollment configuration, so you can focus on your employee’s needs. Below are some tips and tricks to ensure a smooth OE!
Keep reading for our Top 7 (or so) steps to take when configuring Workday. Click here to learn more about how our experts can support your Open Enrollment.
1. Benefit Configuration Health Check
Have you had the opportunity to audit your current configuration? You don’t want to carry existing issues into the next plan year, so this is a great first step in open enrollment preparation. This will help you identify existing issues with your current configuration and create opportunities to automate manual processes. This would include a thorough review of items including, but not limited to:
If it’s been a while since you’ve adopted new features for Workday Benefits, you may be missing out some very useful tools. Here are some of the latest updates from the 2024 R2 Release.
Benefit Elections User Experience Redesign – The user experience for an employee’s view of their benefits has been completely redesigned.
Benefits Messaging – Ability to send messages to workers through email, SMS, and push notifications.
Open Enrollment Journey – Enhanced abilities to use the Journey feature to streamline OE tasks for employees.
Running some simple audits can help you find some common roadblocks to a successful open enrollment.
Workday-Delivered Reports:
View Workers in Multiple Benefit Groups Audit – This report will reveal any employees in multiple benefit groups. When you run this report as of the effective date of your open enrollment, you should receive zero results. If you do have results, there is an issue with your eligibility rules.
Benefit Event Status Report – This provides a list of any workers with outstanding benefits events. Open events need to be finalized before any employee can make open enrollment elections. To clear open events that workers may have forgotten about, run “Finalize Open Benefit Events”.
Dependent Demographic Audit – Are you collecting required demographic information for covered dependents? Auditing your dependent data can help you determine if configuration changes are needed to ensure you’re collecting information required by insurance carriers.
Beneficiary Audit – Review your beneficiary data to get a better understanding of where your organization stands in gathering this information. If your company is the agent of record for beneficiary information and you have gaps in your data collection, you can make beneficiary information required during the enrollment process.
Here are some of our Custom Solutions:
Benefit and Payroll Reconciliation Report – Commit can help build out this custom report to compare differences between benefits and payroll. This can help in finding discrepancies when self-billing.
Click here to learn more about the Benefit and Payroll Reconciliation Solution.
Open Enrollment Custom Dashboard – Although Workday delivers a simple OE tracker, Commit can build a custom dashboard that tracks and reviews New Hires, Employees on Leave, FSA/HSA Audits, pending EOI’s, etc.
Here are some helpful tips to make your open enrollment easier:
Downstream impacts of New Plans – There can be many downstream impacts of adding a new vendor and plans to your benefit offerings.
If you have a new vendor, create new providers and new plans. Be sure to not only include new plan types in your open enrollment benefit event, but also the benefit life events for the new plan year.
Enrollment instructions can also be updated effective the new plan year to inform your employees about the new plan designs.
Consolidate where you can! Take time to review your benefit groups and benefit plans to see where you can reduce the volume of benefit plans/groups for easier maintenance and employee experience.
For example: benefit groups typically are split out when you have different countries, pay frequencies or waiting periods, but it may not be worth it to isolate a certain plan for a smaller population.
Calculated Rates vs Fixed Rates – Creating calculated rates that you can attach to applicable plans can make it easier for you when rate changes occur.
Tip: Calculated rates allow you to swap out rates easily via EIB, which you can’t with fixed rates. Using fixed rates is more advantageous if you have individual rates, which are common for global medical plans and some US insurance plans.
Automate BAR (Benefit Annual Rate) with Integrations – When using Benefit Annual Rates, it can be tedious to have to update and maintain them. By utilizing calculated fields and integrations, we can automate the process of updating Benefit Annual Rates.
Evaluate your Business Processes related to benefit events. Business processes can be a great way to move away from manual, paper processes and streamline enrollment steps for employees. You can add custom validations to your business processes to prevent user error.
For example: if your employees often try to override an existing dependent’s record, validations can prompt them to go and create a new one instead of replacing the old dependent record.
Speaking ofEvidence of Insurability, if you have People Experience enabled, you have an additional option to remind employees to complete their paperwork, Select Enable Evidence of Insurability Link checkbox and related Evidence of Insurability Link field on insurance benefit plans to display a home page card reminder that will be displayed for the employee 30 days after their election is submitted.
5. Integrations
You may have many different integrations with insurance carriers to manage. When prepping for open enrollment, keep in mind the following:
Adding or changing carriers and need a new integration set-up? It typically takes 3 months to set-up a new integration file, so it is important to engage integration support as early as possible.
The following actions will impact your file feeds. Ensure these are updated according to your carrier’s specifications:
Adding, removing, updating or splitting benefit plans
Updating Benefit Coverage Targets or Tiers
Changing deductions for non-health care plans affects payroll and third-party payroll integrations
Plans, Class and Account Structures based on demographic factors such as organizations or benefit plans
Typically, insurance carriers need your open enrollment file no later than the first week of December. Keep this in mind for your project timeline!
Have your notification preferences changed? This is a great time to review and change these settings.
No carrier or benefit plan changes? Commit offers support to manage and coordinate OE integrations even when no changes are necessary. We communicate with vendors and maintain vendor OE deadlines, requested temporary filenames and file scheduling changes, additional ad-hoc runs for OE file and blackout periods, and ongoing re-scheduling for the new OE year ensuring Production schedules resume smoothly.
Audit your Scheduled Processes to ensure integrations keep firing into the next plan year. Use the “Scheduled Future Processes” for this.
6. Payroll
Make sure those deductions are correct! Benefits and payroll should work hand-in-hand to ensure a successful open enrollment.
New deduction codes may be needed for newly added benefit plans.
Updating existing Benefit Deductions with any new benefit plans, if applicable.
Modify the Run Category for any new Benefit Deductions, especially if you want to have benefits on paid leave, arrears for unpaid leave, and benefits on final termination checks, etc.
7. ACA Ties to Open Enrollment
When it comes to ACA, make sure that employees who averaged at least 30 hours per week are in the appropriate benefit group. This ensures they are offered the correct level of coverage. Also, don’t forget to update your ACA configuration to include any new earnings codes that count toward ACA hour calculations and create the new measurement period for next year.
Click here to learn about our ACA Reporting Services, including 1095-C Printing!
…8? Testing!
So, maybe there are actually *7* must-dos for OE. Once you have your updates configured – test, test, and test again! Some configuration errors may force you to rescind Open Enrollment and start all over again! So, measure twice and cut once!
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