Be Proactive about Open Enrollment
Welcome to another edition of In The Loop! Today’s blog will broadly cover open enrollment.
Let’s start with this - Community has an open enrollment checklist that is readily available and covers mostly everything that you’d need to consider when preparing for OE.
What is the big deal about Open Enrollment/Annual Enrollment (OE/AE) and why do I need to “plan” for it? It’s just another cycle of the same thing. We didn’t even get new plans!
You’re right. You may not actually need to do anything other than update your benefit plan year, change a few rates, run out a test OE in Sandbox, and schedule some integrations. However, this line of thinking can lead to some dicey situations. In my experience, Workday Benefits can be the most efficient and easily maintainable SKU that you administer. It can also be the bane of your entire existence.
My answer: It depends – would you describe the state of your benefits configuration (and the relationship between teams) as ‘proactive’ or ‘reactive’? If it’s a reactive situation, then hopefully this blog is a good starting point to have an easier time with OE this year. If it’s already proactive, then go ahead and keep reading for that sweet positive reinforcement!
Do you have an example of what this means?
Requirement: We won’t be adding any new vendors, but we are now offering 3x basic life coverage for employees in New York. The assumption is that this requires no configuration changes. Just an integration tweak, correct?
Proactive Approach: Meet with your functional area to go over all changes, big or small, regarding next year’s benefit options. This includes any plan or structure changes. This requirement should have you build a new plan, rate, eligibility, and coverage type. It could also have its own policy, age-reductions, enrollment prerequisites, and plan structure. That one meeting to discuss that small caveat may have just saved you weeks of cleanup and untold amounts of stress searching for workarounds. Of course, your team simply may not have any answers at this time, but you are kept… In The Loop (sorry).
Reactive Approach: “Great! They confirmed that we will not be adding any new vendors, so we’re good to go! We’ll test things out one week before launch before we realize that we need to update help text, scope the integration, update our configuration, and -- you know what? Let’s just patch this up enough to get things working and plan to revamp for next year’s OE.”
I’ve had this reactive mindset for years. For me, the pain of having to “deal with it later” was never worth it. The scenario above means that you’d also need to rescind and reload, correct, or use a date after the OE event to get this through. Your alternative option would be to have bad data in Workday and rely on an integration to “sanitize” it. Let’s not even talk about the levels of MacGyver-level wizardry that you’d need to pull off to have this correctly flow out of payroll with your deductions and imputed income. All over a seemingly minor change.
Okay, I have the checklist from Community. Where do I start?
There’s no “right answer” here. You should be checking all of it. Every time. Remember, The Benefits SKU does not play well with retroactive configuration changes. This is your one shot to get benefits completely nailed down for (hopefully) the entirety of next year. With that said, I understand the need for quick wins to build momentum.
The things that I’ll check for first, if applicable (again, you should always be thorough and hit every line item):
Granted, you’ll still have about 15 more things to review, but getting these items out of the way should help you feel less overwhelmed. Once you’re in a rhythm, it should be smooth sailing. If not, you’ll have a bit of work to do to clean things up, but at least you caught it before going live, right?
Open Enrollment Checklist
| Tasks |
|---|
| Confirm any net new plans or vendor changes. |
| Get the ball rolling ASAP on any potential new integrations or updates. |
| Closeout/Deny expired EOI events (after getting confirmation of course). |
| Update your benefit event/OE coverage types. |
| Update providers. |
| Update or add plans. |
| Enter effective-dated rate changes and contribution maximums. |
| Update or add your plan year definition for next year. |
| Check your cross-plan prerequisites and rules. |
| Update help text and enrollment instructions. |
| Review your enrollment event rules/EOI setup (even if nothing changed). |
| Finalize expired open benefit events (yep, there’s a task for this). |
| Check your payroll deduction (if using Workday Payroll) to check for any customer-defined limits. |
| Extend your scheduled processes (integrations, passive events, finalization of open events). |
Is anything worth checking out with this release?
For Workday Benefits? There sure are – I’ll list out a few of my favorites. I would highly suggest that you give these ideas a spin or run them by your benefits functional area to get an idea of what should be “in” for this year’s cycle.
| Feature Name | Contact | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Dependent Verification | A long-awaited solution for verifying dependents natively in Workday. | https://community.workday.com/node/1171162 |
| Coverage Begin Date Override | Finally, you can override the coverage begin date on a health care plan election without needing to add new event types/enrollment rules. | https://community.workday.com/node/1170922 |
| Custom Validations for Benefits Enrollment | Please check out this video. I’m sure just about everyone has a use case for something. No more having to rely on help text or BP conditions (in most cases)! | https://community.workday.com/node/1169855 |
Alright. Fine. I did it. We configured it. We tested it. I’m tired. We have production signoff. There were a few things that I had to set up, but at least we’ll be smooth going forward. What now?
Awesome! Now that we have OE covered, it’s time to move on to year-end payroll, the annual compensation review, year-end performance, calibration/9-Box, reconciliations, budget forecasting, resource planning, potential assessments, succession planning, new release functionality rollouts (2023R2 seems pretty loaded with quick wins on the HCM side), and the 50 other backlog items that you have going on!
Yes, it’s time. The dreaded Fourth Quarter approaches. If you need help converting a painful, stressful, and reactive job into a moderately stressful (come on, I’m not going to lie here), scalable, and productive line of business, then Stormloop is here to help you out – specifically to however your organization handles Workday.
Contact us at [email protected] to learn more.
Follow Stormloop here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stormloop-technologies-llc
Written by: Victor Edmonds
Follow Victor here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-edmonds/
