Our top three Workday Open Enrollment tips
Open Enrollment is one of the busiest times of the year for any organization. From waiting on approvals, managing configuration, planning communication and building integrations, it can be an exceptionally time-consuming and resource-draining exercise.
What is open enrollment in Workday?
Open enrollment is when a company’s employees can opt-in to or change the benefits available to them via Workday, such as various insurance policies like health or dental, as well as legal or financial services. Often lasting for a few weeks, most companies choose November for open enrollment, in time for the new calendar year beginning January 1st.
With so much going on, our experts share their top tips and tricks to make it easy and seamless for you and your teams to roll out Workday Open Enrollment:
1. Final end-to-end testing
Open Enrollment goes live this month, and those final tests are key to ensure that before you send everything out to the whole company you have found and fixed any errors. Even down to updating the Help Screens and ensuring any user guide links are correct and embedded in the Open Enrollment screens.
There will be some enrollments that don’t need employee’s input as they will just roll over, all these active and passive benefit elections need to be considered.
Work closely with your integrations teams to ensure testing includes validating deductions for the new plan year and data on benefit integration files to benefit suppliers.
2. Training for your support functions
Often in Open Enrollment, they key focus is training your end users to make sure employees can easily sign-up and understand their benefit options. It’s equally important to train your Workday support staff such as your Benefit Administrators.
It’s vital to bring your people with you on the journey so they can be effective after the enrollment window finishes and it’s a race to submit all elections by the New Year.
Key to enabling your Benefit Administrators to test and train freely across Sandbox and your non-production tenants is considering data privacy as part of this.
Often during enrollment, all of an employee’s sensitive data is available and as there are more support staff in this period testing and training in these tenants, the need for data privacy controls is heightened. A tool such as data masking can enable Benefit Administrators to have access to proxy for elevated access for training and testing but not see any of the sensitive data that this elevated access gives them.
3. Taking key learnings from the open enrollment data
Open Enrollment will tell you so much about your employees likes and dislikes and how they are feeling towards your benefits package. Workday is a fantastic tool for collecting data to get a sense check on their opt in rates and therefore how popular your offerings are. A Health and Wellbeing program can also support you in keeping in touch with how your employees are feeling and if there are any areas across mental and physical health you need to focus on next year.
You can use this data to inform key next steps for how you approach communications to your employees in the next year. Plus any key benefits you need to focus on for the next auto enrollment to make it even more successful and your company even more competitive in its market.