Benefits, Open Enrollment, and Year End....Oh My!

In the following article, Amber Styron, Intrinus Consulting’s Workday Benefits expert who has focused on Workday deployments for the past 8 years and has served as a Workday Benefits Product Lead, provides you with insights and tips on how to successfully manage the challenges of Open Enrollment as well as Year-End Processing.

It’s a Typical ”Workday®”… Benefits, Open Enrollment, Year End…Oh My!

Now is the time of year when you, as a benefits administrator, are probably finding yourself consumed with tough decisions regarding Open Enrollment, new benefits providers and plan offerings, updated benefits rates, and changing compliance and business reporting requirements. As you work through these business-critical decisions, your overarching goal is to ensure you’re selecting plans that are the richest in coverage at the most affordable costs for your employees and your business. Once you’ve made the right decisions, it’s time to make it all come together within Workday®!

Over the years, I’ve seen many clients stress and fret over having to roll out Open Enrollment for the first time in Workday®. Most of these clients had already moved to production and no longer had their Benefits Lead Consultant at their disposal to provide guidance and ensure they were following their year-end checklists, conducting thorough testing, and achieving expected results.

Whether you are one of these “first time around” clients or have “been there, done that” with Workday Open Enrollment, please read on for valuable information on how to relieve typical pain points, comprehensively plan required activities, and assist you in realizing Open Enrollment and Year-End Processing success!

Relieving Your Pain Points

Open Enrollment and Year End Processing in Workday® can sometimes come with a few “gotchas.” As you plan your activities and tasks, consider leveraging the following tips and tricks to mitigate your risks and relieve your pain points:

• New Benefits Plan offerings can be straightforward and easy to configure; however, if you’re planning to replace an existing vendor with a new vendor offering a similar benefit plan (e.g. life insurance), you will want to develop a detailed rollout plan. Be particularly cautious around your Evidence of Insurability (EOI) rules for Life Events and Open Enrollment to ensure they are configured properly in your Enrollment Event rule. EOI sometimes requires detailed configuration in Workday®; therefore, thorough planning and testing are required in order to achieve expected results. If you choose to utilize the Benefits Mapping feature, there are additional impacts to existing EOI approved flags to consider when changing to a new Benefit Coverage Type or Provider.

• Updating Benefits Plan Rates is another typically straightforward configuration task. You can even future date the Benefits Rates to take effect in the new plan year; however, clients that are changing their Benefits Rate Coverage Targets (e.g. from Employee + 1 to Employee + Family) or removing Coverage Targets that will no longer be used may encounter some confusion during updates as the Rate Table will initially automatically default to, and won’t easily allow you to remove, the Coverage Targets that are currently in use. The trick to accurately making these types of updates is to edit the Benefit Plan as of the effective date of your change (typically January 1st of the upcoming year). Scroll to the Benefit Groups, inactivate the specific Benefit Group that you need to remove or update with new Coverage Targets, and hit save. Select edit on the Benefit Plan again as of your effective date and add the Benefit Group back into your Rate Table, this time selecting only the Benefit Coverage Targets that apply. This may seem l like a bit of extra work; but the extra work enables you to accurately and reliably implement new Coverage Targets or inactivate current Coverage Targets that will not be used going forward.

• Period Schedules are managed as a Payroll task; however, in order to correctly calculate rates for Healthcare Spending Accounts (HSAs) and Flexible Spending Account (FSAs), you must remember to create Period Schedules for future Benefits Plan years. You’ll want to create these future year Period Schedules prior to testing to ensure your HSA and FSA rates are calculated accurately. If they are missing, you will experience issues during Open Enrollment Events testing. In fact, I recommend that you first review your Period Schedules setup when troubleshooting testing issues.

• Annual updates to Wellness data, Benefit Annual Rates (BAR), Custom Flags (e.g. Dependent Verification Flags), and other Benefits data need to be made prior to Open Enrollment testing and rollout. These data updates are best managed and maintained via EIBs (Enterprise Interface Builders) because this approach streamlines efforts for managing data integrity during Open Enrollment processing.

◦ Open Enrollment (OE) testing is key to your success for rolling out a seamless OE event. You will need to decide how you will manage existing open or stale events to prevent any OE event from being unexpectedly put on hold. You will also need to agree on the best process for offering Open Enrollment events to New Hires when their Benefits coverage doesn’t begin until after the new year. A recommended option is to select the “Exclude employees with Waiting Periods” checkbox on the Initiation step of the Open Enrollment Event business process. Please note that checking this checkbox will only exclude New Hires who are in a waiting period for ALL Benefit Coverage Types.

◦ EIB support can be provided to assist you with loading Wellness data, BAR data, Dependent Flags, etc.

Workday® 33 Benefits Enhancements:

• Mobile Benefits – This feature provides a more consistent experience between mobile applications and browser usage enabling employees to more independently and efficiently manage their Benefits enrollments while decreasing employee support costs. There is an opt-out feature that allows you to disable Mobile Benefits and continue to use WD 32 if you’re not ready to deploy the redesigned Open Enrollment workflow.

◦ This new feature will be automatically updated in your tenant. If you decide to roll out the enhanced version of Mobile Benefits, be sure to test thoroughly and update any associated training materials to make the mobile experience efficient and user friendly for your employees.

◦ Employees will now see that they have Open Enrollment events awaiting action under the Announcement section of the home page and then can take action directly from the home page by simply clicking the Benefits Enrollment link. Once an employee launches an event, the employee can make updated elections based on the lists on the redesigned summary page of all Benefit Coverage Types for which the employee is currently eligible and in which the employee is currently enrolled.

◦ Tobacco Usage Question – You can now provide more flexible and varied response options to the Tobacco Usage Question for employees and dependents. Leverage this functionality to configure more pinpointed responses and include instructional text for a more robust user experience.

◦ Dependents and Beneficiaries – You now have the ability to create new Dependents and Beneficiaries without linking to an existing Person Type. Additional configuration capabilities provide increased flexibility both within and outside of Open Enrollment events.

◦ For any new Workday enhancements it’s always best to consider any downstream impacts to functional changes. Please be sure to thoroughly test all functional changes before updating the Production tenant.

This article covered just a few of the Open Enrollment and Year-End Processing challenges with which Benefits Administrators, especially those new to Workday, seem to commonly struggle. Intrinus Consulting Partners has a team of experienced and skilled Consultants who can solve your business problems and support your needs. Please contact us today at ondemand@intrinusconsulting.com for additional information.

In the meantime, here are some additional recommended resources for you:

• Workday® Community

◦ Benefits Administrator Guide

◦ Workday® Open Enrollment Checklist

• Workday® Learning

References Workday Community

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Workday 33 Benefit Enhancements – Articles Beneficiaries and Dependents and Open Enrollment Redesign