Read time: 8 minutes
“I’ve been looking forward to this ALL YEAR!!”…
…said no Benefits Admin ever 😑
You’ve been in the trenches — drafting language for communications, configuring benefit plans, and testing deduction dates.
Regardless of your level of prep, it’s nearing go time! You feel (mostly) ready!
Until someone asks, “How long do we have between close and finalize?” …wait, huh? 😧
What do you mean closing OE doesn’t submit the elections? You close and finalize multiple times?
Well, you just fold it in.
In your early days, this can be a big point of confusion 🥴
So in this issue, we help you get crystal clear on managing OE, from initiate to close to finalize, plus the 2024R1 reopen feature, with all its lovely nuance.
More from OE season
Tips for a well-built Workday Open Enrollment - The prep that keeps your ticket queue manageable, and the 4 mistakes that'll have you scrambling.
Your Workday Open Enrollment launch checklist - The bare necessities of what to check and test, from Benefit Plans to payroll.
📍(You’re here) Managing Workday Open Enrollment while it's live - How to initiate, close, finalize, reopen... and why it feels like OE never ends!
Open the floodgates: how to initiate OE
Initiating (aka “launching”) Open Enrollment is the most straightforward step of the bunch. The task Initiate Open Enrollment pushes the OE benefit event out to each of your eligible employees’ inboxes. You can launch it in real time or schedule it for later.
To run now or run once in the future …
If you do want OE to run at a point in the future, run the task ahead of time and select “Run Once in the Future” instead of “Run Now.”
This can be especially helpful for two reasons:
You want OE to be available for your whole population right when they log in, even if they span different time zones — no crack of dawn alarm for you! 🤪
You want to skip working up the courage to launch, which usually looks like hovering over the mousepad for 3 min while going through all of the configuration in your head yet again before hitting submit 😅
The initiating inputs
First, Workday gives you one last warning to check your Benefit Group Audit and make sure your pay period schedule is built out for the impacted Benefit Groups.
Then, you make your input selections:
This is where the good stuff lives.
Free builds awareness. Premium fills all the gaps 🦄
Below:
How to run OE from your mission control board: the Open Enrollment Status Report
Closing vs. finalizing (and correcting vs. reopening)
How to plan your close-and-finalize cadence around parallel life events
The 2024R1 reopen feature, plus the tip that keeps it from looping foreverrrr
Plus everything else in Premium:
⭐️ Release Ratings & Reviews
🔐 Full archive access
🗳️ A say in what gets built
