Read time: 6 Minutes

It’s HEEERREEE!

You’ve got pumpkin spice running through your veins and crispy leaves crunching under your feet.

That’s right, fall is here…🍂

Which means… so is Open Enrollment 🤪 (fondly abbreviated to OE)

You've likely got the big stuff down: your new plans, rates, and eligibility. But the things that deliver a truly well-built OE experience are the oft-overlooked ones!

So today, we’re digging into those: the prep that keeps your ticket queue manageable, and the four mistakes that'll have you scrambling if you miss them 😬

PSL in hand, of course 🎃

Your employees don't read the benefits guide in July.

They don't think about their HSA in March.

For about two weeks this fall, though, they're logged in, paying attention, and making decisions that affect their paycheck and their family's coverage for a whole year.

That's your window!

Whatever they experience within it determines whether OE (and thus Workday) feels clear or chaotic — for them and for you.

Your instructional content does most of that work. Here are the pieces to focus on.

You already know the questions are coming. Write the answers now, starting with your OE-specific Knowledge Articles, like:

When OE opens, employees can find their answers right there in Workday instead of submitting a ticket. That means you’re not answering the same questions over and over again while troubleshooting other high stakes items.

Next, revisit your evergreen articles so you can point people to those too, like adding a dependent.

There are maybe 2-3 times a year when your employees, all at once, willingly log into Workday. Open Enrollment is one of them. So don't waste that attention! Any time you can show your employees the self-service resources already at their fingertips, it means less admin burden for you and your back office in the long run.

Employees can't make good choices about plans they don't understand. Update your employee-facing benefit guides and plan summaries so what's new, what changed, and what it costs is crystal clear.

Bonus points if you’re doing regular presentations and office hours that cover this! Based on the live Q&A, you might get some inspiration for those Knowledge Articles above.

Next, take a look at your Enrollment Instruction language and e-signature text. Unless this is your first OE (bless you!) where you have to write the whole kit and kaboodle and run it through legal, these changes are usually minor year over year.

Having even a rough draft of your communications ahead of time beats starting from scratch when things ramp up.

If you’re already using Notification Designer, finalize your email templates, or even just your message templates now (there’s a newsletter about these in the premium 🦄archive).

You can use these templates to then send reminder messages to employees who have an “In Progress” or “Not Started” OE status once it’s open.

With these prepped in advance, sending these out with the task Send Open Enrollment Reminders will take just a few clicks instead of hours! Future you, with 27 other things on your to-do list, says thanks 😎

And lastly, are you running an Open Enrollment journey? This is a good way to get all your resources directly in front of your employees (documents, actions, external links), and build a report about who’s looking at what.

But talk about tiiiime consuming 😵‍💫 Content, character limits, and framing all take longer than anyone expects.

P.S. If you plan to create a Journey to just host external links to your sharepoint site, skip this and put those in the Benefits & Pay Hub instead.

So, here’s your checklist:

🔲 Enrollment Instruction language (required)
🔲 E-signature text (required)
🔲 Knowledge Articles within Workday Help or linked from elsewhere into your QuickLinks or Benefits & Pay Hub (optional, highly encouraged)
🔲 Employee facing benefit guides or updated benefit plan artifacts and summaries (optional, highly encouraged)
🔲 Notification email templates (optional, can be spruced up via Notification Designer)
🔲 Open Enrollment Journey (optional for Journey’s customers)

Is your OE going to completely fail if you don’t do all these things? No, no.

But these items are what take your OE from “whew! we got through it…” to “wow, that was a breeze this year!”, because all of this anticipation and care contributes to a well-built OE 😄

But if you’re at the point where you’re just trying to crawl across the finish…

There are so many aspects to OE. There’s simply no way to cover them in a single newsletter.

BUT, below are a few common mistakes to avoid during the OE cycle.

And, since it can’t alll be covered here, peruse Workday’s OE checklist to review each area that may impact your org. It’s no deep dive, but it’s enough to put each component on radar.

You could have your benefit plans, eligibility, and enrollment rules all set, but if the Benefit Plan (ya know, like your health care, insurance, spending accounts, HSAs, 401(k), etc.) isn’t included in your Benefit Plan Year, it still won’t be presented to your employees in the Open Enrollment event (or any event for that matter). Make sure they’re all in there!

☑️ Pro tip: If any of your benefit plans have a waiting period (say, 60 days from hire), your Benefit Plan Year needs to be configured at least 60 days before your current one ends. Miss that window and you’ll feel the twinge of regret with each event you have to reprocess that was initiated in that timeframe 😬

If you’re familiar with the Benefits module, you know that the Benefit Group is like your first layer of eligibility — it organizes your employee population into groups that have distinctive commonalities.

For example, many orgs have separate Benefit Groups for part-time vs. full-time folks who receive different benefit offerings. Other times, you might have different groups to accommodate differences in payroll frequencies, open enrollment processing timelines, or differing rates on a benefit plan.

To ensure there’s no Benefit Group eligibility overlap, run the delivered report Multiple Benefit Groups Audit.

🚨 Run it every single time. No exceptions 🚨

This is one of the rare times when you want a report to show up blank!

If an employee does populate, it confirms there’s overlap with your Benefit Group eligibility rules that needs to be corrected. No one can be eligible for more than one Benefit Group, or Workday won’t be able to differentiate or prioritize which group rules to follow.

If this is found after you’ve launched OE, you can’t update the eligibility rules in real time. You must:

This period is stressful enough, make it easy on yourself and run the checks beforehand!

To make your OE experience well-built, leverage available automation where you can!

Here are our favorites:

Cross-Plan Prerequisites work like a validation rule between plans. These function like a hard error, meaning they won’t let the employee submit their elections without the other plan elected, or conversely, if they try to select plans that are incompatible. e.g. Did an employee forget to enroll in the HSA required by their elected HDHP? Or try to select an HSA in combination with an FSA? This is how you enforce those relationships so that events are aligned with plan rules before submission.

Custom Validations can be put in place for more org specific requirements. These can be configured as a hard error or as a warning. e.g. For OE, if someone is switching from an FSA to an HSA and needs to spend down those funds by 12/31, give ‘em a soft warning to remind them!

Coordination of Events is your answer for the inevitable, ad hoc benefit events, like marriages, births, and new hires, that land between OE closing and your January 1 coverage start. Decide how those should behave (such as how many days they have to submit those elections), then review your enrollment event rules for deduction start dates and coverage start dates to ensure it’s all aligned to work with your OE event.

This might be one of the most overlooked!

If you’re pushing changes to vendor feeds this year: test, test, test. Your config can be flawless on the functional side and fall to bits on the integration file.

Save yourself the literal panic (critical illness plans, anyone? 😅) and send a test file to the vendor to get the “all clear!”.

Whether this is your first OE or your tenth, you’re now officially ahead of the overlooked stuff! Hellooo, smooth OE (and a stress-free holiday!).

Go ahead and trade in that PSL for a slice of pumpkin pie. You've earned it 😊

Happy OE season!

P.S. Want to know the bigger list of bare necessities to check and test before your OE launch? That deep dive lands on Premium 🦄 next.