The days leading up to open enrollment may sometimes feel like a whirlwind, but it doesn’t have to! Regardless of when your open enrollment season is, it’s never too early to start thinking about it and setting up your UKG Ready solution. Explore six steps your organization can take before enrollment opens so that when the time comes, your enrollment season goes as smoothly as possible.
Advise your employees to review and update their Account Contacts
Encouraging your employees to review and update their benefits-type contacts, including Beneficiaries and Dependents, ahead of open enrollment helps eliminate confusion (and emails to HR) during enrollment. Employees can do this by navigating to Menu > My Information > My Profileand scrolling down to the Account Contact widget. We recommend using our in-product communication tools to encourage your employees to review and update their contacts. For more information about our in-product communication tools,check out this blog.
Tip: Admins make sure your employee account contacts are mapped when pulling in dependents and beneficiaries’ settings are correct once the plans are updated. For more information on settings to review, check out our2024 Open Enrollment Preparation Guide.
Update existing Benefits Plans as needed
If your organization plans to updates to your existing benefits plans, there are a few key tasks to prioritize once you have the necessary information. You can update all existing plans by navigating to Menu > Profiles/Policies > Benefits > Plansand selecting the plan you wish to update.
As you go through your existing plans, remember you’ll need to update and/or verify the following:
- Plan rates
- Plan description and settings
- Comparison features
- Evidence of Insurability Requirements
Tip: We also recommend reviewing and verifying additional settings such as:
- Eligibility filters
- Custom forms
- Carrier Connectivity
- Waiting periods
Create new Benefit Plans as needed
If your organization is adding a new provider, has new eligibility requirements, or if there are many changes to your existing plan, this requires the creation of a new Benefit Plan. To create a new plan, navigate to Menu > Profiles/Policies > Benefits > Plansand select the Add New Plan button at the top of the screen. Before diving into the plan creation, you must complete a questionnaire and select the plan type, # Earning/Deduction, coverage type, and coverage level. Once filled out, you can start filling out specific details and building the new plan offering.
Tip: For more in-depth guidance on setting up new Benefit Plans, make sure to check out the Benefits Plan User Guide found in Online Documentation (Help > Online Documentation and search for Creating Benefit Plans)
Review your Benefit Profiles
After you’ve finished reviewing, updating, and/or creating new Benefit Plans, the next step is to ensure each Benefit Profile used is up-to-date and has the correct plans added. You can review your Benefit Profiles by navigating to Menu > Profiles/Policies > Benefits> Profile.Select the profile you wish to make sure is up to date there. Your plan dates are one of the most important settings to update in the Benefit Profile, so we recommend entering your open enrollment plan dates in each profile now.
Tip: We also recommend reviewing all verbiage that will show when employees enroll in plans. You can customize the screen messages in each profile to show throughout the enrollment process within the Benefits Profile. You can customize the following:
- ESS Screen Message
- ESS Enrollment Instructions Tab (Global) Message
- ESS Open Enrollment Instructions Tab Message
- ESS Enrollment Confirmation Selection
- ESS Enrollment Acknowledgement
For more information on what each message entails and where they will appear in the enrollment process, make sure to check out our2024 Open Enrollment Preparation Guide.
Ensure all employees have the correct Benefit Profile assigned to them
All your employees must have the correct Benefit Profile assigned to them. If they’re not in the correct profile, they won’t see the most up-to-date information, they may not have the correct plans available to them, or they could end up missing their open enrollment. You can review the Benefits Profiles assigned to your employees using the Employee Information report by navigating to Menu > My Team > Employee Informationand pulling in the Current Benefit Profile (Effective) column.
Tip: Want to easily see the data of how many employees are in a certain Benefit Profile? Considercreating a chart for an at-a-glance view of the breakdown.
Test Open Enrollment Process
It’s essential to test your open enrollment process before the enrollment period officially begins for your organization. By testing the process, you’ll be able to see the following processes are working properly:
- Plans available
- Plan details
- Messages and instructions
- Enrollment confirmation
You’ll be able to catch any mistakes that need to be fixed or updates that need to be made before enrollment opens. Simply create a test employee and assign them the benefits profile you want to test.
Tip: To ensure the open enrollment process doesn’t accidentally appear for all employees, clone the benefit profile you’d like to use, set the open enrollment dates for the testing time period, and assign that test profile to the test employee.
Make sure you are taking full advantage of all the resources UKG has to offer. Check out our 2024 Open Enrollment resources on ourSeasonal Resources page in the UKG Community. We’re also hosting a Best Practices in Open Enrollment webinar onThursday, September 12, at 11:00 a.m. ET.Join us and learn more about preparing your organization and employees for open enrollment.Register now!
The key to open enrollment is preparation. If you’re setting up for open enrollment and run into an issue that requires UKG assistance, make sure to submit support cases early.
