How Automation and Analytics Can Improve Your Workday® Open Enrollment

We hope by this time you have recovered from the stress of last year’s open enrollment, and are ready to prepare for the next one. Early preparation can help you create a stress-free open enrollment process.

Workday® gives you the foundation for successful enrollment its user-friendly interface, easy integration with benefits providers, and direct connection with your talent management processes. You can build on that foundation to make your benefits program a driver of employee engagement and productivity. We have a couple of suggestions to put you on the right path.

Complete Your Benefits Automation

Our first suggestion is about eliminating any leftover paper processes. If you still have any manual processes in your benefits enrollment, we encourage you to automate them now. A little extra effort now will pay off again and again, long after new efficiencies pay back the cost.

A 50% gain in efficiency is reason enough to automate, but the impact on the organization is many times greater.

How you present benefits affect how people perceive your organization. Every time employees must switch to a different process, it creates doubt in their minds. Completing the entire process in one easy-to-use application creates a strong message of service and commitment to employees.

Use Business Intelligence to Understand Employee Needs and Concerns

Our second suggestion involves Marketing. Workday® reporting provides a wealth of information about the benefits process, costs, and efficiency. What it does not provide is business intelligence to understand the end-user in the way Marketing knows customers.

Integrate Business Intelligence and Analytics

Workday® Studio makes it easy for your support team to integrate open source business intelligence tools with your reporting. Many customers create user-friendly visualizations using Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), Actuate Analytics and Reporting, and other cost-effective open source platforms.

You can apply these platforms to understand employee behavior in the same way Marketing understands buying behavior. They enable you to gather the information that would otherwise be a labor-intensive, expensive endeavor. Here are sample questions that come to mind:

• At what point do users abandon the process and look for help and why?
• Which employee do segments take advantage of wellness programs and what motivates them?
• How does your benefits program motivate people in the recruiting pipeline?

Use Feedback Tools

If your organization doesn’t have social collaboration tools, we recommend you get started right away. Many powerful yet cost-effective tools are coming on the market, including Slack, Atlassian, and Microsoft Teams. These platforms enable you to set up two-way communication that gives you feedback that would otherwise not reach you. You can quickly set up surveys and anonymous comments, then use your analytics platform to develop intelligence from both structured and unstructured data.

Employees are Customers

The success of your benefits program depends on great design, but even more on how effectively you connect with your customer, the employee. Upping your analytics and communications will help make your benefits program the productivity tool is it meant to be.

Pixentia is a full-service technology company dedicated to helping clients solve business problems, improve the capability of their people, and achieve better results.