Before and during your Annual Enrollment, there are a variety of things you can do to prepare your employees so they are ready and informed throughout the process.

While the Open Enrollment event window is open, you can monitor the event progress and see who has completed the event, who is in process, and who has not gone in yet.

We offer a video training for this topic on Arcoro Learning.

Planning Employee Communication

To help you plan out your communications with your employees, we have listed some examples below that may help. We also have a dedicated article that provides communication timelines and email templates.

• Start Early and Plan Ahead
  • Lead Time
  • Key Dates
  • Prerequisities
• Multiple Communication Channels
  • Company Intranet
  • Emails
  • SMS Notifications
  • Meetings/Webinars
• Clear and Concise Messages
  • Avoid "TLDR"
  • Tailored and Targeted
  • Step-by-Step Guides
• Resources & Documentation
  • Benefit Guides
  • FAQs
  • Key Contacts
  • Additional Support
• Feedback
  • Establish Feedback Channels

Update Employee Portal

Before starting and during the annual enrollment, it can help Administrators to:

• Add Annual Enrollment Announcements to the Employee Homepage by configuring the employee portal text.

  

• Update company links with the portal links tab of employee portal management.

  

• Upload new or replacement benefit documents through the documents tab of employee portal management.

  

Employee Portal Settings

1. Expand 'Setup' and click Setup Properties from the menu.

   

2. Enable the following settings if desired for your organization.
   • Enable "Navigate employee portal users directly into Open Enrollment/New Hire Event after logging in for first time (must have active Event Window)".
   • Enable "Close "Open Enrollment/New Hire" window once Even is completed."

   

Status Summary

The "Status Summary" report for events allows administrators to view an overview of employees' overall status during an event, such as "Open Enrollment". 

1. Expand Reports, expand Events, and click Status Summary.

   

2. Click the filter icon towards the top right. Select the “Open Enrollment” event from the dropdown menu and enter the Start and End dates of the event. Click Refresh Results.

   

3. This will give you categorized results summarizing "Event Started but Not Completed", "Event Completed", and "Event Not Started". The report information for a status can be exported to PDF or Excel by clicking the associated icons to the right.

   

4. Clicking the number under the "Count" column will open a new tab/window to view a list of the employees within the status count. For our example below, we are viewing employees who have not started the event. 
   • If you are viewing a list of employees who have not started the event and do not want them to start the event, select them with the checkbox to the right and click Delete Selected Records.
   • If the enrollment window should be deleted from all employees, you can select all of the employees with the checkbox at the top of the column and click Delete All Enrollment Windows.
   • The "Activation Date" and "Deactivation Date" fields can be used to quickly update when an event start and/or ends for an employee. If it should apply to all employees, click the red down arrow to apply the date to all employees below. Click Save to apply your changes.
   

5. Click the Envelope Icon to open a new tab/window and easily communicate via email with these specific groups, such as employees who have not started the event. Enter the email subject and body, then click Send Reminder. 

   

Canceling Previous Events

Another important thing to remember when going live with an event on the employee portal is that the system ONLY allows ONE active event at a time. This means that if there is a prior event (New Hire, Address Change, etc) that was never canceled or completed, you will not be able to see the OE event until the prior one is canceled or completed. It is fairly common for employees will have “active” events that are no longer needed. As an admin, you can cancel these on behalf of the employee.

1. Expand Reports, expand Events, and click Started by not Completed Detail.

   

2. Select the events you wish to cancel using the checkbox to the right.

   

3. Click Cancel Selected Events from the Actions drop-down menu.

   

This way you can cancel events that are outdated in mass and your employees do not have to worry about not being able to see the Open Enrollment for the new year on their portal.