How global benefits analytics can demonstrate success

Benefits data presents an immense opportunity to deliver better performance – here’s five ways to prove return on investment and the value of benefits technology.

HR and reward teams often struggle to get the data they need to measure whether their benefits strategy is working.

In fact, 76% of organisations can’t show ROI on benefits investment and 45% can’t analyse their total spend on benefits.

Common challenges include tight budgets, fragmented and disparate data, old technology, and lack of resources, partners and technology vendors. Overcoming these challenges is crucial.

Benefits data presents an immense opportunity to deliver better performance for organisations and employees: you can continue to improve employee engagement, take learnings that are applicable for other regions and even reduce benefit costs.

And, importantly, you can prove ROI and easily communicate the value of the tech (and the strategy) to the relevant stakeholders.

Here are five ways global benefits analytics can help to demonstrate and drive success:

1. Costs and benchmarking

Some global organisations without a unifying platform struggle to estimate global benefits spend to the nearest £/$/€m. To prove ROI, you need to be able to deliver a clear view of global costs for benefit provision by business, market, benefit type and employee demographic.

Being able to draw on your provider’s global data lake to provide cost, engagement and activity benchmarking helps you see where you stand compared with other global organisations.

Perhaps there are opportunities to boost your offering with certain benefits to be more competitive. Or perhaps you’re overspending compared with the rest of the market. These insights can help you become market leading in every location.

2. Coverage and eligibility

You want to make sure that you’re providing the right cover, to the right people, in the right markets. Your global benefits platform should enable you to apply eligibility rules per person/per market and ensure that employees have the right access to benefits at the right cover level/options.

3. Risk

Your benefits platform should be able to give you a detailed understanding of the risks that are held by the business around the world within any specific risk category (life, disability, health, etc).

Incorporating data from third-party providers in risk analysis that show how employees are using supplementary services also offers invaluable insights into employee wellbeing within the business.

4. Modelling

Running data models and hypothesis based on platform data across employee benefits, activity, engagement, usage and cost allows you to understand the programme’s trajectory and adjust your strategy.

It’s invaluable for budgeting as you can forecast benefits spend in minutes.

For example, if the company is looking to increase headcount by 5% in a particular country, you can see how that would affect benefits spend.

Or, if your private medical Insurance costs are due to increase by 11%, you can apply that to the appropriate markets and forecast how that will hit the bottom line.

5. Benefits engagement

Reward leaders are moving beyond the annual benefits enrolment stats as the defining KPIs for benefits engagement, elevating employee benefits out of the once-a-year selection window and turning them into an everyday resource for employees and an everyday part of the EVP for employers.

You can also start to correlate benefits engagement with other employee metrics – for example, reduced employee attrition and increased engagement and retention.

Getting global benefits analytics right

Leveraging global benefits analytics will help you see the true impact of your scheme, drive better outcomes for both employees and the business and ultimately prove the ROI of your benefits investment.

It’s important to remember, though, that benefits success will look different in different regions. For sites at the simpler end of the scale, you would expect logins to be lower than a region with a transactional site and lots of flexible benefits options.

Establishing goals from the start will help you stay on track. Your benefits provider will be able to share benchmarks in terms of what engagement they’d expect to see in a particular country.

Whether you’re rolling out benefits tech for the first time or expanding into new territories, Benefex’s guide to global benefits tech will help see you to success.