Insights from Global Reward Leaders: 8 reasons to implement global benefits technology

Adam Mason, Global EVP at Benefex, was joined by Karen Hall, Senior International Benefits Program Manager at Splunk Inc, and David Nugent, Group Director of Performance & Reward at Alter Domus to share learnings from rolling out global benefits technology. They discussed the drivers behind rolling out benefits tech globally, considerations for other reward leaders, and what they’re focusing on next. You can watch the full session on demand here. 

Here’s why they implemented OneHub in their organisations…  

8 drivers for rolling out a global benefits platform 

1. Banishing benefits administration for HR teams 

“The first [driver for benefits tech] was to automate and streamline benefits administration. So when you’re in a whole range of countries and you’ve got large populations, it’s very hard to manage the benefits of administration. The other one is paper forms are lost, they’re difficult to manage; there’s no analytics that you can generate from them. And then also the reporting just isn’t there, so if you need to report to your CEO on how many people are participating in a plan, it’s very difficult to do because you have to get the data brokers or providers and it can take time. So that was one of the key drivers in all of the companies that I’ve worked at.” – Karen Hall 

2. Levelling up the employee experience 

“Another driver was to enhance the employee experience. So having a high-tech company with a super low-tech benefit solution was something that wasn’t very appealing to leadership. And with the scale and diversity of some of the populations that we work with, it was very difficult to really maintain a positive employee experience [without a global platform] and make sure that people were being enrolled in the right plans and enrolled in a timely manner.” –  Karen Hall 

“We looked at the growth journey that we were on and determined that we wanted to improve our employee experience exponentially, and we needed a really good platform to do that through on the benefits site of things. And when I think back to our business case around investing in this area, it was very, very strong – on the hard, dollar side of things as well as on the soft experiential side. And I would say it’s paid back so far in spades – 100%, whether it’s through compliance and data security, whether it’s through the employee experience – it’s all returned to the business.” – David Nugent 

3. Delivering a globally consistent experience 

“The employee experience was the starting point. We very clearly, at a leadership level, wanted everybody to have the same experience everywhere. So in rolling out Benefex, for instance, what that meant was we were going to roll out the programme where we had 10 people as well as where we had 500 people. So that was really important for us. We selected Benefex because we needed more than just the basic benefits administration functionality; we wanted the total reward summaries; we wanted the recognition platform; we wanted access to the marketplace. Upgrading our benefits across the world, given that Alter Domus had grown from very small origins, meant that we had some countries around the world where our benefits weren’t great, frankly. But the administration overhead stood in the way of upgrading those benefits to a large extent – so we wanted to address this.” – David Nugent 

4. Giving people 24/7 access to their benefits 

“We had people that worked 24-7, but we didn’t have people that could support employees and answer their benefits questions on a 24-7 basis. So having the software available allowed people to get the benefits answers that they needed, when they needed them; the tool also allowed us to really reduce the amount of people we had supporting those populations.” – Karen Hall 

5. Delivering greater benefits flexibility 

“So when I joined Splunk two years ago, we were very much at the 50th percentile in terms of benefits and we weren’t going to offer anything above and beyond that because we didn’t really have the resources to support any additional administration. And with the rollout of the benefits platform, we’ve now been able to add more flexibility. So people can choose between medical plans, or between various allowances, or whether they want to flex up life insurance. Whereas before we had the platform in place we simply couldn’t support that kind of flexibility. It wouldn’t be sustainable to manage all the reporting to the vendors and to payroll and all of the internal financial reporting that we would need to do. So it really did allow us to expand what we’re offering to employees, as well as get their feedback on what they would like to see next, which has been great.” – Karen Hall 

6. Supporting global growth 

“This was one of the reasons that Splunk really wanted to move forward with a global benefit platform, because we were really preparing for a lot of growth. And then also we were looking to expand into new countries, but not increase our headcount for benefits or HR support – we’d be relying on the same team to support more countries and it just wasn’t going to be sustainable. So implementing the benefits platform would allow them to achieve those growth objectives.” – Karen Hall 

“How we grow is going to very much dictate how we further roll out the programme – whether we’re opening up new operations in a different country,  acquiring a business, or (as we often do) lifting out parts of other organisations. Having that kind of scalable plug-and-play solution is central to our playbook, if you like, on the acquisition front. Organically as well, we are just opening a new location somewhere and starting from the ground up, we’ve landed the principle that everybody’s going to have the same employee experience. We’re also looking at upgrading benefits options – from global benefits to benefits that appeal locally.” – David Nugent 

7. Driving digital transformation  

“We wanted to drive a more efficient HR function, where we could actually bring capacity into the team and we could upgrade or elevate the service that we were giving to the organisation. We wanted to harmonise our systems. So we had a lot of people in a lot of countries doing a lot of basic administration work and we wanted to get them out of it. And then coupled with that, of course, we had the employee experience as a real driver for us in terms of digitising the HR function and the employee experience. And the [digital transformation] journey that we went on started around that time in mid-2020, and we embarked on a lot of HR global rollouts. We did a global payroll consolidation project and various other projects along the way to arrive at benefits.” – David Nugent 

8. Ensuring compliance 

“Another key driver was operational compliance. When you’re in that many countries, it’s very difficult to stay on top of not just the design regulations, but also the operational regulations. So it’s one thing to have a pension plan in place that meets all the check boxes, but if it’s not operating correctly then you’re going to get into even more severe problems; if you’re not getting the pension contributions funded in a timely manner, or you’re not getting people auto-enrolled in the way that they should be. It’s those operational issues where global benefits can really fall apart. And if you don’t have people on the ground in each of those countries, it’s almost impossible to stay on top of. So, the beauty of a platform like OneHub is that it allows you to program that in, so you don’t have to worry about it. You can rest assured that the system is maintaining that operational compliance for you.” – Karen Hall 

Rolling out global benefits tech? 

If you’d like to learn more about how to build the business case for benefits tech, deliver on the great expectations of a global workforce and set your programme up for success, check out our report, Your guide to global benefits tech.