Spotlight on Brazil – A guide to implementing employee benefits technology

Having the right partner as your benefits and technology provider is essential to ensure that you have someone you can rely on to deliver an excellent employee experience to your employees wherever they are. They also need to have global experience and knowledge about the local benefits in your locations. At Benefex we link the two to help you on the journey to provide competitive benefits without the administrative burden that you would normally have to suffer. 

This month we venture to Latin America and Brazil. 

Overview of Brazilian benefits 

For those who have not looked in depth at Brazil, you could be forgiven for assuming that it would be relatively straightforward with limited choice. In reality, using OneHub has allowed our customers to widen the choice that they offer employees and at the same reduce their admin.  

Brazil has become a leading hub for start-ups and tech growth resulting in strong competition for talent. Salaries have increased and with this, the range of benefits and choices for employees. With that of course comes the challenge of managing those options and ensuring that the workload doesn’t outweigh the advantages of a competitive offering. 

Typically, the core benefits such as health insurance and pension have some flexibility. For example, adding dependants, sometimes at employee cost with the former or selecting contributions to the pension arrangement. 

In addition to the insured plans, we usually see several benefits such as meal vouchers, childcare aid and commuter allowances all managed via OneHub. 

As a further extra level of complexity, we have seen that benefits vary considerably across office locations and job grades. A platform can therefore display the relevant plan type as well as the relevant level of cover to employees avoiding any misunderstanding as well as showing the costs of any increase that employees are responsible for. 

Flexibility is key 

A very common benefit locally is the meal and food voucher scheme. Employees can select how they would like to receive their allowance either by meal voucher or food voucher. Using OneHub for this replaces paper or email processes saving you significant time especially as it can be changed monthly. Secondly, the choice is very clear for employees and helps them make the right decision efficiently and understand how it works.  

Typically, we have seen complicated health insurance plans with differing cover levels based on eligibility and the possibility for employees to increase cover and add dependants at their own cost.  To offer this level of flexibility and employee choice without submerging the HR team in administration and queries, there is a clear need for a platform solution. 

One area again with time savings for employees and HR is for the commuter allowance, often required by local bargain agreements. This process of directing employees to make their reimbursement choices online via OneHub makes a noticeable difference. 

Achieving bargaining 

The majority of our customers have looked towards a more complex solution in Brazil rather than a read-only approach. Often this is down to headcounts and a desire to relieve the local administration burden. With increasing flexibility and a growing number of benefits being added to the local package, Brazil has become one of the most in-demand locations in the region. 

The launch of a platform in Brazil can have significant rewards especially as the concept is relatively new. Customers have noted increased benefits awareness, engagement and favourable feedback from employees. It is however a big jump from paper-based forms to a platform and we would recommend a good communication and launch strategy to raise awareness and initial employees’ login stats. You may also need to consider the use of local language, especially around the more technical side of benefits to help employees better understand any complexities. 

If you would like to know more about Brazil and how to launch there with OneHub, just get in touch!