Employee Benefits, Global
Spotlight on Spain: A guide to implementing employee benefits technology
04-08-2023
It’s crucial to find a benefits and technology provider who understands the local nuances of each country you operate in, without neglecting the importance of delivering a unified employee experience across all your territories. At Benefex, we pride ourselves on our global expertise and local knowledge, so it doesn’t matter whether you have one employee on an oil rig in the middle of the pacific, or 20,000 employees in an office in Hong Kong. They all receive the same personalised service, intuitive technology, and exceptional employee experience.
For now, let’s focus on Spain…
Overview of Spanish benefits
Spain sits towards the complex end of what we call the simple to complex scale. At Benefex, we use a scale that identifies a location’s benefits requirements, based on the expectations and complexity of that local benefits market and employee populations. For example, the UK or USA would usually be on the complex end of the scale, with countries such as those in the Nordics closer to the simple end.
Typically in Spain we see a mix of core benefits including:
- Pension
- Health cover (with selection options for employees)
- Life and accident insurance
- Disability cover
- Employee Assistance Programmes.
In the context of benefits globally, when talking about ‘flexible benefits’ this refers to benefits with some choice and the ability to upgrade cover level on health cover or increased pension contributions – as opposed to flexible benefits in more complex countries, like the UK, which refers to a wide range of optional benefits
In addition to these core benefits, Spanish employees will have some choice of allowances and voluntary benefits including childcare vouchers, lunch vouchers and a transport/commuter allowance. All of these benefits, from core to voluntary, can be managed via OneHub | Benefits.
What does a typical OneHub offering in Spain look like?
The benefits solution for Spain is typically a combination of read-only and transactional benefits. The latter includes healthcare cover which allows employees to select the level of cover they need for their lifestyle, as well as selecting pension contributions to fit their circumstances.
We understand that navigating health insurance can be complex at the best of times, and are used to working with customers’ local broking or admin teams to manage health insurance, understand the requirements, and ensure the process is not overcomplicated for employees.
Focussing on lunch and childcare vouchers, Benefex can work with the providers to ensure they receive the right data so employees can select their requirements in one place, without the need to navigate between separate logins.
Offering an online benefits platform in an employee’s native language is crucial to delivering a streamlined employee experience. OneHub offers the entire platform, from FAQ pages right through to the benefits selection process, all in the local language of your choice – empowering employees to understand pension details or healthcare coverage, and make informed decisions.
The success story
Through implementing a benefits platform in Spain, our customers have collated all the benefits information in one place for the first time. One customer, a global web travel brand, reduced the need for multiple logins for the first time, and saw their benefits engagement skyrocket as a result. Another customer, a leading business software company, noticed a significant drop in benefits-related queries, and across our portfolio customers have seen a 65% reduction in queries coming into their HR teams.
What’s more, by hosting the administration of healthcare plan, pension and voluntary benefits via OneHub, customers have a huge reduction in admin – for one customer, this removal of manually managing these choices allowed them to offer holiday purchase, which they had previously been unable to do before (despite requests from their employees). It paid off, with almost a third of their employees selecting this benefit in year one!
We’d love to talk to you and answer any of your questions about hosting benefits for your Spanish employees through OneHub, just get in touch!
Paul Andrews
Paul joined Benefex from Mercer in 2019 with a wealth of international benefits experience, having worked with a large number of high-profile, multinational clients to review their approach to global talent and reward. He leads Benefex’s global benefits delivery team and he’s doing an excellent job of it, if we may say so ourselves. He is skilled in international risk assessment and management, legislative compliance, trend research, cross-border claims, and customer relationship management. AND, he can speak fluent French, mais oui!
04-08-2023
