Although every multinational organization is unique, most face similar challenges managing their global benefits and total reward programs. The solution lies in adopting a global-but-local approach.
Today, the only way to administer employee benefits globally is through the implementation of a global benefits and total rewards platform. These platforms establish uniformity, reduce administration by streamlining processes, create greater accessibility for employees, and increase benefits participation by enabling the digital enrolment into benefits.
But how do you choose a benefits provider that can deliver globally?
1. Experience Is Everything
If you were recruiting for a role that required driving, you wouldn’t hire someone without a driver’s license or driving experience. The same logic applies to choosing a benefits platform provider that can deliver benefits globally.
Whether it’s a milk allowance in Botswana, airport business lounge passes in Russia, tuition reimbursement benefits throughout South America, or flexible benefits plans in Germany, choose a benefits provider with knowledge and experience administering complex benefits programs across the globe.
Want to see what other unique benefits are being offered and administered around the world? Don’t miss our blog post.
2. Think local, act global
When a global organization makes the decision to offer specific benefits across the board and across borders, to be effective, the benefits need to be localized in each country using local suppliers. But wouldn’t this be an administrative nightmare, you ask? Not with the right benefits provider.
When choosing a global benefits provider, the whole idea is that even when using local suppliers, all administration, including taxes and payments, is managed from a single platform located, for example, at head office.
Using an example from a previous post about managing a global yet personalized wellbeing strategy, it can be helpful to think of the following:
Let’s say that your organization makes a global decision to offer wellness benefits to every employee in each country that you operate. The wellness benefits offered in each country are then localized based on the local market, and fulfillment is made through local suppliers and vendors.
3. Make benefits accessible and enrolments digital
Although most organizations understand the importance of employee benefits, the problem many face is low participation rates. In most cases, it’s not that the benefits are not attractive, but rather access is restricted, and the benefit enrolment process is convoluted.
Today, we use our smartphones for everything, be it sending e-mails, updating our social media, taking photos, streaming music, or ordering food. As a result, today’s leading organizations understand the importance of adopting a mobile-native mindset. In brief, if you want to increase benefits participation, you need to make benefits easily accessible. What better way to give employees access to their benefits than on the device that’s always with them?
By choosing a global benefits provider with its own app, employees everywhere can conveniently access their benefits information and enroll in benefits digitally from the palm of their hand, anywhere, anytime. Additionally, for blue-collar workers who are often without access to a work computer or intranet, digital benefits enrolment through an employee app is a must.
Read three reasons why we believe your company needs an employee app.
4. Seamless integration
Another important thing to consider when choosing a benefits provider that can deliver globally is making sure that their platform can integrate with your existing systems and applications.
Make sure that your new global benefits and total rewards platform allows for the setup of APIs. This enables existing systems, such as payroll, to be integrated and allows multiple applications to “talk” to each other while being managed from a single source.
After all, the process of integrating systems should lead to greater automation and reduce administration — not create additional work.
5. Global overview
With a global-but-local mindset, reward and HR professionals and platform administrators should choose a benefits provider that offers a single overview of an organization’s entire workforce, and enables them to manage their global benefits in one place.
For global organizations, being able to see which benefits are performing and in which countries, from a single source, is essential. As is the ability to see the costs and spending on benefits and pensions from around the world, including supplier costs and prices.
A global dashboard can assist reward with strategic benchmarking, custom analysis, and reporting so that decisions around employee benefits and reward strategies can be made on actual data, not estimates.
Learn more about global benefits administration here.
