Meeting the needs of any workforce can be a challenge where employees now rightfully expect a more personalised benefits experience.
On a global scale, this can be even trickier.
There are a ton of different challenges that come with introducing benefits globally.
Here, we’ve picked out 3 of the most common challenges and looked at how global benefits tech can help solve them.
Challenge 1: Meeting the varied needs of staff in different regions
With a global team comes different cultures, needs, laws, regulations, languages and so on.
As an example, holiday buying and selling schemes may be more or less popular in regions where statutory annual leave entitlement is higher or lower.
Schemes like the Bike Scheme often prove popular for staff based in busy cities like London or New York and may be less popular in other areas.
It can all get quite tricky and complicated offering benefits to employees globally. Just meeting local needs and regulations can be a challenge.
How tech can help benefits meet local needs
With a centralised employee benefits platform, HR and employees already benefit from a ton of things like easier access to employee benefits and reduced admin.
On a global level, a platform can help show different benefits to different groups of employees depending on which region they’re in to help create a more tailored benefits experience.
It gets even more personalised when you throw global flexible benefits into the mix too.
Global flexible benefits tech helps employees in different regions create a more tailored and personalised benefits experience, helping them make the most of the benefits that suit them and their families the most.
With a platform, HR can also get real-time reporting on how staff are interacting with benefits and communications in different countries.
All this helps HR reduce admin and simultaneously create a better and more personalised benefits experience for staff on a global level with minimal fuss.
Challenge 2: Providing global mental wellbeing support
Mental wellbeing has been high on the agenda for HR and businesses for a while and will always remain a highly important topic.
This has particularly been the case for companies with employees based in or near the conflict in Ukraine in 2022, but also on a wider level with inflation and cost of living increases, for example.
Many businesses are looking for ways to support their global teams with their mental wellbeing, making mental wellbeing support much more easily accessible.
How tech helps deliver mental wellbeing support on a global scale
Many businesses are using their global employee benefits platforms to provide mental wellbeing support to employees.
Benefits like the EAP and mental wellbeing libraries and resources can be provided quickly and easily with global benefits tech.
Global benefits platforms make these resources much more easily accessible for staff globally too.
HR can easily update policies hosted on their global platform including things like increased compassionate leave, which many companies have offered to staff affected by the war in Ukraine.
Global benefits technology can help overcome language translation hurdles too to help implement mental wellbeing benefits quickly and effectively on a global scale.
Challenge 3: Benchmarking global benefits effectively
Measuring the effectiveness of benefits can be tricky even on a national level.
But measures like scheme take-up and engagement with benefits can tell a whole different story in one country compared to another.
Ultimately, what matters is that employees feel supported by their benefits package and that their benefits make a real difference to their lives.
However, metrics like take-up can help HR decide whether benefits are popular and whether they are ultimately supporting employees effectively.
As mentioned though, some benefits are more popular in some regions than others.
That’s why when measuring the effectiveness of benefits, it’s important to benchmark locally rather than compare scheme take-up to other countries.
For example, how does the percentage take-up of your Bike Scheme in one region, say London, compare to the average take-up for other employers in London?
If you find your take-up is low in London compared to other employers in the area, it could mean you need to communicate the scheme to employees more effectively, rather than simply the scheme is unpopular, for example.
How global benefits tech can help with local benchmarking
A global benefits provider can help provide the local benchmarking data needed to understand how effective your benefits are on a local level.
They’ll pull this data through from other businesses that run global platforms with them and any other data to help provide accurate, real-time insights on how your benefits are performing on a local level compared to other businesses in that area.
You can then work with your global benefits provider to optimise benefits for different regions.
This data is crucial in deciding whether to introduce or remove benefits in different regions or whether to spend time communicating benefits more often in certain areas to improve scheme take-up.
All this helps create a more effective global benefits offering that really supports and speaks to employees and their families on a global level.