As a rapidly growing international cloud computing business, Snowflake knew it could no longer rely on a manual benefits system and started to look for a digital alternative.
Jennifer Burnett, director, US benefits, says: “We wanted a platform that could be a single point of truth for employees; one place for them to go to for all the information they needed, whether it was benefits-specific or company policies or wellbeing programmes.”
From the organisation’s point of view, reducing the administrative burden associated with commonly asked questions was also a key aim.
Snowflake teamed up with Benefex, a Zellis company, to implement its global benefits system, which would be branded Snow Globe. The UK, which has 273 employees, was selected as a priority country and the package was rolled out in October 2021, ahead of similar implementations in India, the Netherlands, Poland, Japan, Australia and Germany.
Just over a year in, the organisation is seeing the benefits of a digital system. “We’re able to access real-time analytics to know how many people and dependents we are insuring in our programmes, so we can understand the cost globally, at any point in time,” says Burnett. “Previously, we only had access to point-in-time reporting, but we wanted to know what was doing well when, where, and with who.”
Importantly, the benefits team is also able to demonstrate the impact this has had. “We went through a scorecard process to deliver a picture of before and after Snow Globe,” says Burnett. “Teams looked at all the administrative processes beforehand; for example, how many clicks it took to complete a task. Once we went live, we looked at the effort involved to complete the same task to measure the level of digital transformation.”
This information has also been shared with Benefex with a view to being able to further automate administrative tasks.