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Can HR Really Deliver Consistent Benefits Globally?
06 February 2024 Health and Wellbeing
Story by
James Carrick International Senior Manager, Engage Health Group
James Carrick, International Senior Manager, Engage Health Group examines the challenge of delivering the best in benefits for a worldwide workforce and highlights how to put together a strategic package that works.
Global workforces bring huge benefits to employers, allowing them to increase their talent pool and gain access to new markets. However, they also add a layer of complexity for HR teams striving to deliver employee benefits.
Some of the challenges faced by HR teams include:
- Managing cultural and linguistic differences
- Delivering consistent benefits across a global workforce
- Understanding when to opt for separate local schemes versus single global policies
- Successfully communicating what benefits are on offer and making them accessible
Every international employer needs to overcome these obstacles to provide global teams with the support they need and fulfil employer duty of care to every worker, however far away they may be from the HR base of operations.
Getting it right can play a key role in recruitment and retention efforts, while driving productivity in the workplace.
Be consistent, to a point
Consistency is a huge challenge when dealing with staff located in multiple countries. You’ll encounter differences in cultural expectations, legal requirements, and in the way healthcare systems work.
For example, in countries like the US, free state healthcare is not the norm and many companies will be legally obliged to provide health insurance to their employees. Yet, in the UK, no such statutory pressure exists.
With this in mind, it stands to reason that a global employee benefits policy can only be consistent to a point. There needs to be an element of flexibility to adjust to the specific requirements of different countries. National holidays are one obvious area where cultural differences affect the benefits offered to employees in different countries.
Nonetheless, consistency is important. There should be a general match-up in the health, wellbeing and financial perks offered around the world. An employer can only claim to be fulfilling its duty of care if it does so for every employee in every country.
One way of achieving this is through implementing ‘universal’ policies such as International Health Insurance, International Life Insurance and International Employee Assistance Programmes (iEAPs). Such policies help ensure you have a consistent approach to employee benefits, as opposed to a patchwork of nation-specific policies.
It’s worth exploring this in more detail…
Choose between global and local schemes
When it comes to health insurance, life insurance and income protection policies; HR teams have a choice between setting up single policies in each country or arranging single umbrella schemes covering multiple countries.
It’s not always clear-cut which option is best:
- Global solutions: Typically work best with a workforce spread across many different countries, ensuring all members are fully covered.
- Local solutions: Often work best for a high concentration of staff in one of two locations.
Note: there are mandatory obligations in various countries and areas such as the UAE, the Netherlands, Australia, or Switzerland where you must have locally compliant solutions.
Alongside legal compliance, you’ll also want to consider price. As is so often the case with insurance, a straightforward cost comparison is difficult to come by.
For example, International Health Insurance is expensive but the cost implication can be offset by its ease of administration compared to managing multiple one-country policies. Plus, it also comes laden with extra features that you wouldn’t otherwise receive.
Source local expertise
A good international employee benefits consultant, like Engage Health Group, will have experts located in different countries to ensure you get access to local expertise as and when needed. They can provide unbiased advice to help you better look after employees in specific countries.
At the same time, it’s important to understand the needs and wants of your employees too. Whether you have a large workforce in one country, or just one or two remote workers, it’s important to have an ongoing dialogue – and be aware of any cultural differences that need to be bridged. Cross-cultural training can be a really useful tool here as it’s specifically designed to help ease communication across different cultures. It’s easy to forget just how vast cultural differences can be!
The complexity of hiring and managing workforces abroad leads many companies to outsource the responsibility to Employer of Record services (EoRs) who take on the legal responsibility of looking after employees.
Pull it together with tech
It may be an obvious point, but it’s worth reiterating. The use of digital technology for delivering global employee benefits is a vital component in making a global benefits scheme viable. Try to consolidate everything under one global platform as much as possible and ensure it can sync with payroll software too.
Get it right and you can:
- Unify employee benefits for staff
- Enable improved communication
- Track employee satisfaction and benefits usage
- Ensure employees can easily access their benefits and make use of them
- Provide added extras, such as CBT tools, wellness prompts, dietary advice and much more
Sourcing the right benefits platforms can help reduce the burden on HR teams by making its management much easier, while also enabling employees to help themselves to the services they need most, whenever they need them.
Strive for consistent benefits around the globe
While 100 per cent consistency is probably not possible when deploying international employee benefits (by the time you’ve adjusted benefits to different cultural expectations and statutory requirements; you will naturally see some variation). Nonetheless, they would ideally have the same level of support for physical, mental and financial wellbeing.
The international employee benefits market is complicated to navigate, which is why many businesses and HR teams turn to employee benefits consultants with specialist international expertise. Engage Health Group has a broker network spanning 73 countries enabling us to provide clients with market-leading advice on managing health and protection policies.