Background

A large German multinational insurer with ongoing M&A activities was keen to take a more holistic approach to its global benefits and pensions strategy.

Following a number of acquisitions, the benefits offered to employees around the world had become extremely complex, with a variety of benefit programmes, legacy plans and special arrangements for different groups of employees within the same country. This made benefits difficult to manage, and their team did not have the oversight needed to develop and implement a meaningful global benefits strategy to support their employee value proposition (EVP).

We worked with them to develop and implement a new global benefits strategy and achieve their objectives:

• Become an employer of choice with a clear and unique total rewards strategy
• Reduce the administrative burden and costs associated with their benefit plans
• Establish clear and transparent rules for benefits and pension plans in regions, countries and entities within the group

Balancing global consistency with discretion at the country and HQ level, their new global benefits strategy would have three key elements:

1. Strategic framework with dedicated benefits pillars
2. Overall design principles
3. Global mandatory benefits

The new global benefits strategy also had to be aligned with the company’s purpose, brand and EVP, which was being developed in parallel.

Our approach

We structured the project in three key stages, as follows:

As part of this, we assessed and supported our client in prioritising their benefit plan impact on the EVP, ongoing costs and implementation effort.

We also reviewed the options for the roll-out of their new Global Benefits and Pensions Strategy — by country clusters, by benefit type, or a combined approach, prioritizing global benefits with the greatest impact on EVP and with country pilots to test overall implementation of benefits package.

We helped our client create a new Global Benefits and Pensions Strategy for a strongly shaped global benefits package, including selected benefits for each employee around the globe, aligning the new Global Benefits and Pensions Strategy with the client’s overall HR principles and EVP. We achieved their goal of becoming an employer of choice with a holistic remuneration strategy and employee welfare principles in every entity in each country. We also reduced their administrative burden and costs by more than 35%. Moreover, the project helped facilitate the development of a policy for IMEs (International Mobile Employees).