Insurable Employee Benefits are a costly endeavor, but are necessary to attract the right type of talent and retain excellent staff. 

However, the expense of offering corporate health insurance and more doesn’t have to be exacerbated by inefficiency. Whether decision-making is made at national and international levels, streamlining your operations and focusing on gathering data-led insights can help you to avoid spending extra.

Read on to understand the main challenges you’re likely facing when looking to optimize costs and see how you can better handle your Employee Benefits management.

What Employee Benefits costs are you managing?

If you’re a business operating in multiple locations, the worldwide Employee Benefits you’re managing are likely to include:

• Health insurance for company employees and their families
• Occupational pension plans, even cross-border plans
• Life and disability insurance
• Business travel insurance

Sourcing and overseeing these benefits can be incredibly complex, particularly when management is siloed across subsidiary departments. 

Having oversight across your group insurance for employees is almost impossible when dealing with multiple locales and internal teams. Worse yet, this lack of clarity is costing you money.

Areas in which you might be spending more than necessary include:

• Expensive policies that could be bought for less without compromising on quality 
• Overlapping policies 
• Gaps in coverage that can pose high liability risks, or policies that don’t match your needs, leading to out-of-pocket expenses
• Internal teams spending too much time managing Employee Benefits because of complexity and paperwork
• Missed deadlines for renewals that require extra legwork to resolve
• Time spent generating and understanding multiple reports by team members whose time is expensive

However, all is not lost. Your Employee Benefits management can be made more cost-efficient, but first you’ll need to examine where your team can get the best return on investment for their efforts.

What are the challenges for optimizing these Employee Benefits costs?

Every obstacle to smoothly handling insurable Employee Benefits costs you money. Whether it’s a lack of clarity, multinational operations, risk transfer or more, every opportunity missed for streamlining your operations is an expensive mistake.

Here are the main challenges we’ve seen businesses encounter when looking at optimizing their employee benefits costs: 

Lack of oversight

In a normal scenario, lacking centralized oversight over your company’s various teams is inefficient. However, when it comes to Employee Benefits management, this inefficiency can translate to not only mistakes, but costs. 

Multiple nations

Even if you’re a small business, you might be operating across multiple territories across the world. International corporate health insurance, pensions and more can be difficult to organize and make cost-efficient when your company headquarters are half a world away with little insight into the best providers for each location.

Lack of transparency

Your team members across the globe need to know exactly what they’re offering your employees, and employees need to know precisely what benefits they’re being offered. A lack of transparency can take time and money to resolve internally and can lead your staff to look elsewhere for their employment.

Getting consistent reporting

Reporting on multiple locations with multiple providers for each type of Employee Benefit means you can end up with several reports in varying formats. This inconsistent reporting makes it difficult to spot when you’re losing out on cost savings, or when you’re spending too much on particular policies. 

Lack of in-country market knowledge

If you’re using multinational pooling, you might find that you’re always using the same insurance providers. However, pooling everything is not always the best solution. You might find a better solution with in-country insurance providers (“local champions”) who are not part of a pooling network. 

Unless you’ve developed an on-the-ground team who has connections and knowledge about all insurance providers, you might be missing out on getting the best group insurance for employees at a reasonable price.

Giving employees the best experience

Aside from all the management of these Employee Benefits, your employees are owed the best experience you can offer, particularly when it comes to sensitive subjects such as employee health insurance. 

Your employees entrust you with their care for many of these benefits packages, and ensuring that you provide them not only with the insurance they need, but the experience they are looking for, is key for preventing employee churn.

How to optimize your Employee Benefits costs

Though many of the obstacles to cost efficiency might seem difficult to tackle at scale, there are ways in which you can optimize your insurable Employee Benefits costs without a large undertaking.

Here are some ideas on how to streamline your Employee Benefits costs efficiently: 

Operate from a centralized, secure platform

Even if you have multiple teams located internationally, you should be able to access all the data you need from one location. Orchestrating corporate medical insurance and more should be simple, even if your HR or financial function is based in your headquarters or in a distant satellite office.

A secure centralized platform equipped with intuitive dashboards and cost and risk analytics can eliminate many of the problems you’ll encounter with a set up based on disparate software and non-compatible reporting.  

With all documentation held in the same digitally-secure location, you can evaluate costs and risk and take data-led actions with ease. 

Use virtual multinational pooling with reputable connections

Multinational pooling, or the combination of global insurance plans under one consolidated system, is a plausible option for many businesses. Even smaller companies can use a multinational pooling approach to see their credits against their debit for numerous insurance programs. 

However, you’re not always sure that you’re getting the best type of insurance for your needs. For example, on a local level within a multinational pooling system, you might not have oversight over whether your provider is the most cost-effective or has the most favorable underwriting terms for corporate disability insurance. The “virtual” approach can help here to achieve the desired results even outside of a multinational pooling arrangement.

It all depends on how you set up your multinational pooling and who you entrust the set up to. Ensuring you’re using an Employee Benefits consultant that can not only give you a pooling option but also forge connections for you with the best local insurers is advisable for cost savings.

How ASN-WEB can help

Think of ASN-WEB EB Dashboard as your Employee Benefit consultant in a technical, easy-to-use form.

Our Software as a Service (SaaS) solution helps you to not only navigate the complexities of sourcing Employee Benefits insurance, but to reduce your costs and make management easier. 

In one user-friendly platform with world-class technical and security standards, we give you control over your Employee Benefits schemes around the world. 

With connections to our trusted partner network in over 40 countries, we create and manage all (virtual) multinational pools for you and present the important details on one comprehensive dashboard.

With transparent, consistent reporting, automatic monitoring and secure storage for all your documents, financials and more, ASN-WEB EB Dashboard streamlines and reduces costs for managing your employee benefits.

We offer you:

• Control over the costs of your Employee Benefits plans
• Simplification of your Employee Benefits plan management
• Consistent and comparable reporting for all of your insurable employee benefits
• All the benefits of multinational pooling, no matter your company size
• Connections to reputable insurance providers

Get in touch with us now to find out how we can optimize your Employee Benefits costs and streamline your operations today.