The second European Compensation and Benefits Forum brought together leading experts from the EMEA region to share expertise and discuss creative approaches to challenges ahead.
Chaired by Mr Uli Kleber, GEB Regional Manager for Central Europe, the two-day event included networking and educational sessions, with a focus this year on transversal issues and techniques HR managers can use to best understand and tackle main trends in the industry.
Among the key topics of this edition, the raising importance of prevention at a very early stage of the employee benefits strategy, to maximise impact not only on cost savings but also on employees’ engagement and productivity targets.
“From buying traditional benefits and leaving the management of this area to the insurer, employers are increasingly moving towards assistance and lifestyle intervention programs, taking a more proactive stance on the wellbeing of their workforce” said Pasquale Gorrasi, head of expatriate solutions at GEB and among the speakers at the event.
HR predictive models aim to mitigate exposure to risks, to spot trends, and to devise benefits packages that resonate as much as possible with the needs and aspirations of a specific employee population.
Employees are different and value benefits differently.
Effective segmentation techniques are the foundation of a competitive benefits strategy that can deliver more value and still maintain agility and simplicity of administrative processes.
Applying a flexible approach to smart benefits design means building on a common core with opportunities for trade-offs that give employees a say in what they perceive as valuable and essential to their performance.
In this direction, digital platforms are replacing policy papers to communicate value of the reward proposition and to highlight their impact in the daily lives of employees through an interactive and ongoing approach .
Other topics in the agenda included the need to identify and adequately compensate hot skills, how to integrating business units’ governance needs within global reward strategies, and the impact of mergers and acquisition processes on the revision of benefits programs.