Alter Domus – Employee benefits tech to support a global growth journey

The challenge

1. Level up the employee experience

“We looked at the growth journey that we were on and determined that we wanted to improve our employee experience exponentially, and we needed a really good platform to do that on the benefits side of things. And when I think back to our business case around investing in this area, it was very, very strong – on the hard, dollar side of things as well as on the soft experiential side. And I would say it’s paid back so far in spades – 100%, whether it’s through compliance and data security, whether it’s through the employee experience – it’s all returned to the business.”

2. Deliver a globally consistent experience

“The employee experience was the starting point. We very clearly, at a leadership level, wanted everybody to have the same experience everywhere. So that meant rolling out the programme where we had 10 people as well as where we had 500 people. So that was really important for us. We selected Benifex because we needed more than just the basic benefits administration functionality; we wanted the total reward summaries; we wanted the recognition platform; we wanted access to the marketplace. Upgrading our benefits across the world, given that Alter Domus had grown from very small origins, meant that we had some countries around the world where our benefits weren’t great, frankly. But the administration overhead stood in the way of upgrading those benefits to a large extent – so we wanted to address this.”

3. Support global growth

“We’re about roughly 5,500 people today, 23 countries, and we have been growing for the last approximately three, four years at a rate of 25 to 30% a year. So I’d put us in the high growth category at that level.”

“How we grow is going to very much dictate how we further roll out the programme – whether we’re opening up new operations in a different country, acquiring a business, or (as we often do) lifting out parts of other organisations. Having that kind of scalable plug-and-play solution is central to our playbook, if you like, on the acquisition front. Organically as well, we are just opening a new location somewhere and starting from the ground up, we’ve landed the principle that everybody’s going to have the same employee experience. We’re also looking at upgrading benefits options – from global benefits to benefits that appeal locally.”

4. Drive digital transformation

“We wanted to drive a more efficient HR function, where we could actually bring capacity into the team and we could upgrade or elevate the service that we were giving to the organisation. We wanted to harmonise our systems. So we had a lot of people in a lot of countries doing a lot of basic administration work and we wanted to get them out of it. And then coupled with that, of course, we had the employee experience as a real driver for us as well as digitising the HR function. And the [digital transformation] journey that we went on started around that time in mid-2020, and we embarked on a lot of HR global rollouts. We did a global payroll consolidation project and various other projects along the way to arrive at benefits.”

5. Reduce administration

“Introducing a new medical plan or something like that is a lot of work – everybody knows that. But who’s going to administer that, how is it going to work afterwards? So having that operational cut-through that a platform provides was very, very important to us. And also on the non-negotiable site was data security, again – the employee experience – and then the value adds like making sure that everybody had access to a total reward summary.”

The solution

Taking learnings from other tech implementations

“We had implemented a global payroll project prior to this, and we’d learned from that that you have to go slow to go fast. We very quickly learned that if you don’t plan things properly and do all of the pre-work, you’re going to fall at the implementation hurdle. Having a really strong team in place that’s aligned with the partner is also critical. You need clarity of roles and accountabilities throughout. I remember when we started speaking with Benifex, it was probably about six months prior to actually starting the implementation – and we very quickly fell in love with the technology. We liked the implementation approach as well and the intuition within the team was we can move fast with this. And we only had a finite level of investment anyway – so we had to move fast.”

A unique approach

“We turned it on its head and started with smaller countries; we knew that we would be able to take learnings from these countries into the larger countries. We did launch in the US early on, which is our biggest territory so there was a good financial reason for that. Then we focused on Northern Europe and Luxembourg before moving into the rest of Europe and Asia. And we’ve been growing – not just organically, but also acquisitively. We’ve had an acquisition in India that’s led us, and we’ve got another one coming in another country shortly. The list of countries continues to grow, but we have a scalable solution now, we have a team, and we have the capabilities within the business to actually deliver.”

The importance of getting buy-in across the business

“There was a strategic reason for implementing in Luxembourg early on as that’s where most of our leadership is; I wanted to showcase the technology and experience. Once we implemented in Luxembourg, some of our global leaders that are based there were saying they wanted us to rollout the tech faster – which was great. We had a lot of sponsorship, both at a local level and at a global level, that really helped to smooth the way and get people excited about it. The organisation was very keen to upgrade the employee experience – and now it’s more about “can you upgrade the benefits programmes themselves?”

Future growth will continue to shape the rollout plan

“How we grow is going to very much dictate how we further rollout the programme. So whether we’re opening up new operations in a different country or whether we’re acquiring a business – having that scalable plug-and-play solution is central to our playbook. Even if we’re just growing organically and just opening a new location where we’re starting from the ground up, we’ve landed the principle that everybody’s going to have the same employee experience. Later this year, we’re also rolling out the OneHub Recognition module, and then there’s a project to upgrade our benefits – looking at global options, as well as benefits that appeal locally.”

Results

Adam Mason, Global EVP at Benifex, was joined by David Nugent, Group Director of Performance & Reward at Alter Domus and Karen Hall, Senior International Benefits Program Manager at Splunk Inc, to share learnings from rolling out global benefits technology. They discussed the drivers behind rolling out benefits tech globally, considerations for other reward leaders, and what they’re focusing on next. You can watch the full session on demand here.