Benefits and the bottom line: Why it’s so hard to find your single source of truth

How many systems or platforms do you use to manage your employee benefits programmes? Would you describe your benefits ecosystem as connected? Is it easy to uncover and trust the benefits data you need to understand the totality of your programmes across your entire global footprint?

 

The sheer number and variety of employee benefits have grown exponentially over the years – and with this, the complexity of global benefits management, reporting and analysis has also increased tenfold.

 

By now, there is no doubt as to the value that employee benefits provide to businesses – from supporting employees with traditional offerings such as private health insurance to preventative wellbeing measures such as cycle schemes or mental wellbeing support, to the downstream business benefit of happier, healthier and more productive employees.

 

But the inherent volume and complexity of these programmes continuously add more administrative load onto already-lean benefits teams. Our own research tells us that fragmented, dispersed data puts benefits professionals in an almost impossible position: one in five report that a simple query about coverage can take a month to answer.

 

Not only does this leave them in an impossible position with employees, who need timely and accurate answers to their questions, but also with the wider organisation and senior leadership – who want to understand precisely what’s on offer and how much it costs.

 

Benefits duplication: the invisible drain

If it’s so hard to answer even the most basic of questions, what other information gaps sit beneath your benefits portfolio? How much overlap or duplication do you have? If you have separate teams managing benefits and, say, wellbeing, it’s not uncommon to find the latter team introducing new services or supports which are already catered for through an existing insurance product.

 

This kind of oversight could be happening across your portfolio – and it stems from a lack of visibility. If you have one of these overlaps, the chances are that you have several. How many “unknown unknowns” do you have? And how easy would it be for you to find the answer to that today?

 

The dangers of scattered data

When employees enter the benefits ecosystem, the process is probably managed through pre-existing employee-facing software. But the data which underpins that system is all too often spread across documents, hiding in inboxes or held in the minds of key HR team members.

 

Legacy spreadsheets, edited manually, are still central to the global benefits landscape. Fragmented systems are going to produce fragmented results, which lead to decisions based on half the information. Expertise can make up for some of this shortfall, but where incomplete data persists, it won’t catch everything every time.

 

An unforgiving financial environment

Layered on top of this are the increasing costs associated with delivering a compelling benefits strategy. Rising healthcare costs are a particular driver here, with businesses looking to support employees as state-run healthcare services struggle to cope with demand, or private services continue to raise prices. Alongside this, employers are also having to pay more for private medical insurance, making it increasingly difficult to balance quality of service with affordability.

 

All of this means that it’s extremely difficult to show a clear picture of precisely how benefits spend affects the bottom line, and how that is likely to change over the next one, two or five years. Set that against the backdrop of roughly two million HR queries per year (based on four in every five employees making one HR request once a month), in a large organisation with 50,000 people, and the result is an unrelenting cost centre that demands your team’s constant attention, but without a single clear picture of cost or benefit.

 

Making sense of it all…with a single source of truth

Some may look to LLMs as the solution, but the truth is that the complexity of the global benefits environment demands something purpose-built: AI which is not only capable of ingesting this sort (and volume) of information but which has been trained on the complexities and diversities (be they language, regulation and format) of benefits data.

 

Once benefits documentation is brought together in one place, what we end up with is a genuine, single source of truth: a dataset which can be easily interrogated and which offers clear, actionable insight quickly and at scale, building the first reliable benefits infrastructure. 

 

A single source of verified, reliable data underpinning the entire benefits ecosystem, owned by the HR teams themselves, means that benefits leaders finally have the visibility, intelligence and governance to run their programmes effectively – and have a material impact on the bottom line. 

 

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Chris Bruce is Co-founder and CEO of Origin – the Enterprise Benefits Intelligence platform

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and draganab