Mercer Marsh Benefits

2020 was supposed to be a transformative year, laced with key technological milestones: new outer space launches, 5G revolution, and breakthroughs in humanoids. But little did we know that ‘everything’ would change. The global pandemic completely upended our normal lives and clouded even the most well-thought-out business and technological endeavours.

This pushed many businesses to quickly scramble all their resources online in order to continue operating amidst an economic downturn. At the same time, working from the confines of our homes became the new world order. With that, one thing became very clear, very quickly: the undeniable interconnectedness of work and life. For instance, employees found themselves caught in irregular working hours that created stress and burnout. At the same time, employers started realising its impact on employee engagement and retention. Not long after that, keeping employees connected and supported during the COVID-19 spread made it to the high-priority list of every business’s corporate agenda. This naturally translated into boosting the budget for workplace benefits programs. According to McKinsey & Company’s Global Survey report, 76% of organisations increased benefits spend as a result of the pandemic, and as per PwC’s Pulse Survey, 88% of HR and benefits teams saw more involvement in benefits from the C-suite.

However, allocating more benefits budget and amplifying C-suite participation in HR decisions only solved one part of the equation. When employers started drawing a parallel between employees’ increased work stress and the existing workplace benefits, they also realised that the latter no more reflected the requisites of the new ways of working. On the one hand, this created a new opportunity for businesses to reinvent workplace benefits and become more resilient. On the other, it also implicated a serious risk to a business’s bottom line if things were not done right. What the businesses needed was an HR-tech expert that could evaluate existing benefits programs, spot gaps, and leverage technology and analytics to bring about a complete overhaul of the benefits landscape for the future of the workforce. Enter Mercer Marsh Benefits (MMB).

Bringing together a unified front of two of the world’s leading companies, the people consulting side of Mercer and the risk management and broking aspect of Marsh, MMB is a global leader today in the employee benefits arena. This enables the company to offer a broad spectrum of expertise and help clients navigate the complex world of risks, cost management, and employee benefits. Combining their skills, the company has a unique mastery over the complex and interconnected dynamics around risk, strategy, and people—to offer the best in benefits broking, consulting, and technology, all under one umbrella. In that regard, the company’s market-leading employee engagement and benefits administration platform, Darwin, acts as the dynamic digital tool to support all of its global benefits management (GBM) services. “Leveraging these technologies and advisory services, our goal is to constantly understand the present and the future workplace needs and reshape the HR and benefits landscape, thereby unlocking the real value of health and well-being,” states Tony Wood, partner and managing director of MMB, Continental Europe.

To that end, one can’t help but question: “What should the future of workplace benefits look like?”

To understand that, one must first decipher how the pandemic is changing the way we work, as Wood—referring to his company’s various surveys—eloquently elaborates. The foremost shift has been in the relevance of the items that people consider appropriate. “To put it simply, today, there has been a tenfold rise in the percentage of people working from home as opposed to a mere 4% of the populace before the pandemic hit. Employers are also anticipating that in the post-COVID-19 era, nearly one in three of their employees will move to remote working full-time,” explains Wood. Based on this shift, employees’ perspective toward the things they find worthy has also changed. They are no longer satisfied with the traditional benefits package as it is tied to a world where we worked from the office. Instead, they want employers to go beyond the fundamental boundaries of physical and mental well-being to include newer trends like social well-being and connectivity, as well as financial well-being. Hence, MMB is working extensively to help employers integrate more of such broader wellbeing services into their employee’s benefits regime.

On that note, the second important trend is in terms of added prominence to mental health. Given the present scenario, employees are stuck at their desks for hours. They are neither travelling to the office nor walking across the office floors. Some even live alone, and hence, they are unable to catch a break between their work and house chores for indulging in any sort of interpersonal conversation. As a result, mental health and physical health are suffering a huge blow, leading to employee exhaustion and burnout. Employees want their employers to make a note of that and introduce new well-being benefits that are more suited to those needs. And well, the tides are definitely turning in employees’ favour. More than 54 employers surveyed by MMB agreed that they would be enhancing mental health support with an eye to improving talent acquisition and retention and 71% of them are introducing, or planning to introduce, more flexible working arrangements to prevent employee exhaustion and therefore burnouts.

Another closely associated trend is making the leap from reactive to preventive care schemes. Most of the existing benefits plan revolve around offering support when an employee has already fallen ill. However, with the pandemic and people’s increased awareness of health and wellbeing, employees are seeking benefits programmes that provide them routine and pre-emptive support for disease management. This is where MMB is guiding many of its clients to ride on the digital and virtual health services bandwagon to meet the urgent and unmet proactive health needs.

According to Wood, the move to virtual care can also bring about many positive developments, such as improved access to behavioural healthcare, treatment for substance use disorders, chronic health condition management, and family planning services.

In the pursuit of preventive care, MMB is also steadfastly helping businesses be more resilient by mitigating people-related risks. Wood explains, “Peoplerelated risks have risen sharply up the boardroom agenda, thanks to the single largest health crisis of our time. This has reinforced how employer-sponsored health, risk protection, and well-being plans are central pillars of the employee value proposition.” To that end, the company’s six pillars of people research have identified 25 key risks across five key people risk categories affecting firms. Understanding and evaluating these exposures should be a core priority for business leaders who want to turn these vulnerabilities into strengths, according to Wood. Only then employee health and benefits plans can be used strategically to manage a range of threats while helping protect employees, managing costs, and improving business performance. MMB is enabling just that.

In a nutshell, designing a future-proof benefits plan is fulfilling employees’ changing lifestyle needs. And it all starts with a broader industry outlook and an eye for detail, two of the traits that MMB has immense proficiency in.

Overcoming the Challenges to Progressive Benefits Strategies

While almost all businesses understand the significance of implementing a futuristic benefits framework that’s well-suited for the post-pandemic world, it’s not without challenges.

Two of the core issues are lack of HR tech and budget, and more often than not, these issues are interconnected. Every three out of 10 employers cite that they do not have the necessary technology to drive transformative benefits changes, and the reason behind that is the lack of budget. Even if they find the necessary monetary backing, it is either misdirected change management initiative or nonresonating benefits package that leads to the failure of the entire project.

On top of that lies the challenge of user experience. Clunky and difficult-to-use applications are a prime reason for less-than-satisfactory utilisation among employees. Unless such applications provide a consumergrade experience, they won’t be able to engage with the employees at the desired level. While everyone is focusing on providing digital benefits solutions that would support employees, not many are looking into the user experience aspect. On the one hand, employers need to invest in technology to boost their benefits game, and on the other, the benefits framework itself needs to undergo technological transformation to ensure ROI.

That’s where MMB’s world-leading employee benefits platform, Darwin, comes in to break the tie. Darwin is built to meet the needs of modern businesses. It comprises two cores: one for employees and the other for decision-makers, and each of these is targeted to optimise the technological as well as user-centricity of a company’s benefits administration goal. As a result, employers enjoy increased employee engagement, more streamlined administration processes, and greater efficiencies through controlled costs and reduced risk. On the flipside, Darwin puts health and well-being benefits in the palm of employees’ hands at the moments that matter, driving improved take-up and participation and delivering a greater perception of investment in people. At this juncture, Wood also adds another strong suit of Darwin—powerful analytics. He notes that one of the greatest concerns most multinational companies face is fathoming their ever-increasing volume of employee data in order to design and harmonise benefits programmes based on what their employee value. A benefits strategy cannot be regarded effective unless it is meaningfully helping a company win the talent acquisition and retention war. That being said, the path to achieving this should not be at a higher cost parameter. The reason being that, more often than not, to expand data literacy, multinationals have to hire additional analysts. This consequently adds to more investments being made against lower ROI for uncovering unseen benefits opportunity. Today, Darwin is tactfully solving this problem with its robust data finding and analytics modules, helping both employers as well as employees land on data-driven benefits planning and implementation effectively and cost-efficiently. More importantly, Darwin makes the insights easily accessible and consumable on its platform, so that absence of skilled analysts in a benefits administration team is never a setback for maximising benefits performance.

Under the Hood of Excellence

MMB’s years of excellence has always been simple yet strong: their motto is ‘delivering benefits that truly benefit.’ “What we mean by this is that we don’t just offer a product or solution; we offer a partnership that brings a harmonised approach to our clients’ HR strategy, with a range of services that inform and complement each other across health, wealth and career,” explains Wood.

These unique facets have helped the company expand its global benefits management (GBM) solutions to over 350 multinational clients today, accounting for an industryleading (55 percent) market share in the GBM space. Further bolstering their global presence, Wood notes, “Nearly 80 percent of all companies across the world using technology to drive their global benefits solution do so with our market-leading benefits administration and employee engagement platform, Darwin.”

Benefits beyond All Borders

One of the crucial foundations of any global business fostering a diverse workforce is responsiveness towards Diversity & Inclusion initiatives.

Addressing diversity and building inclusivity within workplaces has always been a longstanding struggle for employers. Often underrepresented groups have been historically marginalised in the workplace. Looking to flip this script now, employers seek opportunities to drive meaningful change and bring an end to these ongoing prejudices. Wood suggests, “One good place to start is with employee benefits.” As Diversity & Inclusion continues to become a vital topic of discussion worldwide for employers to make a greater impact on their employees’ lives, a more diversified and inclusive benefits strategy can bring a world of difference. To that end, MMB is dedicated to guiding its clients on better ways to design and implement a benefits strategy that embraces Diversity & Inclusion at its core. The company aces it by customising and personalising benefits plans as per the precise needs of its clients, because they clearly understand what might be suitable for one in terms of Diversity & Inclusion requirements might not be apt for another. MMB, on that note, can be also called pioneers of the inclusive benefits landscape who are partnering with the ecosystem participants to create new inclusive coverages. “We have successfully partnered with carriers in Canada, Ireland and the U.S., and helped our clients create self-insured, inclusive programmes in Brazil, Mexico, Singapore and the UK,” shares Wood. Where local administration is not feasible (due to operational or socio-cultural barriers), MMB has combined global benefits financing and inclusive benefits capabilities to facilitate more inclusive benefits coverage through captives and global underwriting solutions. Through this, MMB has helped its clients combine cost efficiency with empathy to seek robust returns while aiding them to make progress towards their Diversity & Inclusion goals.

Alongside this, Wood himself has been serving as a stellar role model for workplace inclusivity. “Through my role at MMB, I have been driving change for the LGBTQ+ community. I am the Executive Sponsor of the firm’s Pride Business Resource Group (BRG) UK and a member of its Pride BRG Europe.” Serving the cause, he has supported many community programs and social functions and implemented support for LGBTQ+ colleagues, even during the lockdown. Likewise, he is determined to improve trans healthcare and embed LGBTQ+-specific policies among the businesses that his company caters to. He adds, “MMB respects, values, and leverages all aspects of diversity. The four pillars that accelerate our journey towards creating a diverse workforce and inclusive culture are: listening better, leadership accountability, learning, and advocacy.”

Integrating ESG as a Part of Benefits Strategy

Not so long ago, implementing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles for business investments were considered an afterthought. To date, there has been limited attention paid to how a company’s ESG performance affects one of the most important stakeholder groups: its employees. Therefore, organisations are now prioritising ESG as part of their employee benefits, retirement plan investment options, and broader workplace culture—to stand out as employers of choice for the next generation. That being said, ESG not only helps attract and retain employees but is also a powerful tool for attracting top talent. Wood highlights that employer investments which consider environmental, social, and governance factors have broad appeal, especially among today’s millennial and Gen Z employees. These are precisely the aspects that MMB helps its clients achieve. MMB offers insights into the relationship between ESG performance and workforce sentiment, which they consider is a key lever in a time of unpredictable turnover and tough competition for talent.

Illuminating the Path to Success

With such a proactive approach to client relationships, MMB has always been able to respond to employers’ unique needs and provide them with the insights to make the right decisions. As a testament to this is their recent success story:

A Dubai-based aerospace and military company with 100,000 employees across 85 countries was facing multiple challenges, including high premium costs and lack of certainty around benefits set up. The client was also facing a flexibility issue with their existing provider network around the UAE. “Upon on-boarding MMB, our team first conducted a historical and future analysis, reviewed their benefits offering, and suggested changes based on claims trends and gaps in coverage,” states Wood. The MMB team then worked with the client to implement a detailed market strategy targeting traditional insurance and reinsurance routes. This immediately created enough market competition to drive the premium costs down. Wood adds, “Using our technical knowledge, and by understanding the trends and projections, we were able to achieve better broking results.” During the first year, the client was able to generate 23 percent savings along with cost avoidance on the group medical program. The next year the client generated a further 5 percent savings.

Our Goal is to Constantly Understand the Present and the Future Workplace Needs and Reshape the Hr and Benefits Landscape, Thereby Unlocking the Real Value of Health and Well-Being

Penning hundreds of similar success stories since its inception, MMB is now laser-focused on removing all the barriers that obstruct building a harmonised employee health and wellbeing benefits ecosystem for the changing business landscape. The core idea is to help the employer community revisit their benefits programmes that do not serve their purpose anymore while also ensuring that every employee gets the benefits that they’re entitled to in a timely manner. With that conviction, in the coming months, the MMB team is going to move forward and swiftly expand its base across different countries. “The future of workplace benefits is not just about embedding best-ofbreed benefits technology but also facilitating a better symbiosis between technology, strategy, and end-user experience,” concludes Wood.