In the Spotlight: Core/Flex – Enhancing the Mobile Employee Experience

As organizations continue to look for ways to enhance their mobile employees’ experience through tailored benefits delivery options, core/flex policies have become an important element of many mobility programs providing both flexibility and cost containment. Yet, the development and administration of these programs can be complex.

BGRS’s Aric Pasquill, Manager, Client Technology, shares his insight on the implementation of core/flex mobility benefit programs and how these types of policies support our clients’ talent mobility objectives In the Spotlight.

Tell us a bit about core/flex programs and their growing popularity.

Aric Pasquill: The growth of core/flex is driven by an increase of multi-generational mobile employees going on a greater variety of assignment types with different individual needs. The ability to deliver flexibility around benefits and a better employee experience, while meeting business objectives and containing mobility program costs is the underlying value of core/flex.

The program structure itself enables organizations to offer services to their relocating employees, with a set of “core” benefits that cover services essential to assignment success (such as visa support) and additional “flex” benefit options from which employees can choose according to their particular needs. Companies may have several different policies: for instance, they may distinguish between level of employee, type of assignment, destination or family size.

Recently In the Spotlight, we discussed how rapid technological advances are shaping the global mobility arena. Considering this trend, how is technology supporting the implementation of core/flex benefits?

Aric: While core/flex policies are a significant tool both for maximizing employee experience and optimizing company spend, they can be quite complex, both to construct and to deliver. BGRS’s technology used to support core/flex is a result of our investment in digital solutions as well as ongoing collaborative work with our clients. BGRS’s technology reduces the administrative effort required from mobility program managers. Our core strategy is to continue to add new and emerging technology solutions to our ReloAccess platform that supports the flexibility to deliver services across a diverse set of mobile employees.

With core/flex utilization, BGRS will capture data and provide insights into relocating employees program selections, providing clients with analytics into benefit selections, budget management and the ability to make data-driven decisions on program offerings from year-to-year.

How do core/flex benefits impact program management costs?

Aric: The combination of core benefits with additional options ensures that a relocating employee will absolutely have the critical benefits they need to get to their new location with the flexibility to utilize additional benefits that are important to them. This allows companies to target benefits more accurately than in more traditional programs while giving employees more freedom of choice, reducing exception requests and maximizing mobility spend.

How does BGRS partner with clients to ensure the core/flex approach is best for them?

Aric: More and more mobility leaders are becoming interested in seeing what core/flex might look like for their program. Implementing this type of approach requires benchmarking, cost estimations, understanding and predicting employee usage, tracking, measurement and data analysis. BGRS partners with our clients to assess their existing programs and determine if the core/flex design and scale are the right service delivery model for their organization and mobility objectives. Once determined, BGRS also works closely with our clients to design the program and ensure that it is an effective support for an organization’s talent management needs and objectives.