At our Global Benefits Forum in London, HR leaders, consultants, and risk specialists came together to explore how employee benefits can keep pace with corporate dynamics that are becoming harder to predict and sometimes more difficult to align. The agenda focused less on new innovations or a single solution, and more on a shared recognition that progress depends on connection. Many employee benefit strategies and programmes still reflect the way they were built – incrementally, and often in isolation from one another. So, the real challenge is: how can organisations connect their intrinsic assets – knowledge, experience, people, and intelligence – to narrow the distance between what they intend their benefits to do and what those benefits actually deliver.
Speakers converged on the same underlying tension. The modern benefits function is expected to do more than ever – to support wellbeing, strengthen resilience, manage cost and risk, and reflect organisational values – while operating across workforces that are increasingly diverse, dispersed, and at times, divided in their expectations.
Here’s a recap of the key takeaways that defined the forum, and the ideas shaping how benefits leaders can turn fragmented insight into coordinated action.
Leadership in complexity: embracing paradox
For benefits leaders, competing demands are not new: global consistency versus local autonomy, cost versus care, speed versus precision, structure versus agility. Amy Walters-Cohen, founder of Human Dynamics Research, reinforced that effective leadership today is about how well you navigate complexity – resisting the instinct to rely on familiar approaches. For leaders it can be an uncomfortable place to be – to embrace tensions and opposing ideas to guide new approaches and better decision making – rather than focusing solely on resolution.
It’s a mindset increasingly central to global benefits. Designing programmes that work across geographies, cultures, and expectations requires a willingness to balance, not eliminate, competing pressures.
Alignment is an ongoing practice
If complexity is unavoidable, then alignment becomes essential – but it requires sustained effort. Developing a shared vision is critical for realising goals. Different functions within an organisation may continue to prioritise different outcomes: finance will see cost, HR will see experience, risk will see exposure. Each perspective is valid. Progress is a process – it comes from bringing those perspectives together through open and regular communication that facilitates trust and buy-in between different parties.
A successful employee benefits programme is a multi-faceted, multi-year project. Nicola Fordham, Chief Solutions Officer at MAXIS Global Benefits Network, and Stephanie Ings, Senior Vice President at Lockton, agreed on the importance of ”building in phases” to allow programmes to take shape over time and evolve as an organisation evolves. Demonstrating value through phases helps to build trust and credibility with stakeholders – and that results in confidence and momentum.
Reposition people within the risk conversation
Michael Lombardi, President, Global Solutions and Lockton Global Partners, talked about an important shift that’s beginning to recognise people risk as business risk – with issues such as wellbeing, absence, disengagement, and talent retention central to organisational resilience, business continuity, and performance.
He and Phil Simmance, Senior Vice President at Lockton, discussed how the risk function has evolved over time and the need to re-elevate people related risks to the boardroom agenda – not as a separate category, but integrated into the enterprise risk framework. The mechanism for that is to connect the HR and risk functions and leverage the intelligence they bring from experience and data to understand exposures and optimise the organisation’s position with benefit providers and insurance markets.
Think globally, act locally to win hearts and minds
For multinational organisations, the real test of any benefits strategy lies in its execution across markets that differ widely in regulation, culture, and expectation. Marc Bentley, Head of Global Risk Finance at IHG Hotels & Resorts, spoke to the importance of winning the hearts and minds of employees in each territory.
He framed the challenge in straightforward terms: benefit programmes succeed only when they make sense to the people they are designed to serve. That requires benefits leadership on the ground and a level of local understanding that can’t be imposed from headquarters. Yet too much adaptation brings its own risks. Without some degree of consistency, programmes can lose coherence, becoming a collection of local arrangements rather than a shared strategy. Managing that balance between cohesion and flexibility remains one of the defining challenges of global benefits.
Pivot from intention to outcomes
A similar balance is beginning to emerge in how organisations think about fairness. For years, the emphasis has been on the standardisation of benefits: setting minimum levels of provision that apply across all markets. Ian Grimshaw, Global Benefits Director at Dentsu, outlined how that approach may provide structure, but doesn’t necessarily produce equal outcomes. Employees in different regions, or at different life stages, don’t experience benefits in the same way.
Ian described an important mindset shift for benefits leaders, from asking whether benefits are consistent to asking whether they are effective. The distinction is subtle but it steers the strategy discussion towards the purpose of benefits: connecting what is offered with what needs to be achieved. That shift does introduce new complexities – varied needs can increase cost and complicate administration – but it also represents a more mature understanding of the workforce. There is no single solution, rather a series of trade-offs that organisations need to navigate within the context of their philosophy and aspiration.
By the close of the forum, one point had become clear. The future of global benefits will not be determined by any single reform or innovation. It will be shaped by how well benefits leaders connect their intelligence to better understand their workforce, align priorities, bridge gaps between regions and functions, and translate intent into practice. It’s a quieter kind of transformation – less about sweeping change, more about coherence and targeting deliberate outcomes.
As the conversations in London demonstrated, the Global Benefits Forum is more than a single event. It’s a growing global community of HR leaders, consultants and risk specialists, united by a shared challenge: how to make benefits work harder in an increasingly complex world.
Each forum builds on this collective intelligence – creating space to exchange ideas, challenge thinking, and connect perspectives across markets and disciplines. As we look ahead, that conversation continues.
Register your interest here (opens a new window) to be among the first to hear about our 2027 Global Benefits Forum series and join future discussions shaping the direction of employee benefits.