Grolsch is a multinational beer brewery located in Enschede (the Netherlands) and part of Asahi Europe Ltd. At Grolsch, the communication on labor conditions and benefits can be quite a challenge. With over 650 employees, it’s often hard to keep track of all the changes and personal preferences. Especially when most paper forms are 7 pages long and not everybody knows exactly which tax concessions they can use to their advantage.

That’s why Grolsch wanted a change.

A more efficient, eco-friendly system that would give employees better insight into their labor conditions and benefits. One that would open the door to a new era. A digital HR system that allows employees to personalize their labor conditions and benefits while directly seeing the results of their choices in that same system.

Continue reading to learn about Grolsch’s changing process and the positive effects it has had so far.

The situation

Every year in October, employees have the opportunity to rearrange their employment terms. They can, for example, change their working hours or choose specific employee benefits such as extra holidays or a bicycle.

However, all these changes need to be written down in a bunch of forms.

When you’re as big a company as Grolsch, all this paperwork can lead to quite an administrative challenge. Especially when you’re working with different CLA’s (collective labor agreements) and previous employee benefits.

Back in the day, every Groslch employee needed to fill in a 7 pages long paper form. Sometimes HR advisors even had to explain the pros and cons of each individual situation. It’s not hard to imagine that this process took a lot of time, effort and money – and that something needed to change.

The intervention

That’s when Danielle (HR Operations and Payroll Controller at Grolsch) and Steven (Pointlogic HR) started to think about a solution. What if we digitalise the administration of employment terms in a system that shows every employee’s personal situation and benefits whenever they register changes?

That’s how, in April 2018, the idea of My Benefits using Pointlogic’s existing platform was born. A digital HR system ready-to-serve the new working era without the administrative rigmarole. Subsequently, Steven and Marian (Analytical Consultant) started to lead the project.

In August 2018, they invited Kick (HR Business Analyst at Grolsch) to become the project leader and make sure the new system would be live before the yearly session in November. Quite a challenge, since My Benefits wasn’t fully ready yet and all employees needed to be made aware of the upcoming changes as well.

Kick’s energy and fresh gaze, however, gave the project exactly what it needed to succeed. A tight schedule was made and in just a few months time the new online environment was built, tested, and ready to go; in November 2018, it was used for the first time.

The results

The new system, called My Benefits, is currently being used by Grolsch to gather all the labor conditions of its employees. There is still more to come though. In the next few months, the company is looking to add more simulation modules to the system. This will enable employees to have direct access to the possible result of changing their terms of employment.

A satisfaction survey already showed increased contentment amongst employees from a 6.8 (out of 10) with the old paper system to an 8.2 with My Benefits!

Conclusion

My Benefits is a solution made for the digital age. It allows employees to change their terms of employment themselves and gives them useful insights into the effects of the changes they make thanks to the simulation modules. On top of that, it saves companies a lot of administrative work and cuts back paper waste. It’s easy to use individually, an efficient inventory tool, and it seems like a promising solution to cover more simulation modules in the future.

As far as future improvements or add-ons are concerned, the Grolsch team is looking forward to expanding the My Benefits function with more HR tooling. In order to achieve this, they’ll be working closely together with their IT department to finetune simulations and step forward into the new, digital working age.

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