Supporting a global workforce

At a time when workforces are more global than ever, the challenges for HR and people teams have increased.

How do you create a benefits package that appeals to people in each location? How can you create a stronger culture when people are in separate locations? And how do you ensure that the people working remotely are just as aligned to your mission as the ones at head office?

Fortunately, these are some of the challenges we’ve been able to help many businesses with. We have over 4,000 customers across 140 countries, and many of them have diverse and dispersed workforces. Let’s hear from a few of them!

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Open GI: Benefits beyond borders

Open GI is a software company that primarily develops products for the general insurance market. With over 40 years’ of expertise, and almost 500 employees across the UK, Poland and Macedonia, the company wants to be an employer of choice.

As Organisational and Development Manager Hayley Pearce explains, the business was looking for a way to provide employee benefits that appealed to everybody.

“Our geographical spread means that we need that degree of consistency… Employee benefits are really central to our reward package and prior to Perkbox we had a degree of inconsistency and a lack of transparency around the type of benefits that we were able to provide. That is something Perkbox has most definitely solved for us. It’s given us a great platform and we've got that consistency and transparency built in for all our employees.”

reward points with perkbox

Internal Communications Executive Nick Sturdy believes this aligns perfectly with how the business likes to treat its employees.

“From a culture and engagement perspective, one really important thing we have here at Open GI is ensuring no parts of the business feel alienated from the rest of the company. So the way Perkbox can be applied in Macedonia and Poland as well as the UK means we have that level playing field.”


Hayley adds that Perkbox’s global reward system is another key part of Open GI’s employee experience, enabling her to cater for a variety of needs.

“It’s great that when you give someone a reward…currency isn’t an issue. And they can of course spend their Reward points on something of their own choice, which I think links culturally to the employee experience piece. We know — and I expect lots of other businesses grapple with this too — that because of the changing demographic, people want to feel like they are receiving something with them in mind. So the opportunity to choose something that works for them is really important. That’s something we particularly like about Perkbox.”

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Monica Vinader: An EVP that shines all over the world

Monica Vinader is a global jewellery brand with over 250 employees across the UK, USA, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Not only is the workforce spread across three continents and time zones, but there was also no single source for their people initiatives or communications. Employees had different levels of IT access and store employees didn’t have a company email address.

Louise Sparkes, Senior People & Culture Manager, says this led to siloed employee populations, where "people knew what was going on in their own locations but not necessarily with other teams or parts of the business."

wellbeing videos on perkbox

The Perkbox platform is location agnostic, which makes it perfect for a dispersed workforce. And with access available 24/7 via desktop or mobile app, it also simplifies the experience for employees and employers. Louise adds:

"It was really a case of us looking for a solution that meant globally everyone had the same thing… where people could access it on the go, wherever they are, without needing particular levels of access.

"It's also so much easier for administering things that previously we might have had to go to a local supplier for. It's quite nice to be able to centralise them on Perkbox.

It's one of our only benefits that is completely global and for us that’s really important. When we launch something new, we try to think — can we do it through Perkbox? We’ve already got this fantastic platform available to us; what can we do more with it?”


With financial wellbeing support becoming a must-have, Monica Vinader employees have also been able to use Perkbox’s discounts to save money — no matter where in the world they’re located. They also receive 25 Flexi points each month, which can be spent on a variety of Flexi Perks which are meaningful for them. The high level of choice means there’s something for everyone across countries. This is demonstrated by over 1,500 Flexi Perks being redeemed in the first seven months since being made available.

“It helps make people’s money go further,” says Louise. We have people of all ages across the whole workforce. Some people are buying a house and want furniture or bigger purchases. For younger staff it may be the smaller perks, so we do see a real range.”

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Havas People: Reward and recognition done globally, yet simply

Havas People is a talent communications agency which is part of the wider Havas group — the fifth largest marketing communications network in the world.

The company has 150 employees, spread across offices in the UK, USA and Australia, as well as remote workers across the globe.

One of these is People & Talent Advisor Rebecca Zoli, who’s based in Italy. Reward and recognition was a core part of her people initiatives, but she wanted to make them applicable to employees across all locations.

Trying to manually find rewards that work for everybody in a diverse workforce was both complex and costly. The introduction of Perkbox has removed this headache for Rebecca and her team.

add your company values to perkbox

"For Christmas, we used to send people a hamper. But obviously the challenge was finding suppliers in all the different locations we have, and all the costs that come with it. And then thinking ‘what if that person is allergic to this?’, or ‘what if they don’t like what’s in the hamper?’

With Perkbox, we can send points to everyone and people can decide what they want to use it on… [This is better] than receiving something which they appreciated, but might not have been what they wanted."


Over 95% of the Havas People workforce has received Reward points since the system launched, with a near 50-50 split between employees choosing to spend immediately vs save for a bigger reward.

Rebecca says the fact that it’s truly global is exactly what her business needs.

"When you have a team or employee winning an award in, say, New York, the value of a reward through payroll is not the same. Now that we are expanding globally, Perkbox has really allowed us to reward everyone."

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Traveltek: A global solution for global challenges

Traveltek is a global software company that specialises in the travel industry. It has 90 employees across the UK, India, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Australia and America.

In 2021, Cressida Sergeant, Chief Commercial Officer, took on responsibility for Traveltek’s people agenda. She immediately recognised a number of challenges.

Some were linked to the impact COVID-19 was having on employees in the travel industry, whereas other challenges were more typical for international companies that have dispersed workforces.

Cressida was immediately on the lookout for a benefits and rewards solution that would help — specifically around global communication and peer-to-peer recognition. She believed Perkbox ticked a lot of boxes due to it being a location-agnostic platform.

rewarding globally

“We looked around at a lot of the tools that were out there and I was really impressed by what I saw with Perkbox. It was clear that it was a global solution that could fix a lot of our challenges.

When you’re running multiple teams across different markets, it’s great to have one tool where you’re able to give that recognition to global colleagues. You’re [also] able to run polls that go across multiple time zones.”


Another big benefit was the simplicity of going live across locations. This was especially important for Cressida who is responsible for the Sales, Marketing and Account Management teams worldwide, in addition to her work on the people agenda.

“One of the great things about Perkbox is it’s a really easy to set up system. When we rolled it out internationally to the rest of our colleagues it was such a simple set-up, in terms of them being able to get up and running straight away.”


Companies like Traveltek will continue to grow, and being able to attract, retain and motivate top talent will always be a priority. The global nature of our solution puts us in a strong position to help with this — and they happen to agree.

“The fact that we’ve implemented Perkbox and a number of other initiatives to try and improve our benefits has definitely helped in a market where, as we know, talent is really hard to retain.

[Going forward], our growth will come out of the North American market so it’s brilliant that we’ve been able to roll Perkbox out to our US colleagues, and as that team grows I'm sure we’ll be utilising Perkbox even more in that part of the world.”

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