After more than three decades working alongside global HR and benefits leaders, we've noticed a pattern that repeats itself with remarkable consistency. As a company grows, its benefits landscape gets increasingly complicated — 30, 40, 50 countries, hundreds of benefit plans, hundreds of millions in annual costs, billions in plan commitments and assets — and the response is predictable. Committees are formed. A governance matrix is built. Roles and responsibilities are defined. A global structure is created. Data is collected and updated.
Then, several years later, everyone is sitting in a room together asking the same questions: Why does this still feel so hard? Do we understand what we have? How well is it really working?
We have spent a lot of time thinking about why this happens and we recently had the chance to talk about it openly with a group of top global benefits leaders at WTW's Global Benefits Summit. We want to share what we think has important implications for every organization dealing with the complex nature of benefits today around the world.
The governance model we inherited and its limits
The governance frameworks most multinationals use for their benefits programs around the world were originally designed with a legal purpose primarily: To delegate responsibility through a defensible chain of authority and accountability and to protect fiduciary responsibility. That's legitimate, and we aren't suggesting this purpose has gone away. But it's critical to understand what that model was never designed to do.
It was never designed to make organizations faster. It was never designed to eliminate duplicative work. It was never designed to surface better decisions. It was never designed to support employee health and financial resilience. It was designed to organize accountability and organizing accountability isn't the same thing as solving for the challenges and opportunities that multinational companies now face.
Illustrating the opportunities and challenges facing multinational companies:
- 65% of employees say benefits are a key reason they join an organization, up from 45% in 2022 (WTW, Global Benefits Attitude Study, 2026).
- Healthcare cost inflation continues at double digits (%) around the world (WTW, Global Medical Trends Survey, 2026).
- Organization-wide change appears increasingly common, driven by factors such as global financial pressures, M&A activity and technological advancements.
In our global consulting work for benefits, we often see multinational companies that have added governance structures to existing workflows, which formalizes complexity without making it simpler. McKinsey (State of Organizations, 2023) finds that two thirds of executives see their organizations as overly complex and inefficient. McKinsey (Want to break the productivity ceiling? Rethink the way work gets done, 2025) goes on to find that successful transformations which create sustainable impact are more likely to focus on optimizing workflows over structure and roles. This aligns with what we observe from working with global companies. Workflow is where the work lives. The governance structure is the frame around it — and you can't fix the picture by changing the frame.
The simplification imperative in global benefits
In nearly 20 years of researching large multinationals on how they manage their global benefits programs, one theme has appeared with almost metronomic consistency: simplification. Not technology adoption. Not benefit harmonization. Not cost reduction, though that's also always present. Simplification.
The tools, the platforms, the advisory models have grown in sophistication, but the underlying operating model, the way benefits work flows from strategy to execution in a multinational company, hasn't kept pace.
This tells us something important about the state of global benefits solutions today. The tools, the platforms, the advisory models have grown in sophistication, but the underlying operating model, the way benefits work flows from strategy to execution in a multinational company, hasn't kept pace. And leadership is feeling it. Leadership now expects that benefits teams will do more with less at nearly every multinational we work with. Not stable resource at stable cost. More output, lower costs, greater efficiency — year on year.
Employee expectations are also increasing. What’s meant by “benefits” has broadened. What employees see as consumers increases expectations of their experience as employees. Employers are seeking to “elevate” their benefits portfolio and experience.
In this environment, a governance refresh alone isn't going to move the needle. What will deliver results is a deliberate, structured approach to process simplification, which can also enable elevating benefits. At WTW, we've developed a framework with three practical dimensions: Eliminate, Integrate and Accelerate.
Eliminate: The hardest conversation worth having
Let’s face it: Organizations are far better at adding than they are at taking away. It's easier to launch a new program, onboard a new vendor or broker or create a new approval step than it is to remove any of those things. Removal requires confidence, political capital and a willingness to make a decision that someone will probably push back on.
The right starting point is always an honest review. What exists today, why does it exist and what would happen if it did not?
But elimination is where the most meaningful simplification gains live. In our experience of implementing benefits solutions around the world with many hundreds of multinationals, the areas of highest impact tend to be consistent: Incomplete use of multi-country solutions, unnecessary plan design inconsistencies across complementary geographies, fragmented broker/adviser and vendor relationships that create additional coordination effort/cost rather than reducing it, decision-making by stakeholders with limited access to subject matter expertise and benefit plan variations that create legal and administrative complexity disproportionate to their value to employees or the company.
The right starting point is always an honest review. What exists today, why does it exist and what would happen if it did not? That question, asked rigorously, tends to reveal more opportunity than most organizations expect.
Integrate: Bringing the right voices to the same table
Integration is often misunderstood in relation to benefits globally. It isn't about aggregation using technology tools, though that helps. It's really about the integration of process accountability, decision making and information flow. The most common reason for failure is that key data are managed by different teams, reported in different ways and not put together into a single, clear picture for leaders.
What we advocate at WTW is integration at the level of process first — before systems, before platforms. That means bringing input from benefits, business strategy, finance, HR operations, risk and others into the same conversation at the right moments. It means building integrated communications workflows so that employees receive a consistent, cohesive story about their benefits rather than fragmented messages from siloed teams. And it means defining clearly, in advance, who owns what — not as a bureaucratic exercise, but as a real enabler of speed.
When organizations do this well, the results are significant. Decision making accelerates. Change management becomes embedded rather than bolted on. And benefits practitioners start to be seen by the business as a strategic enabler rather than an administrative impediment.
Accelerate: Building the infrastructure for speed
The Accelerate dimension is the one that often generates the most energy in our workshops — and the most honest admissions. Because when you ask global leaders of benefits what slows them down, the answers are rarely about external complexity. They are about internal friction: Approvals that take too long, relationships with local teams that don't exist until a transaction forces them, excessive meeting schedules that end without decisions and local HR partners who lack the tools or confidence to move independently.
It is clear that improvement opportunities continue to widely exist and that organizations that execute on them consistently find themselves ahead of the challenges.
The consulting work we do at WTW around acceleration focuses on practical, sustainable enablers: Decision-rights frameworks that make explicit — not just implied — who approves what at what threshold; toolkits and templates that put local HR teams in a position to act without waiting for central guidance on every standard request; processes that aim to reduce reliance on unnecessary and immaterial detail; adviser/broker relationships structured to deliver local expertise rather than just local coverage; and the discipline of ending every governance touchpoint with defined improvement-based next steps and accountability.
None of these are revolutionary ideas. But it is clear that improvement opportunities continue to widely exist and that organizations that execute on them consistently find themselves ahead of the challenges, rather than perpetually trying to catch up.
Culture is the canvas, not the constraint
The most important point of view we hold in our global benefits consulting practice is this: Organizational culture isn't a problem to be solved. It's the context within which every solution has to work.
We know from experience that the most effective global frameworks for employee benefits aren't necessarily the most elegant ones on paper. They are, however, primarily designed and calibrated to the culture they operate within.
The spectrum of how multinationals structure their benefits operations around the world is really broad. Some are centrally driven, where a strong center of excellence (COE) sets direction and local teams execute with limited discretion. Others are highly devolved, where regional or local leadership holds the formal power and the COE plays an advisory role. Many are somewhere in the middle with the balance shifting periodically, shaped by leadership changes, acquisitions, spin-offs, restructuring and the prevailing philosophy of the current C-suite.
We know from experience that the most effective global frameworks for employee benefits aren't necessarily the most elegant ones on paper. They are, however, primarily designed and calibrated to the culture they operate within. That doesn't mean abandoning ambition — it means sequencing it wisely. Understanding where the culture allows movement and where it will resist is essential. Keep an eye out for changes in the organization, like a new leader, a corporate transaction or other major change. These are the times when the culture changes for a short time, and the chance to shift approach unveils itself.
Supporting multinationals at WTW
Our unique experience is foundational to WTW’s approach to benefits solutions for multinationals companies. We don't arrive with a standard governance template and fit an organization into it. We start by understanding a multinational company’s ambitions and opportunities, complexity challenges, cultural realities, the tasks that are creating problems and the pressures leadership are facing. From there, we develop a simplification framework that leverages structure, where structure serves compliance and accountability, and flexibility, where flexibility serves effectiveness and speed.
The result, at its best, is a global operating model for benefits that doesn't just look good on paper. It works — for leadership, for local teams and ultimately, for the employees whose outcomes and experience depend on getting this right.
That's the standard we hold ourselves to in global partnerships with clients. And it's a conversation we look forward to having.
For any multinational employer eager to take a fresh look at the immediate benefits governance opportunities, look out for WTW’s 2026 Headquarters Priorities Research later this year, and discover your company’s current state by using the personalized benchmark assessment.
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