Challenge
Founded in 2001, AXIS Capital has become an established global provider of specialty insurance and reinsurance services. The highly diversified company employs a dedicated team of over 1,100 people located in offices in Bermuda, the United States, Europe, Singapore, Canada, Australia and Latin America.
The company was already using total compensation statements for its U.S. employees near Atlanta, Georgia when it decided to expand the program to all of its worldwide offices. The two-fold challenge was to roll out a global campaign that conveyed the total value of AXIS Capital’s salary and benefits package, while customizing statements to the cultural language of each country.
Solution
In January 2012, AXIS teamed with TotalRewards Software to produce and mail international compensation statements to its workforce. Amy Jackson, vice president of corporate benefits, and her AXIS team initially created a sample statement based on U.S. benefits and compensation, then met with international counterparts to identify the similarities and differences.
Using its TotalCompBuilder.com software platform, the TRS services team created individual statements that detail each employee’s cash compensation along with the total value of their benefits and retirement programs. A fully customized total rewards portal soon followed that allow employees to log in from work or home.
Results
AXIS employees around the world now understand the “big picture” of their salary and benefits – and the company was able to overcome what might have been a dizzying maze of cultural differences.
“We started this project thinking it was going to be more of a nightmare than it actually was,”
“There are a lot of moving parts, so we had to be organized. You can’t have a cookie-cooker total rewards statement.”
Amy Jackson, (Former) Vice President of Corp. Benefits | Axis Capital
The AXIS statements explained benefits at a high level, then highlighted selected benefits and their associated costs. While data was tailored to each country, the overall statements followed a similar layout for ease of design.
Jackson stressed the importance of preparation and working with a flexible provider.
“Make sure that you have a means of validating all of the data, especially if it’s coming from many different sources such as HR contacts, benefit carriers, payroll providers and third-party administrators. Another big key for us was to partner with a compensation statement company who could be very customizable and flexible with what we wanted to do.”
Company Profile
AXIS Capital is the Bermuda-based holding company of the AXIS group of companies. AXIS Capital provides specialty insurance and reinsurance on a worldwide basis through operating subsidiaries and branch networks based in Bermuda, the United States, Europe, Singapore, Canada and Australia, as well as a representative office in Brazil.
AXIS Capital was capitalized with approximately $1.7 billion in November 2001 to address the need for quality capacity in the global insurance/reinsurance industry following the tragedy of September 11th. The company went public in July 2003. As of March 31, 2013, AXIS Capital had shareholders’ equity of $5.9 billion, total capitalization of $6.9 billion and total assets of $19.7 billion
