A focused flexible benefits view for Koch, Inc. — EMEA, across the industries Koch operates in.
Prepared by Aon · Draft for discussion
Measured employee sentiment — not assumptions about what people want.
Paid time off is top-two in every market. Below that the lists diverge: medical coverage is second in Spain, fifth in the UK, and absent from the Dutch and German top five. Life and disability insurance is fifth in Germany and appears nowhere else. Highlighted cells mark where a market departs sharply from its neighbours.
This gap is not a spending gap. Nothing in it requires a larger benefits budget — it requires that the existing budget be allocated by the person who receives it rather than on their behalf.
Read this as the readiness signal. Where the figure is high, flex can be introduced as a straight reallocation of existing spend. Germany is the exception at 34 percent, and the German top five explains why: life and disability insurance ranks fifth there and nowhere else — a market that values security is slower to trade it away. Sequence Germany last, and lead with protection rather than with choice.
The Netherlands has a communication problem rather than a provision problem: 16 per cent say they are not told enough, while only 8 per cent doubt their employer is investing in their skills — the lowest of the four by a wide margin. Spain carries both at once. A flex platform addresses these together, because the act of choosing is itself the communication.
Benefit prevalence across Koch's EMEA markets — what is standard, what is rare, and what is therefore differentiating.
Only five benefits are offered by more than a third of employers. In red are the five lines employees rank highest or ask for most — four of them sit below that line, and the exception is paid time off, the one benefit every market already ranks first. Flexible benefits itself is at 28 per cent: not yet standard, so still a differentiator.
On all four lines employees ask for more than twice what the market provides — and none of the four is a large-ticket insurance purchase. Wellbeing support, financial education and family care are exactly the categories a flexible allowance can fund from existing spend, because they matter enormously to part of the workforce and not at all to the rest. Read the direction and the size of the divergence rather than subtracting: expectation and provision come from two studies with different bases. All four expectations are global figures. Childcare is the one that varies sharply by market — 16% in the Netherlands, 28% in the UK, 30% in Germany, 40% in Spain — so only Spain sits above the global line shown here. Read this bar as the EMEA picture, and the Dutch ask as the exception rather than the rule.
Koch does not operate in one industry. Its EMEA workforce profiles differ sharply — and so should the benefits investment.
Childcare is a top-three ask in Germany, the UK and Spain, and half that level in the Netherlands — the one market of the four with substantial state provision. That single contrast is the argument against a uniform European package, made with employees' own words rather than with theory.
Manufacturing plants in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Shift-based, technical, safety-critical.
Packaging and materials operations. Largely operational and site-based.
Facilities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Heavy manufacturing.
Connectivity and components. Mixed engineering and production populations.
Knowledge workforce, high mobility, benchmarked against technology employers rather than industrials.
Four of the five are shift-based or site-based populations, for whom time, protection and family care carry disproportionate weight. The fifth competes for talent against technology employers on an entirely different basis. The market data on the previous slide already varies by more than twenty points across these needs — before industry is taken into account at all.
Evidenced in sentiment data, not assumed from what the organisation already offers. Established for four EMEA markets on slide three.
Established: everything below career development is offered by under a third of employers. Low prevalence means the spend buys differentiation, not parity.
A shift-based plant population and a software population pass and fail different tests entirely.
Flexible benefits is what makes all three answerable at once, and keeps them answered. Employees self-select what they value; their choices become the prevalence and value data for the next cycle. The gap on slide four closes without the budget moving.