Clarita Earnshaw

Working with a 35m USD annual budget, this Centre of Excellence role reports into the Global Director of Benefits. Responsible for the development and management of all plans within EMEA along with the meeting standards in compliance. Working closely with my Lead on the development of the benefits strategy.

• Led harmonisation activity for seven countries successfully end to end over six-month period, managing stakeholder’s expectations on timelines and costs. The project was done in parallel with standard renewal activities for another nine countries. This included close interaction with Vendors and Brokers to implement changes according to the new philosophy of the new commercial entity.
• Standardised hundreds of benefit processes when the HR operations team was outsourced, holding team accountable for process controls through country audits, service level agreements and regular cadence with the new offshore team.
• Developed roadmap for Workday system improvement to future proof benefit administration. Project approval is underway for 2025.
• Created new processes plus system enhancements to streamline benefit administration for UK Bonus Sacrifice that led to employer National Insurance savings of £500k and 45% engagement.
• Lead Project Manager for most significant EMEA based project, removing 200 car leases and replacing with allowances. Negotiated with 5 Workers Councils and individuals and consulting with 6 Leasing Companies along with internal stakeholders such and Leadership, Legal, Procurement and Head of Human Resources and the Workday technical team.

Working within People Services as a Contractor, supporting the execution of the Total Rewards programs.

• Performed reward activities such as job evaluations, compensation planning and audits.
• Supported on annual activities based on benefit renewal decisions through Darwin and communicating updates to employees.
• Maintained local working instructions on manual processes, working with cross-functional team to ensure issues were resolved promptly.
• Contributed to team projects by providing key analytic insights and lessons learnt.
• Case management experience, handling large volumes of compensation and benefit employee enquiries.
• Led benefit harmonisation project for Nordic countries, implementing new vendor processes along with employee communications and webinars.

Managed £5m benefits program budget. Managed annual administration, responsible for enhancing provisions where commercially practical, increasing education in provisions, improving effectiveness of policies and processes.

• Led process mapping project for audit purposes ensuring ongoing compliance with a successful audit outcome. Feedback received was extremely positive.
• Project to change company healthcare provider fixing a tax issue, easing smooth transition between vendors, mitigated HMRC fines along with introducing new process safeguards to limit future risk. Supported the transition of new supplier and was key contact for the business for all issues, post-transition.
• Project to introduce salary sacrifice for pension contributions: Successfully collaborated with disengaged external stakeholders to support business changes, supported IT changes to payroll via requirements setting, creating and completing test scripts.
• Negotiated with Trade Unions on total reward and recognition projects.
• Provided clear communication around changes to benefits, minimising confusion amongst employees.

I had a number of roles, the key one being the main contact for a £10m+ benefits program budget for UK and Ireland. Supported on projects to enhance company provisions and managed the ongoing education to employees in addition to improving the effectiveness of policies and processes.

• Redesigned death benefit provisions to achieve significant business savings (over £2m).
• Regular status reporting to global centre of excellence on UK activities along with local business leads on how the savings would be reinvested.
• Successfully mobilised a large scale update to health and wellbeing range of benefits, Workstream Lead for products, starting with plan design, gap analysis. Project was well received by employees and Business Leads alike. Won an external award in 2017 for the strategy underpinning the wellbeing agenda.
• Key contact for all creating and managing employee benefit related communication campaigns, M&A and harmonisation activities.
• Oversaw logistics and operations to deliver process optimisations and efficiencies.