When a company grows, many things that at first worked in a simple way start to get complicated. The people management is one of them. What with a small team, this can be handled with manual processes, scattered tools, or standalone solutions, but it becomes a burden as the number of employees increases.
That is exactly what began to happen at Refinery89, an AdTech company based in Madrid with more than 70 employees, specialized in helping publishers monetize their advertising inventory and helping advertisers maximize their campaigns in Europe and Latin America.
As the company grew, its traditional employee-benefits model began to feel too small. Not because benefits were lacking, but because management was increasingly decentralized and became less convenient for both HR and the people who had to use them.
The challenge, therefore, was not simply to offer more benefits. Refinery89 needed something far more important: to make them easy to manage, understand and use.
From multiple processes to a single platform
The solution arrived from Pluxee, a leading employee-benefits company with industry-standard technology, and specifically, with its multi-benefit solution Cobee by Pluxee, a platform that enables centralizing different employee benefits in a single environment.
The objective was twofold. On one hand, to simplify the operational burden of the Human Resources department. On the other, to improve the employee experience by avoiding the need to switch between different tools or procedures to manage their benefits.
From the app, employees can access a range of flexible-reward options, including meals, transportation, health insurance, or physical wellbeing. Each person can choose which benefits best fit their needs and personal circumstances.
That personalization component is especially relevant for any small business. Not all employees value the same things or have the same priorities. For one person, transportation may be important, while another may place greater value on health insurance or certain wellness-related options.
Rather than designing a rigid package for the entire workforce, the company provides an environment where each worker can tailor part of their experience.
That the employee knows what they have and how much they save
There is also a simple but important detail: making benefits visible. One of the common problems with compensation plans is that the company may be making an investment that the employee ends up perceiving as little value. If using a benefit is complicated or the worker doesn’t know exactly what is available, its value is diluted.
With the Cobee by Pluxee app, each person can check how much budget remains, how it is distributed among the various options, and how much they have saved.
“Every time I log in I can see how much budget I have left, how it’s distributed across the different benefits and how much I’ve saved so far this month. That helps me organize my expenses better,” explains Néstor Rodríguez, Senior Business Development LATAM at Refinery89.
The company also gains visibility. HR has a dashboard from which they can monitor benefit usage, handle hires and terminations, and measure the plan’s ROI.
The adoption data: nearly 90%
A platform may include many features, but in this kind of project there is one metric that ends up being decisive: that employees actually use it.
In Refinery89’s case, about 90% of the employees in Spain currently use the platform.
That is especially meaningful because one of the main risks of implementing a new internal tool is precisely lack of adoption.
“Since we implemented Cobee by Pluxee, the reception has been very positive. I think it would be very noticeable if tomorrow we stopped having it,” says Anaakai Dall’Orso, HR Manager at Refinery89.
The company considers that the system has thus become an important part of its employee value proposition.
Less HR administration, more autonomy for the workforce
For a small business, one of the most interesting aspects of the case is the reduction in administrative load.
Small and medium-sized enterprises don’t always have large HR teams. In many cases, a few people must handle recruitment, hiring, administration, payroll, training, and employee support all at once.
Centralizing the management of benefits helps reduce part of that operational work. At Refinery89, HR now has all the information in a single platform, simplifying tasks that used to be more fragmented.
At the same time, the employee gains autonomy. They can directly check their benefits, monitor the available budget, and manage their own options without continually relying on HR.
For a growing company, that combination is particularly attractive: less administrative work on one hand and a simpler experience for the employee on the other.
Benefits as a tool to retain talent
The case also shows how benefits management can go beyond a simple pay raise.
Refinery89 believes the platform has helped strengthen its bond with the company and improve adoption of its benefits model. “Getting people to choose you every day, among all the factors they may value, is something very important when it comes to working,” summarizes Anaakai Dall’Orso.
The insight is especially valid for SMEs, which often compete for talent with organizations that can offer higher salaries or larger professional structures.
In that scenario, factors such as flexibility, wellbeing or a great employee experience can become differentiators.
Refinery89 also highlights Pluxee’s ongoing platform evolution as a positive aspect of the project. The tool adds new functionalities and improvements designed to make it easier to use. “They’re continually improving it and increasingly offering new tools to make it easier and more intuitive,” explains the company’s HR manager.
And perhaps this is another valuable takeaway from the case: for a SME, digitizing a process should not just mean replacing a spreadsheet with an application. The real improvement happens when technology eliminates tasks, provides useful information, and eases the work for both the person who administers the system and the person who uses it.
At Refinery89, the move from a decentralized benefits model to a single platform has simplified management and, at the same time, achieved an adoption rate near 90% of the workforce.
This is an example of how a seemingly administrative task can also become a tool to improve the employee experience and strengthen a company’s ability to attract and retain talent.
