I would start by saying that the most popular benefits today are very similar across Europe: additional healthcare coverage and pension plans.

What I find surprising is the low popularity of the public transportation benefit. I haven’t come across anyone asking about this in 5 years. I’m sure this will change in the next few years as public transportation improves.

When it comes to our business – When we started in 2015, I would have defined the benefit market as conservative and price driven; no more today! I see a major shift (and boom) for the better that started about 3 years ago. Perhaps the switch from paper to cards was a major catalyst for change?

Greece is the laboratory to test some crazy ideas. We are extremely far away from conservativism.We rolled-out the first cashback solution (“HeroCorp”) in Europe that has since been implemented in the Czech Republic and now France.

We just released the “Feed a Friend” service – meaning colleagues are now able to send back some money to their colleagues from meal card to meal card… Another feature that will be rolled-out in other countries I’m sure of it!

To conclude – I believe Benefits are becoming increasingly important in Greece-especially over the last few years.I do not see this trend stopping in the near future,on the contrary!

All crises bring their shares of misfortunes and opportunities. I believe the COVID crisis will have a lasting effect and major opportunities will be found in at least 3 fields:

• Digitalization of businesses (& transformation)
• Home working – and its impact how we work & live
• Importance of health (mind, body, access to healthcare)

For “Up Hellas” – the embodiment is none other than ‘UpFit”.

“UpFit” is our company sponsored multi gym sports and wellness membership. In a nutshell, the UpFit membership gives employees access to hundreds of gyms and other sports related activities across Greece.

Misfortunes from the beginning: We rolled-out this solution at beginning of 2020… However, with all gyms and sporting activities closing, we had to freeze out the solution. And with it our extremely high expectations for this solution.

Opportunities are around the corner: As our societies emerge from the pandemic, I believe some major questions will need to be answered:

a. Impact of regular physical training on our general Health

I believe the pandemic has shown the importance of having some sort of physical training on a regular basis. There will be a time where major decisions will need to be taken. I see a few interesting debates arising and one in particular: how to make sure senior citizens maintain physically active and the role of social security in providing such services for all. Sports has become a general health issue.

b. Employee health & work life balance

Businesses will want to promote a healthier lifestyle to their employees.This does not only include the “eating healthy” and “working-out” billboards – the issue is much broader.

It will include topics such as office layouts, policies on homeworking and office hours, the use of technology to help, govern and control… And of course, trying to solve the unsolvable equation of work-life balance as everything collides!

To conclude, “UpFit” will be a part of the solution to these big changes as it provides some answers to these issues.

This is a very tough question – as I believe people have very different answers to what happiness at work mean. For me happiness will stem from doing a work that brings value to the business and is therefore important. This is where technology can help greatly. Technology has the power to change process, to automatize tasks and render them invisible. This in turn means people will have a lot more time to think about how to continue enhancing businesses and their work life.

If I take “Up Hellas” as an example, we are working on many critical side projects that add great value to our business:

• business portal and card management platform for our corporate customers
• integrated chatbots in our mobile app for cardholder

These technologies driven solutions add value to our customers – but they do something even more important: they free time from some of our colleagues – time that they can now spend on further enhancing the customer experience, which frees more time and leads to an even better experience, resulting in everyone being happier.

I started writing a similar article on Linkedin on this very topic – and never got around to finishing it.

I think Greece has made huge advances since 2015, and even more so in the last year in the digitalization of most of its administrative processes. And it will only continue to improve.

That being said, I never felt lost or frustrated in the opening of Up Hellas. Sure, I have a few fun stories to say – and they might have been a bit frustrating at the time – but that is in the past and they show how much the country has improved since then.

To answer the question, my only recommendation would be to outsource the company creation to lawyers – don’t be afraid to hand out some POAs – they are handy!

For a working nomad… I can only show some amount of jealousy at being able to work while having all the time to discover this amazing country.