Two years ago, Moderna was a local Massachusetts biotech company with roughly 800 employees and little consumer recognition. Today, its successful COVID-19 vaccine has turned Moderna into a household name — and a global organization with 3,000 employees.
That team is now managing a pipeline of 44 different drugs, experiencing the kind of exponential growth that brings just as many challenges to a company as it does opportunities. That’s certainly been true for Erin Sarin, Moderna’s senior director of global benefits, who joined the company in 2021 and dove headfirst into delivering
“We’ve grown in every way possible — from people and capabilities and manufacturing and sales and regulatory, you name it,” Sarin says. “We’re scaling just about everything all at the same time, and building a business that can support 3,000 employees now, as well as a very healthy talent pipeline.”
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A close connection to the communities Moderna operates within is vital to delivering effective benefits, she says — especially as Moderna is working to
Sarin recently spoke with EBN to discuss the many ways Moderna is using its benefit programs to prioritize culture and employee support, especially as it continues to grow its reach and its team.
It’s safe to say Moderna’s had an intense couple of years.
We very quickly became a company with a product that needed to be manufactured to support the lessening of the spread of coronavirus, and that really turned us —almost overnight — into a global organization. I joined Moderna in June 2021, and we were in three countries at the time. Now we’re in 13, and we’ll enter another nine before July.
How do you keep up with that kind of growth as a benefits leader?
When I joined the organization, I did a little listening tour, and I made sure to meet with every single
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What were some of those insights you learned from that listening tour?
When I joined, we were already building on what had become a world-class program with extremely comprehensive leave and medical programs. So it was more about understanding the nuances of how people interact with benefits, and if there are barriers to care, what those are, whether cost or access or meeting a diversity need. We got into that level of detail which was very surprising to me. It wasn’t about requesting more vacation days or talking about a 401(k) match — it was a really thoughtful approach from people who are really engaged with their benefits.
That kind of engagement with and awareness of benefits is definitely not the norm across most employee populations. What do you attribute that to?
We’ve grown so rapidly that we’ve had the opportunity to get in front of a lot of our employees, and train managers and business partners and our talent acquisition folks. It’s very different when you’re working with an organization where a bunch of people have been enrolled in the same program for 10 years. Everybody is new, everyone is excited, and that lends itself to a really engaged population.
What are some of the more popular programs Moderna offers?
We have a program called the lifestyle spending account, which is essentially a spending card an employee can use on their own fitness and nutrition, and we also have a personal enrichment benefit, which is an annual allowance that lets people do everything from take a language class to become a yoga instructor — just find new ways to take care of themselves.
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Two years ago, things like fertility benefits and comprehensive parental leave programs were the “in” thing, or the way you could market yourself as being an inclusive employer. But those things, they’re table stakes now. So it’s exciting to see benefits elevated.
As the company grows geographically, how are you keeping up with those nuanced needs of workers outside your own community?
We’ve gone from a really local type of advisory support that was Massachusetts-focused, to a more global strategy where we’re making sure that the benefits we execute locally are culturally appropriate. We use the help of global benefit providers to understand the individual market preferences and trends.
The other piece that kind of builds off my listening-tour philosophy is, typically, the first couple of folks we hire within any given country have some sort of leadership capability and is responsible for that country’s success. So I make a point to build a relationship with those people so we can work on what benefits will look like in year one versus what we’re striving for in year two or three, and what the value proposition is when we’re going out and trying to attract talent in Japan, for example. We need to be sensitive to unique needs — it’s easy to fall into a pattern where the U.S. is headquarters, but we treat every single country we operate in as if there were a thousand employees there.
