An hour-long retirement plan enrolment session with an employee might be doing more harm than good.
The secret to Jim Micak’s satisfaction with his benefits plan is an employee survey. The president and CEO of DPRA Canada and corporate director of DPRA Inc., a software solutions company with offices across Canada and the U.S., says he would stop being happy with the plan offerings when his employees told him they weren’t satisfied.
People don’t consciously control a lot of their behaviour. For plan sponsors, this is frustrating, because getting employees engaged in benefits and retirement plans is all about behaviour change.
Whether you’re overhauling your corporate culture, reinventing your brand or integrating lines of business, a well-communicated realignment of your pension and benefits program can serve as a powerful catalyst and springboard for introducing broader organizational change.
Over the past 73 years, the Co-operative Superannuation Society Pension Plan (CSS plan) (No. 60 on Benefits Canada’s 2012 Top 100 Pension Funds Report) has weathered many storms. Since its launch in 1939, global markets have been rocked by a number of economic crises, and most pension plans have seen their assets rise and fall sharply as a consequence.
At the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAAT) Pension Plan (No. 29), those charged with overseeing the retirement savings of nearly 34,000 plan members from participating Ontario colleges aim to respond to changes before they happen. And they try to be as transparent as possible with members when changes to the plan are deemed necessary.
Results from the 2012 Sanofi Canada Healthcare Survey suggest that opportunities exist for plan sponsors to better educate and engage plan members, according to a member of the survey team.
Workplaces today are filled with a generational jumble of four different age groups: veterans, baby boomers, generation X and generation Y. And the different dynamics of these groups have employers scrambling to find tactics to engage and inform them all.
After years of declining employee engagement levels around the world, it looks like there’s a positive shift coming in, according to research by Aon Hewitt.
Plan members are busy people. In our hyper-connected world, many employees struggle with information overload. With that in mind, it's a good idea to ask yourself how clearly and concisely you’re communicating with them.