November is Financial Literacy Month in Canada. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Economic Education, the Investor Education Fund and other groups are making great strides with initiatives intended to improve financial skills and knowledge in schools, communities and workplaces. That’s a good thing. For plan sponsors, financial literacy is seen […]
Let’s face it: no one really wants to spend precious time reading about their pension and benefit plans. Pensions and benefits are boring, and sometimes downright depressing. To make matters worse, the content is often beyond the literacy skills of the plan members we’re trying to reach.
In the world of pensions and benefits, members face two kinds of surprises. There’s the bad kind, such as when they discover they’ve missed a claim submission deadline, or their retirement income isn’t what they thought it would be. And there’s the good kind—which includes things like realizing they’re covered for a medical expense they thought they’d have to pay for, or their retirement income is better than expected.
Every organization is unique. If you want to understand the best ways to communicate with your employees, you need to ask them. That said, your employees don’t know what they don’t know.
If you were asked how long you think you’ll live, you’d probably do a quick mental scan of your grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and other family members. Will you be like your maternal grandmother, who survived to 102—outliving several of her own children? Or, will you inherit the heart problems that cut your father’s life short?
If you’re a pension or benefits plan sponsor, you need a documented communication policy. Why? Not because it’s a legal requirement. And not just to check off another item on your best practices to-do list—although having a formal communication policy is a broadly accepted industry best practice.
Your best employees are likely motivated by more than just money. That’s not to say they don’t care how much they’re paid or whether they have a good pension and benefits program. But sustained commitment to high performance takes more than monetary rewards. To succeed in a high-performance environment, today’s organizations need to figure out how to tap into the intrinsic motivators of their people.
The holidays are a magical time. For many of us, they offer a period of reflection, renewal and planning for the coming year. It’s a chance to ask ourselves if there’s anything we did over the past year that we can do better in the year ahead. Or, maybe there are things we didn’t get around to—things we can put on our wish list for the new year.
Academic research in behavioural economics and psychology is changing how we understand our pension and benefit plan members’ decision-making process, and how we communicate with them. Popularized by the 2008 book Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, behavioural economics has been making huge advances—especially in the United Kingdom, where the Cabinet Office established a Behavioural Insights Team in 2010.
If you’re having trouble getting your plan members to understand and appreciate their pension benefits, ask yourself this: Do you celebrate your pension plan? Do you make it a BIG deal?