07 Mar 2022
Recent research by financial platform Mintago who polled a total of 436 people in the UK who were all employed full time and between the ages of 18-34, confirmed a third believed their job performance is being harmed by financial concerns whereas only 9% of employees aged 55 and up shared this sentiment. The survey also found that 48% believe their employment pension to be a valuable benefit though 51% have no idea how much they pay into their pension each month. The research showed that 66% of young workers do not check on their pension savings regularly and overall, the majority of people (54%) feel that saving for retirement is difficult.
This dispels the myth that employees are not interested in financial planning or their workplace pension. In fact younger staff have more financial concerns than mature employees. This shows just auto enrolling employees into workplace pension schemes is inappropriate.
It is therefore important employers have a coherent communication strategy providing information and education to employees in respect of the workplace pension and wider financial planning. It always surprises me that for many employers, their biggest spend on employee benefits is their employer pension contributions but this is usually the benefit which is the least promoted or understood by staff.
At Wingate Benefit Solutions we provide employers with member guides in plain English to promote this benefit. We can undertake Pension presentations and individual financial wellbeing workshops to provide employees with the tools to deal with and allay their financial concerns. We can also provide individual member clinics with a 20-30 minute meeting for each employee and also bespoke reports for those who complete our questionnaire which contains the following information:
- projection of all pensions to retirement and a total fund value
- confirms income which could be generated by this fund value
- confirms state pension amount
- an aggregated annual income combining private pension income & state pension income
- confirms if there is an income shortfall compared to what the employee wants to receive at retirement
- confirms the additional monthly contribution required to remove the shortfall
- the cost of delaying increasing monthly contributions by 3 years
The Mintago’s research also showed 60% of younger employees would be more engaged with their pension if it was easy to track savings and alter contributions. 55% want their employer to do more to improve employee participation in their workplace pension plan. To help address these issues, in the second quarter of this year Wingate will be launching a new online service, Wingate Engage, which will enable employees to:
- Connect all their different pensions in one place without need to transfer
- View real time values of all their different pension plans in one online portal
- Include other investments or savings earmarked to support income in retirement
- Online process to add new pension plans to portal
- The ability to locate old pension schemes, so there are not ‘lost’
- Shows benefits of salary exchange where employer adds NI saving to contribution
- Employees can see if they are on track to achieve their retirement income goals
- Encourages employee engagement on workplace pension
- Shows impact of employee increasing contributions by £ or %
- Automated process to notify HR of increases in contribution employee wishes to make to pension
- Provides employees with realistic projections on the value of their pension savings
- Easy for employee to ask advisers questions (reducing burden on employer HR teams)
- Employee booking facility for 121 with adviser who can use system assist, advise and support
If you would be interested in improving the financial wellbeing of your employees and/or getting better value from your pensions spend, please get in touch.
