During Benefits Canada’s annual DC Plan Summit, plan sponsors participated in interactive sessions. They split into small groups and were given questions to discuss. Based on these discussions, moderators later offered their insights and relayed key take-aways.
Ofelia Isabel, Canadian leader, rewards, talent and communication with Towers Watson shares the best ideas from the question she moderated: What are the best practices that leading organizations follow on design, investments and communication?
One theme we encountered was that the information that we’re putting out around our plans is often intimidating and boring. Almost everyone acknowledged that not only are they really not surprised that employees don’t read it all, but a lot of us haven’t. There are risks that we need to be aware of, but I don’t think there’s anything in the legislation that says the document needs to be 30 pages of heavy text. Make it simple; less can be more.
CALL TO ACTION
- Use lessons from our marketing colleagues—pick one message that we really want to get out there. Make it fun and engaging.
- Use employees to engage other employees; if an employee says “You should really check out this video,” that can become viral very quickly.
- When bringing in a retiree to talk about the plan, don’t just bring in the retiree who got it right, bring in the one who didn’t pay attention. That could be powerful.
Watch more videos:
