Legal and General has run an initiative to educate its 7,000 staff about the importance of saving for retirement as the first phase of its communications around auto-enrolment.
The insurance firm has an auto-enrolment staging date of April 2013. It has a defined benefit (DB) pension scheme, which was closed to new entrants in 2001 and has about 700 members. Most of its staff belong to a defined contribution (DC) stakeholder scheme. The scheme is compliant for auto-enrolment purposes, but about 600 employees have either not joined it or are currently not contributing enough.
Rosemary Lemon, group head of reward and executive remuneration at Legal and General, said: “We have a lot of staff in the DC scheme who don’t actually understand how it works. Rather than just go in with a new process for auto-enrolment, we wanted initiatives that would get staff thinking practically about what they want in retirement.”
The first phase, in partnership with Age UK, challenged staff to live on the state pension for one week. Almost 140 volunteers took part, and 12 wrote a daily blog about their experiences. The firm donated £70 to Age UK for each employee who took part.
More than half (55%) of participants said they wanted to make changes to their retirement plans as a result of the experiment.
The second phase of Legal and General’s auto-enrolment communication strategy will be a series of staff presentations about understanding their pension scheme, as well as the firm’s other workplace savings vehicles, including sharesave.
The third phase will comprise communications around what auto-enrolment means for employees. These will take place later this year and again before the firm’s April 2013 staging date.
See full details in September’s Workplace Savings Quarterly.
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