When recruitment firm Monster started preparing for auto-enrolment, its senior director for human resources, Claire Lock, got a bit of a shock.
“We’d been offering a generous pension scheme but only 41% of staff had signed up,” she explains. “Employees didn’t really understand its value or the implications of not saving for the future.”
To change this, the organisation introduced a workplace savings platform, Aon’s Bigblue portal, in June 2014. As well as detailing all of its employee benefits, this includes a financial management tool that allows employees to get an overview of their finances. “Employees can import everything, including their savings, credit cards and mortgages and see their net worth. It will also analyse spending and savings habits, which can be a real eye opener,” Lock adds. “I’ve already increased my pension contributions on the back of the information it gave me on my retirement income.”
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And she’s not the only one. Ninety-eight per cent of the firm’s 280 employees are now members of its pension scheme and, while auto-enrolment will have helped drive this, 78% also log on to the portal and 72% have taken advantage of its salary sacrifice arrangements. “We’re really pleased with this level of engagement,” Lock says. “It was important for us to help employees gain a better understanding of their finances and be a differentiator in the market.”