It relaunched its group personal pension (GPP) scheme in July 2013 with a new provider, Friends Life, to comply with auto-enrolment legislation ahead of its August 2013 staging date. Its employees are auto-enrolled on a minimum 3% contribution, although they are encouraged to increase this voluntarily to at least 5%. The organisation matches contributions up to a maximum of 8%.
Oliver Polson, pensions manager, UK and Ireland, at Molson Coors, says: “We don’t force employees because we’re conscious of not wanting to scare them off. Our view is, especially with the younger staff, that it’s much better to get them in [to the scheme] and gradually get them to increase their contributions rather than them being knocked out straight away and never being engaged.”
To boost staff understanding around pension contributions and what these mean for their retirement funds, Molson Coors offers an online modelling tool to demonstrate the impact of different contribution levels. It also intends to launch a communications campaign to help staff understand their annual pension statements.
Polson says the organisation will also target specific sections of its workforce with future communications. “We are going to do a targeted campaign for younger employees around pay review time on the impact of increasing their contributions by just 1%,” he says.
The organisation has also carefully considered the language that will be used in this. “Rather than talking in percentage terms, we are going to talk in pound terms because some feedback we’ve had is that staff don’t listen if we talk about percentages,” says Polson. “They just think about their net pay packet. We’re trying to make it more real to them.”
Molson Coors actively monitors its employees’ contribution levels and has already seen a 10% rise in the proportion of scheme members who are paying in the maximum matched contribution levels or above.
It has set a target to increase the proportion of staff contributing at least 5% by 10% over the next year.
