EXCLUSIVE: Ian Baines (pictured), head of pensions at Nationwide Building Society, is to discuss how employers can encourage and support staff to save more for their retirement at Employee Benefits Live 2017.
The session, titled ‘Boosting retirement prospects for employees’, will form part of the workplace pensions conference stream on Tuesday 10 October.
During the session, Baines will discuss how employers can influence employees to take ownership of their pensions. This will include a look at defined contribution (DC) pension structures and communication methods that organisations can employ to help staff be more engaged with managing their own retirement outcomes.
He will talk through the initiatives Nationwide implemented to help employees save more for retirement. These include moving to a contribution model which automatically defaults employees to the maximum, not minimum, contribution level, as well as its forthcoming launch of a pensions e-learning module to help employees improve their knowledge and understanding.
Baines will also discuss the importance of fun and creative staff communications, showcasing videos and films that helped Nationwide Building Society successfully implement the changes to its pension offering. These were designed to steer pensions conversations away from technicalities to instead look at retirement aspirations and lifestyles, which Nationwide Building Society promoted using poster and poem competitions. “What it did was it encouraged people to start talking about what retirement meant for them but not in the classic pound, shilling and pence; […], It was what people aspired to, [and] what they dreamed to,” he said.
“It’s really all about, against the backdrop of auto-enrolment, trying to encourage people to engage with their pension and save more. I’ll be talking about […] how [we have] gone about trying to engage with our employees and get them to take more ownership of their pension, save more into their pension, manage their pension more, look towards retirement in terms of what they’re on track for and whether that’s going to be enough.
“I’m giving a practitioner’s insight into how we’ve gone about trying to improve engagement with our employees and get them to do more, so some interesting behavioural nudges at play [that] might be interesting for others to hear about.”
Employee Benefits Live 2017 will take place on Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 October at Olympia National, London.
