Contract caterer Elior is preparing for a series of peaks during the initial stages of going live with auto-enrolment in July, due to the seasonal nature of its work in the sports industry.
The company, which employs 10,000 people, expects to auto-enrol 5,500 workers in the summer. Due to its operations in the stadia business – providing catering and hospitality services at sporting venues – it is preparing for a hike in numbers during season time.
Justin Johnson, head of HR operations and people services at Elior, said it was likely to see a spike in the number of employees in July and during September and October.
"With the football season ramping up again towards the end of this year, we’re likely to spike in terms of the initial auto-enrolment in July – both weekly and monthly payrolls," he said.
"But we anticipate a further peak in September/October time when, obviously, we bring in the casual workers that we engage with in that particular area of the business."
Around 40 per cent of its staff work on a "zero hour", casual basis, Johnson told delegates at the National Employment Savings Trust Live event yesterday. He said this presented particular challenges for auto-enrolment.
Elior has a group personal pension plan with Friends Life, but is set to use Nest for auto-enrolment. Out of its 10,000 employees, just 400 are members of its current defined contribution scheme.
“It’s not that we don’t go out and promote it, we do. But it’s just the nature of our organisation,” Johnson said.
How to test your AE systems
The company has about “six or seven” schemes in total, including an arrangement for workers that have transferred from the public sector to Elior, which aims to replicate the pension benefits they would have received in their former job, delegates heard.
Testing systems was a key part of preparing for auto-enrolment, Johnson said. Like many employers, Elior took the three-month postponement option to give itself more time to get ready and to reduce the cost-impact on the company.
Highlighting the importance of testing, he said it did a payroll run for all new starters and found that the system drew out people that had left the organisation. “So we were potentially sending staging date letters to those people in that pay period that had just left, so you need to be aware of what the system is doing,” he added.
Jonathan Dowden, product manager at Sage, also told delegates that effective payroll administration was key in helping employers navigate their way through auto-enrolment.
Using a payroll system already in place at a company for auto-enrolment purposes could make the process easier for staff, he added.
“Using payroll means that the actual tasks your staff have to do and administrators have to do will be a lot easier to pick up if they are using that within a product they’re already very familiar with,” said Dowden.
During the event, Nest announced it was working with 26 more employers, taking the number of participating members in the scheme up to 100,000. Some of the new names include sports retailer Foot Locker and universities such as Southampton, Glasgow and Manchester.
