Whitbread has seen an increase in the number of employees that were not eligible for auto-enrolment joining its pension scheme since it began communicating the reform.
Speaking at Pensions Week’s UK Leadership of Pensions Summit on Thursday, the hospitality group’s pensions manager Lesley Williams said there had been a big uptick in people not eligible for auto-enrolment joining the pension scheme.
“Our biggest success is when we look at people that weren’t automatically enrolled, or weren’t in the [auto-enrolment] population, and we look at the number of new joiners we’ve had as a result of fundamentally changing the way we communicate with people,” she said.
This sentiment was echoed by pensions minister Steve Webb, who reported in his keynote speech an increase in the number of employees under the age of 22 looking to join workplace pensions.
The employer's previously reported low-key approach to communicating auto-enrolment was vindicated as the hotelier and owner of Costa Coffee experienced an opt-out rate of 4 per cent among its 18,000 eligible employees.
The group used email as much as possible, due in part to the logistics of communicating with 40,000 people. Williams added the success came when the scheme surveyed its members about how they felt after the auto-enrolment process.
“Most said, ‘Great, thanks, we have a pension scheme, we trusted our employer, they put us in a scheme, we didn’t really have any communications about it or we missed it, but we are happy with what we got, so we aren’t going to opt out,'” she added.
The language used in the campaign was intentionally simpler than that of the Pensions Regulator. Due to the large numbers of employees who did not have English as a first language, materials were kept at a lower reading level.
Neil Latham, principal at Punter Southall, told the delegates to “build a comms strategy that suits your business.” He has been surprised by the fact that smaller companies are asking the consultancy to come and speak to their employees to answer their questions about the reform.
“[Face-to-face discussions] are not possible for large, multi-site employers. So they have to go email, if everyone is on email – which is another challenge for large employers,” he said. “But for smaller employers, perhaps the communications challenge is less significant but they want to do it at a higher standard.”
