Employee Education Challenges

This past spring, OneAmerica conducted a survey of retirement plan sponsors to better understand their plan design priorities and participant education trends. In this blog, we are highlighting one of the survey topics: challenges with employee communications.

The number one employee communications challenge for Plan Sponsors was that their employees were not reading their communications.

Though technology has made it easier than ever to communicate with all employees, our research suggests that employees are more likely to be engaged when they can receive relevant messages through a medium that resonates with their preferred learning style. In other words, the message and the media need to fit the audience.

One approach is to segment your employees. Understanding your organization’s demographics allows you to send targeted messages to different employee groups like those who are not participating in the plan, by age or by location.

Another way to promote employee education is to vary your message mediums. Offering short videos or podcast links in your newsletter or emails may resonate stronger with different learning styles or age groups.

To help address these communication challenges, OneAmerica offers an online toolbox that includes short engaging videos, podcasts, interactive calculators and guides. You have the ability to include links to specific videos or podcasts in your communications or to showcase at an employee meeting. Within this resource center are five different categories of topics, so you can target messages to your specific employee groups. For example,

• You can show the Reasons to Enroll in your Retirement Plan video from Peter Dunn, a.k.a. Pete the Planner® during an onboarding session with a new employee.
• If you have a larger group of employees who are closer to retirement, you may want to incorporate Peter Dunn’s Mock Retirement podcast link in a targeted email.

We encourage you to visit the online toolbox and download the offerings for your employees to view, listen or read on demand.

NOTE: Provided content is for overview and informational purposes only and is not intended and should not be relied upon as individualized tax, legal, fiduciary, or investment advice.