The Electricity North West Group of the Electricity Supply Pension Scheme is encouraging members of its defined contribution plan to join its engagement panel, as experts highlight how seeking member feedback can help with trustee decision-making.
Ensuring good levels of engagement can help boost retirement outcomes, from encouraging employees to increase their contributions, to raising awareness of pension scams to protect members from fraudsters.
It sounds like exactly the sort of thing every scheme should be doing
Rhys Williams, Quietroom
Member engagement can also benefit employers. Forty-four per cent of companies surveyed by Aegon and CBI said they believed stronger engagement would lead to better retention of employees, while more than a third think it would improve their ability to recruit.
There are several ways in which trustees can engage with members. The Pensions Regulator suggests running workshops and events, holding member annual meetings and creating focus groups or forums to ask for members’ views on certain aspects of the scheme.
The watchdog also suggests that larger, more complex pension plans might consider establishing “a regular member panel to represent the wider membership and provide feedback to the trustee board on particular issues”.
The Electricity North West scheme, which has 1,231 contributing members and 241 deferred members, is one of these schemes.
The plan has a member engagement panel and, according to its latest member newsletter, is encouraging staff to join.
DC members who are current employees are eligible to sit on the panel and do not need to have had any previous pensions experience.
“The panel consists of around 10 people, covering the DC membership across different areas of the company,” according to the newsletter.
It aims to meet twice a year and works closely with the pension team and DC subcommittee on any issues raised. The panel covers member communications, investment issues, retirement options and member support.
Members are given time to attend meetings and the scheme has said that any reasonable expenses are reimbursed.
Panels can help inform trustee decisions
Tim Middleton, technical consultant at the Pensions Management Institute, has not come across engagement panels, but says that it “seems a very logical thing to do”.
“Anything that is going to encourage higher standards of engagement, with the increasingly complex options available to people from DC schemes, has got to be a good idea,” he says.
Rhys Williams, strategy director at communications consultancy Quietroom, says engagement panels are quite common outside of pensions, adding that “there are things that are fairly commonplace in other worlds that are being imported to pensions”.
He notes that such panels are good for generating “insight, food for thought, viewpoints, opinions”, and “with a panel you can begin to evolve your relationship with [the members]”.
This often involves bringing together a steady representative sample of the target audience, with a view to using them as a source of suggestions or a testbed for ideas.
“It sounds like exactly the sort of thing every scheme should be doing,” Mr Williams adds.
