For more than a decade, the pensions industry has been trying to crack engagement. Communication budgets have grown and member portals have been rebuilt and rebuilt again, employing the latest in behavioural nudges, targeted segmentation and AI-enabled personalisation. And yet the dial has barely moved.
The diagnoses touted at industry events are familiar: the communications are not clear enough, the technology is not good enough, we are fighting an uphill battle as the members are not interested enough. And, despite us continuing to solve for these, engagement remains a problem.
So there has to be more to it. What are we missing? There are two areas less frequently discussed: who is in the room when the comms get written, and where the member is sitting when they read them.
Around eight out of 10 UK workers pay basic rate tax. However, the people who write the pensions communications, design the engagement strategies and sign off the member journeys, almost certainly do not. This unintended mismatch between pension providers and their audience has the potential for very real, and very unhelpful, consequences. Things get lost in translation.
Perhaps because the inequality is uncomfortable, this lack of diversity often gets overlooked. Yet employees living in a lower income bracket world will have fundamentally different financial realities, decision-making horizons and priorities from those who are designing the materials and therefore different arguments and approaches are likely to be warranted. Are communications road-tested appropriately, to ensure they are speaking the native language of 80 per cent of their audience? Until the answer is yes, we are missing a trick.
Culture sets the conditions for engagement
Engagement is not a behaviour that can be isolated, diagnosed, treated and cured. It is a downstream symptom of an employee’s day-to-day environment. It is very difficult for anyone to make long-term decisions inside short-term cultures. If their day-to-day experience of work is anxious, transactional or attritional, no pensions communication, however beautifully designed, will land.
When workplace culture is psychologically safe, when it is reliably consistent in how it treats people, there is scope for members to look up and look out. Members are able to engage with long-term questions once their working life has set the tone, giving them reasons to think in those terms. Even the most brilliantly apposite pension communication cannot create engagement, unless the culture around it does too.
Across more than two hundred interviews of senior financial services professionals for my On Motivation book series, the pattern is consistent. Behaviour follows culture. Culture follows leadership. Those firms whose people engage with their pensions are likely to be the firms whose people engage with everything else, because the underlying conditions are right. The variation in member outcomes across employer populations is not random: it correlates with culture, and with whether people feel they have any structural reason to plan for the long term.
Making it measurable
Corporate advisers, EBCs and IGCs are already comfortable measuring what matters. Value for money has become a rigorous discipline and Consumer Duty readiness has been written into governance frameworks; both took concerted industry effort and significant debate to embed. Representation and Culture should be next.
Start with the demographic and economic composition of the teams designing your pensions communications. If the gap between communicator and audience is significant, the comms are working uphill to reach the member; what steps are being taken to bridge the gap? Then ask employers a harder question than ‘Have you launched the new portal?’ Ask whether their culture gives employees the confidence — for structural reasons — to think about thirty years from now. Culture is notoriously difficult to assess, but the more we ask the question about cultural conditions in employer populations, the sooner the challenge of assessment will be seriously addressed and solved: how do you measure and maximise workplace psychological safety, stability, trust?
The engagement deadlock has cost the industry the better part of a decade and a great deal of money. It is unlikely to be solved by yet another communications campaign or AI-enabled nudge. It will start to shift in the firms that recognise the problem is upstream of the comms, and that the communications have been written, for the most part, by people who do not share the financial reality of the audience they are trying to reach.
Here’s one question to take into your next employer review. In the rooms where this scheme’s communications are being designed, whose financial life is being represented, and whose is being assumed? The advisers who can answer it honestly have a fighting chance of closing the gap. The rest will keep funding initiatives that have already had their decade.
Jenny Segal is member of Aviva’s Independent Governance Committee, chief investment officer at Nesta Trust, workplace culture expert and author of the On Motivation book series.
