When Ford Motor Company moved to a master trust in April 2022, explaining the changes to people at pensions roadshows was a priority.
Oliver Payne, international pensions and data analytics manager at Ford and founder of the Reinventing Pensions event, explains: “The reason for that is you get people’s focused attention. No matter how well you write a letter or e-mail, there is always something else competing for someone’s attention while they’re reading it. When they’re in a room, you’ve got a chance of getting 100% of their attention.”
It is much easier to convey passion for a subject in person than in writing, says Payne. It is also possible to read the room and adjust language.
Ford Motor Company, which employs around 7,000 people in the UK, had some great results from its roadshows, says Payne. “Across our sites, we talked to around 1,500 people in total,” he explains. “We explained that we’ve changed our pension plan to a master trust and we introduced a new, what we call a top tier, contribution rate. So, if the employee contributes 8% or more, Ford will contribute 12%.
“We looked at the data from the roadshows and it looks like 400 people went away after those sessions and said, ‘Yes, I want to contribute more’, that works out at an average of around £2,500 pounds extra a year that those people are putting into their pensions, including the Ford match. In the face of the cost-of-living crisis and ongoing high inflation, we take that as a really big win.”
Communicating changes is part of any pensions manager’s job. Payne co-founded Reinventing Pensions as a way to get together with other pensions managers, exchange ideas and share new pensions innovations they have seen.
“It’s been a great way to push us to be more creative and to challenge the standard things that we do,” says Payne. “Within the pensions world, [we are] so restricted by legislation and historic practice, which can push [us] down quite a narrow funnel. Whereas in the Reinventing Pensions world we start with a blank sheet of paper and sketch out how we would do things if we weren’t restricted. by everything else. And then invite challenge to new ideas. This leads to some really interesting and creative discussions plus helps us to arrive at conclusions very quickly.”