April 6, 2011

People who need people

Filed under: Blog — Grove @ 12:15 pm

I realised this morning that I’m just starting my 31st year working with company pension schemes! Crikey.

If pensions aren’t your thing, or if you have the perception as many do, that they’re overly technical and just a little bit dull, you might wonder how I’ve managed to stay interested for so long?

Well, I’ve given it some thought but actually, not much was needed. The reason I’m still here is that, when you get beneath the acronyms, jargon, technical and regulatory complexity, company pension schemes are about people, plain and simple. They’re about;

  • Building high quality relationships with your most important resource; your people.
  • Facilitating dignity and choice for your people as their need or desire to work, full or part time, diminishes.
  • Reducing the likelihood, now that you can no longer compel people to retire on the grounds of age, of people with declining interest and motivation clinging on to their employment with you simply because they can’t afford to do anything else.

Over the last 25 years we (via our elected representatives) have lost our way. The generation of well pensioned employees has just retired. A great many of them were compulsorily enrolled into high quality company pension schemes. Auto-enrolment (or as it was then, the ability to include compulsory pension scheme membership in the contract of employment) was removed from employers in the 1986 Social Security Act. This was to enable employees to break the chains (you may remember the advert?) of company pension provision and be free to access all the wonderful things that the private sector would offer through Personal Pensions.

What actually happened, particularly for employees of smaller firms, was that more than just the chains of company pension provision were broken. The chains of long term saving were broken too. We spent and borrowed instead.

At least the government has at last remembered the power of workplace relationships in influencing behaviour. The auto-enrolment regulations taking effect next year are essential to the revival of the long term saving ethic.

Now is the time for employers to revisit their pay and benefit structures and decide whether they grudgingly accept the new requirements and outsource as much of the work as possible, or really engage and seize the opportunity that auto-enrolment offers to positively influence the lives of their employees.

So, 30 years have passed. I’ve still got at least another decade to go and I’m feeling positive about it. I like people, I like company pensions and a new era is dawning. Bring it on, I say.

People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world – Barbara Streisand, 1964.

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