A pension no one understands is a wasted benefit

When it comes to pensions communications, choosing the right words is everything.

If you’re investing heavily in your workplace pension, but your employees don’t really understand what they are being told about it, that investment is being wasted.

Industry sometimes avoids saying that too directly. We talk about engagement rates, open rates and click-throughs. We reassure ourselves that communications have gone out, tools are available, and key messages have been “landed”. But a pension is one of the most valuable benefits an employer offers.

If people don’t know what action to take or feel intimidated by the way it’s explained, then the value of that benefit is leaking away.

That’s not because employees don’t care. It’s because pensions still sound too often like pensions.

What should matter to employers

The language we default to feels normal to us because we spend 40 hours a week talking about pensions. We explain things correctly, but not always clearly. We then act surprised when people put the email aside for later and never come back to it. For a busy employee who is not a pensions expert, “later” usually means “never”.

That should matter much more to employers than it sometimes does. They’re paying for a core part of their reward offering and want it to support retention, financial wellbeing and long-term security. But if the provider is speaking a language people do not understand, then employers aren’t getting the full value of that spend, and nor are employees.

That’s why the burden sits with providers. We can’t expect employees to become semi-experts before they can get value from their pension. Our job is to make the pension easier to understand, easier to engage with and easier to act on. God forbid, even entertaining at times.

Creating a blueprint

Regulation should really be the floor rather than the ceiling. Fidelity uses experts on accessible language, numeracy and behavioural science to help create a blueprint for communication standards that helps everybody make sense of their savings.

It means focusing less on whether we have included every possible detail, and more on whether someone reading the communication actually knows what matters and what they should do next. That is a very different standard.

Trust and recogntion

The more interesting journey is from regulatory compliance to genuine best practice in communication design, to creating member experiences that stand out for the right reasons. That’s how providers start producing communications that build trust, earn recognition and set a higher bar across the market.

But even then, content on its own will only take us so far. People are far more likely to internalise information when it’s explained in a way that feels relevant to their own life, goals and trade-offs. That is why clearer digital journeys, and better communications need to sit alongside human support, conversation and guidance where it really matters.

The question employers and providers should be asking more often is whether the pension is really delivering all the value it should if employees don’t understand what their pension provider is saying?

A technically accurate communication is not the same as an effective one. And when an employer is spending serious money on a pension benefit, “technically accurate” is nowhere near good enough.