Video tutorial: How to shift your thinking on workplace retirement savings

The workplace retirement savings market is changing fast. So how do you shift your thinking around such an issue to keep up with changing business and HR demands?

That was the question put to panelists on an ‘experts on the sofa’ discussion at the REBA Reward Leaders' Forum.

Watch the Experts on the Sofa: 'How to shift your thinking on workplace retirement savings' debate in full.

Peter Strudwick, pension and benefits partner at LV=, said it was important to not only help employees understand that they weren’t saving enough but to help their employers understand the scale of the problem too.

“The starting point for me is to understand across your employee base what do their long-term pension outcomes look like against a sensible target so you aren’t just looking at it in isolation – then you need to share that information out with them and say this is what good likes and this is how you get from A to B,” he said.

Graham Vidler, director of external affairs at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA), said that the state of the housing market was doing a number of things in relation to retirement saving. “It’s inhibiting people’s ability to save for retirement and indeed even to think about saving for retirement and it adds to people’s costs. The typical example of you enter retirement mortgage free isn’t going to be same in 15-20 years,” he said.

And Tim Sharp, pensions policy officer at TUC said there were further problems caused by the growing casualisation of the workforce. With regards to this he called for a need to “go back to basics and harness the inflexibility of the pension system,” he said.

The trio were joined on stage by Gavin Zaprzala-Banks, principal at Punter Southall Aspire who outlined the changing needs of new generations in the workforce.

This video tutorial was filmed at the REBA Reward Leaders' Forum which took place on 27 April 2017.