After three long days in Las Vegas, I’m fighting nodding off on the plane ride home. I have bags under my eyes and my allergies are acting up, but I am returning home the victor with the same amount of cash with which I departed – a victory for any business trip, but an unparalleled success when leaving the city of Lost Wages!
I return with not only my hard-earned money but pages upon pages of notes from the sessions and a follow-up list that’s a little sobering. For those of you not familiar with this conference, don’t fret, this is only its second occurrence. The nascent gathering is the prodigy of LRP –the folks behind Human Resource Executive magazine– and benefits communications guru, Jennifer Benz. Last year’s registration was incredibly discounted as they worked to draw in folks for the first event, but this year’s higher spending attendees proved this conference has legs for several years to come – come join us next year.
This year’s event was at Caesar’s Palace which was breathtaking if you could overlook the horrible torture of having to see 12 different hotel pools with their requisite sunbathers any time we looked out a window on break. The rumor is next year the conference will return to the Aria – so we’ll trade in bronzed bodies for puzzling modern art and uncomfortable chairs.
Hopefully you were all following our tweets from the sessions as there were a lot of insights passed out by the speakers. (If you missed out, why not take a second to follow us at @HRTechKaiser) Here’s a summary of three program highlights:
– One of the beginning sessions focused on retirement and featured Greg Long, Director of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, as part of a panel with some interesting thoughts:
- “Are employers paternalistic? They need to make that call,” said Long. That decision will impact their employee communications around retirement. The old non-paternalistic message was to tell a new retiree to take their money and go, rolling it over into an IRA or some other outside account. He believes that if employers today are paternalistic they may want to change that message to the employee now to: You’re better off if you leave your money in the plan and move to an annuity. The oversight and financial governance the plan sponsor offers outweighs the lack of ownership of the distribution.
- He also has designed the statements their participants receive to have the overall account balance in a small font but the same amount expressed as an annuity in a much more noticeable 3x font. This way the future retiree is called to consider “could I live on that amount a month?” and their experience was that overall deferrals increased following the statement changes. His point which is right in line with what we’ve heard from the behavioral finance folks: the overall account balance is so huge – typically the largest amount of money that employees have ever seen in one of their accounts. This can have the detrimental effect of lulling them into inaction or lethargy thinking that they have succeeded in their savings while, in fact, that amount is insufficient to fund a lengthy retirement. This is just one example of a lot of conversations around what role the employer has to protect vs. enable the employees with their health and wealth benefits.
– Another participant Laura Rowley, of the National Association of Retirement Plan Participants (NARPP), on that same panel had a newly collected set of data with some great insights as well from a behavioral finance perspective. They have data to show that as employees’ financial literacy increases, their deferral rate and size of retirement savings increase as well.
– JoAnne, my partner-in-crime for this trip, covered a different slate of sessions for our team. While she found two of the breakout sessions to be little more than sales sessions for the presenting vendors, there was one in particular that caught her attention:
- A session on Voluntary Benefits and Financial Security led by Donna Joseph, of Rhodes, Joseph & Tobiason Advisor, LLC discussed their research listed the top employee life needs from an employer perspective as:
- Health and Welfare
- Protection from financial catastrophe
- Retirement assets and income
– Because of this, they were seeing a movement to employer offerings through voluntary product offerings focused on:
- Financial counseling
- Identity protection
- Product purchase plans
- Legal services
- Auto and home insurance through payroll deductions
– The closing session was a self-described “riff” on topics by Jennifer Benz and Carol Harnett. With what was certainly a challenging task, they delivered a wide-ranging but thought provoking conversation mash-up on everything from economic class division to their tips for staying “trend spotters.”
- Both speakers did a great job of keeping the focus on all employees – not just the white-collared HR group in the room. They kept the increasing financial pressures facing the average worker in the forefront of conversations as they see greater class divides possible as employers shift more retirement and health ownership (caveat emptor) to employees. No one has the employee’s trust in these situations like the employer to be watching out for them.
- Another interesting point they relayed: 44% of employees either in stressful and distracting care-giving role or just coming out of one. This is one of many datapoints quoted during the conference from Eliza Corp and their research into the Vulnerability index. This topic (with what sounded like some expansion by another party into Magnifiers and Buffers of Resilience) is at the top of my follow-up list. It sounds like highly relevant research for those of us managing people and teams.
This is in no way a full accounting of the interesting and exceptional speakers and topics from this year’s conference. These three sessions jumped out from our notes as enough insight-filled that we wanted to relay them as quickly as possible. You can always holler out to us with any particular questions based upon what you might have seen on our twitter feed or we’ll keep posting additional thoughts as we cull our notes for pearls of missed wisdom. Please feel free to leave any comments using the link connected to this article or e-mail me any time at mkaiser@lockton.com.