Pension schemes need to see if their comms are treating some members more equally than others.
The hidden gap in your engagement measurements
People who run pension schemes commonly try out communications by showing them to a panel of members. This can be a really useful thing to do in some situations. But if this is a self-selecting panel, then you’re talking to people who are by definition interested in the subject. So the responses you get are unlikely to be representative of the whole workforce.
But another, perhaps less obvious, pitfall is to be biased towards desk-based employees. You might not be doing this on purpose. But if you’re measuring email open rates, attendance at webinars, or updated nomination forms, your results might be heavily skewed towards people who had the opportunity to engage with those channels. And those are likely to be your office workers.
1 in 3 members could be getting a bad deal
The Office for National Statistics figures suggest that around 12 million people – 38% of the UK workforce – are in non-desk-based jobs. Timewise estimates there are 10.5 million ‘frontline’ workers. Both figures are proxies based on occupation type, not a literal headcount of who has no desk.
Of course for each scheme this percentage will vary. But it’s not just a case of thinking of 2 segments: desk-based or deskless. The circumstances of the deskless workers can be very diverse, including within the workforce of a single company.
The diversity of desklessness
At a recent Quietroom breakfast, we heard from 9 different schemes that all have a significant proportion of deskless members. Across retail, transport, manufacturing and utilities, the situation of those members varies hugely:
- Some have no work email address. Some do but don’t use it.
- Some use tablets for their work, so are highly digitally connected.
- Some have access to an employee app – well-used because it has the work roster on it.
- Some always check the noticeboard when they clock in.
- Some rely on informal, on-site pension reps to answer basic questions.
- Others responded in their hundreds to a pensions message pushed through the intranet feed – because that’s what staff already scroll through on their lunch breaks.
So, schemes should be careful not to make assumptions about what messages, formats or channels will or won’t work for their members, or that everyone wants the same thing. They need to find out what channels are popular, what medium resonates, what questions members have, and how all of those vary across the workforce. If your deskless workers include drivers and divers, don’t assume they all need the same solution.
DC schemes are not reporting on their diverse workforces
Are schemes considering this diversity of needs? We looked for some evidence, taking a random sample of 10 DC scheme governance statements across sectors with significant non-desk workforces, including transport, hospitality, catering, construction, logistics and retail, plus some office-based sectors for comparison.
In each case, where member engagement was reported at all, it was as a single overall figure or a general qualitative statement, with no breakdown by role, site or workforce type.
Deskless workers feel left out
Other research consistently finds that deskless workers feel that communications at their company don’t work as well for them.
Workvivo’s global survey found that half of deskless workers believe their company cares more about desk-based colleagues than them. Staffbase and YouGov found that only 9% of deskless employees are very satisfied with internal communication quality, against 47% of desk-based employees. And Firstup found that nearly a third of deskless US workers say their employer is less effective at communicating with them than with office-based staff.
First steps to improve comms for deskless workers
A great place to start is to assume nothing. You or colleagues might have strong ideas about what’s working or not working – and you might be right. Or you might not. So start by gathering some evidence, and identifying the problems that most need fixing. Here’s a handy ABC of places you can start:
- Ask your administrator or provider if they can break down engagement and communication metrics by role, site, or shift pattern, not just report one scheme-wide number.
- Before plunging into a new strategy to go digital (or some other channel), identify which specific sub-group of your deskless population you’re trying to reach and what access that group actually has. For example, WhatsApp has exploded as a work channel amongst deskless staff – are your members using it?
- Change one thing at a time. If you’re working off hunches instead of evidence, test iteratively. If the new thing’s not working, try something else.
Other ways to improve engagement with your workforce
There’s no single fix for engagement with deskless workers, because deskless workers aren’t a single group. The schemes making progress are the ones checking which of their several distinct workforces they’re actually failing to reach, rather than trusting a number that might be hiding the answer.
It’s clearly not easy to get this right. But we’ve seen some schemes making great strides, and we’ve put together a big list of things you could try.
