It seems like a lazy Sunday in The District, but I’m already pounding the keys on my laptop at the SHRM 2016 Annual Conference & Exposition. I even had my first interview with Jeff Tulloch, MetLife’s vice president of the PlanSmart, Workplace Benefits and Business Advantage group.
Since I have retirement on my mind with my latest “Last Word” column and Workforce’s upcoming July issue on retirement, I talked to Tulloch about what companies can do to help workers with retirement. An edited transcript follows.
Whatever Works: How do you get past the white noise that many employees hear when it comes to retirement planning?
Jeff Tulloch: The first component is, where we are now compared to 10 years ago, people have woken up to, ‘OK, my parents maybe had a pension plan and they were taken care of, and, well, I don’t have that. So now, what do I do? How do I get myself secure?’ So I think there’s the stark reality that people now have. ‘I need to do something,’ but they don’t know where to go. ‘I see things in the paper, I see things in the magazines, I see things online, I talk to my friends.’ So getting past the white noise, we have this workshop [PlanSmart] offering that is a voluntary benefit. You come if you want. You’re not forced to go. And that gets people to take the first step forward. ‘I know I need information. I just don’t know what I need.’ And then once they get there, there’s a variety of information that’s provided to them that helps get them to a better spot. And then they can self-select if they want to take things to the next step, which is meeting with a financial adviser one on one. So it’s still difficult because, obviously, a large population is not financially well but that forum where — you’re not forced into it, you go if you want — and then you self-select how far you want to go with it helps get people [pointed] in the right direction.
WW: What mistakes are companies making in explaining retirement benefits?
Tulloch: I would say one would be thinking that the 401(k) plan is it. It’s the answer. And it’s not. The average balance nowadays is $100,000, maybe a little less than that. And that’s the average. A lot of people have a lot less. Probably one mistake is: ‘We put a lot of effort into our 401(k) plan, we did a great job of getting more people into it and contributing more, so we’ve done our job.’ And that’s just one component, one mistake. A second one kind of playing off that would be not realizing how stressed out people are regarding their financial matters and how that drains on the company’s productivity. ‘I’m on the phone with people trying to figure stuff out or I’m stressed out online looking stuff up, or I’m stressed out and therefore missing deadlines and not as productive as I should be.’ So I think those two things go together.
WW: Has the mentality changed on how employers approach employee retirement over the years?
Tulloch: I don’t know that I’d say it’s completely changed. I think [it’s] the reality of where companies are now financially and the challenge to be more and more competitive relative to who they are competing against. Companies [are] being stretched to figure out how to lower expenses. That’s the reality. The people we interact with, large corporations, they want to do what’s right. I think the same passion is generally there to help employees, but then there’s the reality of, ‘We can’t give you a pension plan anymore.’
WW: What about the smaller employers?
Tulloch: They are even more challenged just because of the resources available to them. And a small employer, if I’m the owner or one of the key managers, I’m so focused on the 14 jobs I have within the company that I’m stressed to figure out what to do for the employees. So that’s tough. There are tools out there to provide people with access to information, whether it’s online calculators or newsletters, things like that.
WW: What three bullet points do you have for companies to provide best practices to help employees with retirement planning?
Tulloch: The first would be drive a culture of helping support people financially from the top down. Make sure it’s not just something that an upper-level manager is supporting. Really start at the top, the CEO, the owner of the business, and really say, ‘This is important. We’re committed to it. We want our employees to be in a good spot, and we’re going to do everything we can.’
One would be start with the CEO on down. The second would be realize that there’s a commonality that most of us have some level of financial stress in our lives, but the range of what that stress is is extreme. You and I can be the same age and [have] the same income, but your stress might be that you’re trying to save for college. My stress might be I have a special-needs sibling that I’m taking care of. The third one might be I have no clue what I’m trying to save for retirement.
The second one would be realize there’s a wide need; it’s not just one answer.
The third would be accessibility. Do people want it on the phone, do they want a workshop setting, do they want it online on the intranet? And I think the answer is probably yes to all of that. So how can you deliver something that’s multimedia?
James Tehrani is Workforce’s managing editor. Follow Tehrani on Twitter at @WorkforceJames and like his blog on Facebook at “Whatever Works” blog.