Here’s an opportunity for employers to put their pensions in the spotlight, and employees to receive more help planning for their futures.

New pensions regulations coming into force in 2012 require employers to automatically enroll all their eligible jobholders into either a 'qualifying' workplace scheme, or the new National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) scheme. NEST is a scheme designed to help low- to medium-earning employees save for their retirement if they don't have access to a good-quality, employer-sponsored pension already.

These pensions changes pose a great opportunity for employers to communicate and engage with their employees while there’s a wider media buzz around the importance of financial planning. It’s a win for employees too, as many will have pensions for the first time, or experience better pensions than they did previously.

But as 2012 approaches employers can’t afford to simply sit back and wait. It’s vital to make decisions now, and work hard on your communication strategies so employees aren’t confused, say pensions experts. Colin Mayes, Head of Pensions at benefits consultancy Enrich says: “Big questions are: will you opt for NEST or, if you have one, should you continue with your existing scheme? Does it meet the requirements? Are your IT systems up to scratch? What are you telling staff and how are you communicating with them?”

He says introduction of the new responsibilities will be phased in from 2012, giving smaller companies more time to comply. But there will be a lot of media coverage of NEST and pensions-provision generally, so employees must receive clear HR communication from the start, or may think they are missing out.

“Make sure they know when, and how, they will be auto-enrolled and how to opt out if they want to,” says Mayes. “And if you have a good existing scheme, make sure you raise its profile internally when NEST is in the news, showing how well it compares. You don’t want people thinking they’re missing out because their scheme isn’t a NEST. It’s worth pointing out that what they do have, or will have, is of the same standard, or better,’” he adds. Mayes says it’s worth looking into the Pensions Quality Mark (PQM) run by the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) as an official endorsement.

Chris Hopkins, Managing Director of Caburn Hope agrees: “Having this accreditation for your pension and using it in your communications would be really helpful to reassure employees that their long-term financial wellbeing is of paramount importance, and that they’re being well-provided for.”

Hopkins strongly believes that clear, positive communications in the run-up and during 2012 will help organisations turn Pensions Reform to their advantage. “Even if there are issues around cost, for instance, if salary increases need to be tempered to pay for the additional pensions costs, that can be justified and explained to employees,” he says. “The core message needs to be that ‘this is for you, your future will be more secure, and you are benefiting from this great new pension arrangement’. Companies that aspire to being an ‘employer of choice’ would do well to communicate the efforts being made to meet the needs of their people. Genuine concern for the financial wellbeing of your workforce is a fantastic value, and certainly worth shouting about.”

Caburn Hope are pleased to announce our partnership with Enrich, a leading employee benefits solutions provider, to offer our Employee Communication clients specialist Employee Benefits advice, broking and consultancy.

In a reciprocal agreement, we have joined with Enrich as their Communications specialist, creating a team that delivers all-round benefits solutions and communications to engage and motivate employees.

Caburn Hope have also recently redesigned Enrich’s corporate identity, website and collateral to reflect their position as leaders in their field.

Enrich is a full service employee benefit and reward consultancy specialising in wellbeing, healthcare, risk, flexible benefits, pensions, and reward. www.enrichbenefits.com

Only 59% of companies are carrying out annual or half-yearly Employee Engagement surveys, shows our latest online poll, carried out by Caburn Hope in April 2010. A healthy 78% of respondents confirmed they have conducted some form of Employee Feedback or Employee Engagement survey, but a worrying 19% of these were on an ‘ad hoc’ basis, and the remaining 22% still don’t recognise the importance of assessing employee opinion at all.

“Measuring employee engagement is now widely accepted as an important facet of corporate life, but these surveys must be carried out regularly if organisations are to properly monitor attitudes and improvements to engagement levels over time,” says Chris Hopkins, managing director of Caburn Hope. “Highly engaged colleagues can add enormous value to organisations. Surveys highlight areas where dissatisfaction and lack of understanding are creeping in, and will help companies pinpoint weaknesses in how they are supporting and communicating to their people.”

It’s impressive that some organisations - 10.8% - are gauging employee opinion on a half-yearly basis, says Hopkins, but this low response shows how few workplaces have the time and resources to measure employee engagement regularly.

Surveying your people is a ‘bottom up’ approach, and can be complemented further by monitoring attitudes from the ‘top down’ too. This can be done by auditing and benchmarking your overall employee communication activity. “Engagement tends to flourish where leadership and managers inspire enthusiasm for work, and communicate company values and objectives regularly and clearly,” says Hopkins. “Acting on the results of employee feedback and wider communication audits can improve relations across the board. This in turn leads to more committed, motivated, and productive employees, giving real return on investment.”

Research by the Corporate Leadership Council in the US equates a 10% rise in engagement to at least a 6% increase in productivity, directly affecting the bottom line.

UK employers continue to individually recognise staff despite feeling the effects of the financial crisis, according to a new poll survey conducted by Caburn Hope.

Sixty per cent of respondents said they felt it was more important now than ever to individually recognise employees in times of financial hardship. However, cash incentives were less likely to be the method of recognition, with one quarter (25 per cent) opting to acknowledge their staff with non-financial rewards.

This is supported by a recent study conducted by Towers Perrin (2009) which revealed that one in ten businesses planned to cut reward spending (9.14 per cent).

Chris Hopkins, MD of Caburn Hope, said: “When there is so much talk of doom and gloom it is of fundamental importance that companies continue to individually recognise the needs of their workforce during these times of hardship to keep motivation as high as possible.

“Business is tough, but cash is not the only driver of engagement. In fact, research shows that performance improvement more than doubles when the reward is a non-financial one*. Introducing schemes such as personalised e-cards which instantly recognise the recipient will promote that feeling of goodwill whilst barely breaking the bank.”

*Workspan, November 2006 38.6 per cent for a non-cash award versus 14.6 per cent for cash

Caburn Hope has created a comprehensive pensions and flexible benefits communications programme for global aircraft and defence services supplier, the Goodrich Corporation.

After making some sensitive changes to its pension arrangements and introducing a new Defined Contribution scheme, Goodrich sought an effective way to help its UK employees make an informed decision when saving for retirement. Simultaneously Goodrich also launched its first flexible benefits scheme, Flextra.

Caburn Hope was appointed to create a communications strategy to launch Flextra and steer staff through the pensions consultation period. The brand ‘My Future, My Choice, My Reward’ was conceived by Caburn Hope and was consistently applied to all communications with a tone of voice which was considerate of this sensitive subject and encouraged employees to prepare for the future together with their employer.

The solution took a multi-platform approach, including a tailored website designed to provide a resource for both pensions and Flextra for employees. The site supports user generated pensions content which changes according to the scheme the user is viewing, and runs through the available flex options.

The communications package included in-print newsletters, posters, brochures for both Defined Contribution and Defined Benefit pensions schemes and a booklet to outline the new Flextra scheme.

The Goodrich Corporation is a global employer of over 25,000 people at 80 facilities across 16 countries. Its systems and services are supplied to aircraft and engine manufacturers, airlines and defence forces around the world.

More than one fifth of employers do not measure the success of their intranet facilities, a poll conducted by Caburn Hope last month reveals.

Twenty-one per cent of respondents stated that there were no procedures in place to assess the intranet offering within their organisation.

The top method of intranet measurement was shown to be the use of a feedback form with 43 per cent of the vote, whilst page impressions and time spent by user were jointly favoured by 14 per cent of those surveyed.

“The intranet is for employees and its contents should be led by employees,” said Chris Hopkins, managing director of Caburn Hope. “If there are no provisions in place to gauge intranet accessibility and the success of the content displayed there, you can never know whether the core messages you really want to drive home are ever being read, let alone absorbed and understood.

“Intranet facilities present an ideal opportunity to open up the flow of communication with employees. Measuring its success by embedding mechanisms to encourage feedback, whilst paying attention to the numbers of repeat users and click throughs, will allow you to create an intranet system which is entirely worthwhile to the organisation as a whole.”

Click here to contribute to our next research by taking part in our new poll, Do you feel it’s appropriate to individually recognise employees in times of financial hardship?

Former Travelport employee engagement manager Lee Nicholls joins employee communications consultancy Caburn Hope today (5 October) as account director.

Nicholls will oversee the growth of the consultancy’s business portfolio and provide valuable insight to the delivery of employee engagement strategy and employer brand performance.

Whilst working for Travelport Nicholls was responsible for driving employee engagement to 3,000 members of staff located globally in 145 countries. Nicholls built strategies to increase engagement and created communications tools to support management in the cascade of company goals, including the creation and delivery of an employer brand microsite and Manager’s Toolkit portal.

Preceding Travelport, Nicholls worked with Simplyhealth as employer brand and engagement manager for four years. During this time Nicholls was responsible for the creation of the new SimplyHealth employer brand after its transition from HSA and raised the company’s profile through the ‘Times Top 100 Best Companies to Work For’ guide. SimplyHealth ranked for five consecutive years, three of which were places in the top 50, and received two recognition awards for its employee offering.

Christopher Hopkins, managing director of Caburn Hope, said: “Lee brings with him a wealth of experience in aligning employee engagement strategy with commercial vision, and we are delighted that his appointment will allow us to provide our clients with a richer employee communications offering.”

In light of his appointment, Lee Nicholls said: “Employee communications must be of primary concern to any organisation hoping to achieve increased employee engagement. Actively communicating with staff in an exciting and inspiring way will drive employee motivation and engender a consistent employee experience from recruitment to alumni.

“Working with Caburn Hope is a fantastic opportunity and I look forward to the fresh challenge this role will bring.”

Caburn Hope is an employee communications consultancy which specialises in creative and strategic communications to maximise employee engagement and ultimately productivity across the entire breadth of the employee lifecycle. Key clients include Coca-Cola Enterprises, Kellogg’s, O2, HSBC and Aviva.

Caburn Hope has developed an integrated communication campaign to launch two new pension investment choices to O2 employees. A personalised mailing provides a strong call to action to use a dynamic new modelling tool available online. The modeller gives O2 employees an instant snapshot of the effect of their investment choices.

Based on data such as current age, predicted retirement age, level of contribution, whether the user will take a lump sum, and different levels of investment risk, the O2 pensions calculator forecasts the employee’s total fund upon retirement. Interactive sliders immediately demonstrate the impact of different circumstances and choices, including salary, retirement age, level of contribution and scheme selection. The tool also provides a useful printout the user can refer to when making their investment decisions through O2’s flexible benefits scheme.

See the modeller online at www.o2pensions.co.uk under Interactive Tools.

The main barrier for managers attempting to connect with their employees is a failure to understand the importance of engagement, our poll survey reveals.

Thirty-five per cent of those who took part in the poll judged underestimating the importance of engagement as the top obstacle for management.

The organisational culture of a company was cited as the second reason with 29 per cent, whilst 24 per cent chose lack of awareness or understanding of engagement as an obstacle. Just 12 per cent of respondents blamed uncertainty of where to begin as the primary reason for a breakdown in engagement.

Chris Hopkins, MD of Caburn Hope, said: “Every manager should recognise the importance of engagement, but the main question is whether they actually understand what it means for an employee to be fully engaged, and whether they know the ways in which engagement can be improved.

“Providing managers with the tools necessary to help them motivate employees, including clear communications materials which capture and excite the imagination of the manager as much as the employee, will emphasise the fundamental role of engagement and help deliver key messages from the top down.”


Click here to contribute to our next piece of research by taking part in our new poll, how do you measure intranet success?

Caburn Hope has launched Aviva’s first ever flexible benefits scheme to 22,000 employees.

Leading on strategy, we produced an exciting online presence for the scheme, www.myavivaflex.co.uk, supported by on and offline communications for maximum impact. At least 89% of Aviva’s workforce visited the site during enrolment.

Providing both information and an enrolment facility, the site enables two levels of user journey through its content, providing either a top level overview of the offering and enrolment process or the opportunity to drill down for further detailed information, facts and figures. Written and presented clearly with Aviva’s token ‘happy’ feel, quirky imagery, and a range of scenarios users can relate to, my Aviva flex is highly informative whilst remaining accessible.

Supporting communications to build excitement in advance of the live site launch included a lively intranet banner campaign, carefully crafted ‘splash pages’ to preview the scheme, and personalised booklets mailed to employees’ homes. Manager briefing packs ensured a cascade of communications through the business, helping managers to support their teams consistently and effectively.

Elliot Rees-Davies, Head of Reward at Aviva, said: “We understand and respect our employees as individuals and know this means they have different lifestyles, make different choices and need different things from their benefits package. My Aviva flex truly caters for everyone, which is exactly what we set out to achieve. It dovetails perfectly with our wider My Aviva Reward communications and has made a significant impact on employees in its first year.”

For our latest employee communications news and views, follow us on Twitter: @caburn_hope

Don’t miss us at the e-Reward Conference on 4th November. MD Chris Hopkins will be speaking on the power of effective reward communication alongside the Kellogg's Reward team.

Topics for discussion include the opportunity reward communications present to deliver key messages about the business, what really makes effective communication, and best practice examples from Kellogg’s new reward strategy. There will also be an opportunity to ask questions.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Caburn Hope has helped the UK’s largest insurer make the act of recognition more meaningful for 22,000 employees UK-wide.

Spotlight is a dynamic new recognition scheme aligned with the company’s objective of creating a culture of individual recognition and reward where employees can be publicly thanked for 'going the extra mile'.

Caburn Hope’s communication consultancy, creative design and copywriting bring this to life for employees at every level of the business, engaging them with the values and behaviours that underpin Aviva’s new brand.

Colleagues can nominate individuals and teams who 'live the brand' for a Spotlight award for which they are awarded points to spend in an online shop, and any employee can send a personalised Spotlight e-card to instantly recognise a colleague. All e-cards and nominations are copied to managers.

Helen Jackson, Reward Director at Aviva, commented: “Spotlight is about saying thank you to everyone who displays the behaviours that live up to the Aviva brand. It is a very impressive scheme that is easy to use and implement.”

Our industry poll found that almost three quarters of communicators are actively changing the way they connect with employees during the economic downturn.

36% of responders reported they were increasing employee communication activity as it was “even more important” to engage with employees during turbulent times.

28% are cutting back, 8% are stopping comms activity all together and 16% are subject to a budget freeze.

Chris Hopkins, MD, said: “The recession is clearly affecting the methods, and most likely the frequency, organisations communicate with their employees. Whether communicators can still make impact with less resource is a true test of their mettle. Those who succeed understand that there has never been a more vital time to communicate with their workforce.”

“Comms success won’t come from trying to execute the same amount of activity thinly. It’s about doing fewer things but upping the ante; making each piece of activity work much harder for greater impact. Organisations reducing employee communication to less than the bare minimum should reconsider – communications ‘lock-down’ achieves very little and usually ends up costing more in the long-term,” he continued.

Caburn Hope has produced Kellogg’s first ever personalised total reward statements.

The statements feature some of its best-loved characters to grab employees’ attention and shout about the benefits they receive. Bright, bold, and jargon-free, they spell out the reward offering for employees at a glance. This is one of the first communication projects to be completed under the company’s new brand guidelines. Representing a new initiative in the company’s reward communication, the statements replace standard benefit and pension letters for much greater impact to boost employee motivation and retention.

Dave Lowe, Compensation & Benefits Business Partner, comments:
“Now, more than ever, we want our people to know they matter to us so we made a conscious decision to ‘sell’ our reward offering a lot more proactively than we’ve done in the past. Our trademark characters and fun features such as our ‘CornFlex’ section are backed up with a serious agenda. The statements are a new way of talking about reward for us – they do more than communicate the facts and figures relating to an employee’s pay and benefits; they embed our company culture, inspire employees and demonstrate we value them enough to put serious consideration into communicating their reward.”

Our work for Aviva and Goodrich was recognised as amongst the best in the industry as we were named Finalists in two categories at the 2009 Employee Benefits Awards ceremony: Most Effective Use of Digital Media (Aviva) and Most Effective Benefits Strategy (Goodrich). Visit our case study pages to read more about these projects.

The intranet forms an integral part of the internal communication strategy in most organizations as an information provider and collaboration tool. But social media also allows collaboration, dialogue, documentation and much more.

In this report, Melcrum looks at the future of the much-loved intranet and it's chances of survival in a web 2.0 world. Click here to visit Melcrum's Internal Comms Hub.

If you have subscribed to receive Spot On, our research and insight bulletin but have not yet received an issue, make sure you add 'news@caburnhope.co.uk' to your address book to ensure your email provider does not accidentally store it as Junk Mail.

To read more about how we helped Aviva bring its new brand to life by identifying benefits as a key brand ‘proof point’ among employees, click here to visit the Employee Benefits Magazine website.

Our work for insurance giant Aviva has been featured in Employee Engagement Today. To read about the project’s aims and challenges and to find out about why placing the employee at the centre of the strategy paid off, click here to read the article as a pdf.

We have launched our brand new e-communication, Spot On. Subscribe by filling out the form on the right of this page to make sure you don't miss out on the latest free research and insight from Caburn Hope.

We are excited to announce Caburn Hope has been shortlisted in two categories at the Employee Benefits Awards 2009: Most Effective Use of Digital Media and Most Effective Benefits Strategy.

Aviva’s stunning new reward portal My Aviva Reward has earned the insurance giant a place in the final for its use of digital media to communicate benefits to employees. We led on the creative design and strategy for this website, which harnesses some of Aviva’s trademark ‘happy’ to guide users through their reward package every step of the way.

Goodrich is a finalist for the company’s ‘Flextra’ flexible benefits scheme communications strategy (entered jointly with Towers Perrin and EHRO). Caburn Hope helped develop a microsite, newsletters and brochures to communicate the leading aerospace and defence organisation’s flexible benefits offering to employees.

The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony on June 26th.

Caburn Hope has helped Aviva launch its new reward brand and benefits portal to 28,000 employees across the UK.

My Aviva Reward uses consistent branding to draw together all aspects of pay and benefits for UK employees and is a core component of Aviva’s integrated reward communication programme.

The project will play a significant part in bringing the new Aviva brand to life for employees and will support one of the largest UK financial services rebranding exercises in the last 10 years.

Caburn Hope co-founder and senior consultant Chris Hopkins said: “As creative leaders on this project, we are delighted with My Aviva Reward. Its completely integrated personal approach and bright, lively creative communicates employees’ total reward in a highly engaging way that will capture the hearts and minds of employees. We are very excited to be involved in this crucial stage of Aviva’s brand development.”