Should enrollment meetings be limited to 10 minutes or less? A paper authored by Diversified makes a strong case. New employees can be burnt out after days and maybe weeks of new employee orientation, so a 45 minute meeting reviewing plan features like loans, distribution and especially investments may be detrimental. Just get them enrolled — answering other questions as they come up — and schedule meetings about investment education or advice later in one-on-one settings.
Other suggestions:
• Give employees the opportunity to join now even if it means using paper.
• Engage them — get heads nodding.
• Focus on at least maxing out to get the match.
• Attitude is everything. (So is getting them to laugh.)
• If they decline, get it in writing. And don’t agree to just enroll them next year.
• Use peer pressure.
• Measure success.
Focusing on deferral rates and probability of success helps too. Though auto plan features will solve a lot of problems, some plan sponsors are reluctant to use auto escalation or start at a high rate of deferral. Enrollment meetings, however, can still motivate employees to save more In a world in which attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
Do you have any suggestions that are not on the list? Share them in the comment box below.
