Optimize Your Company’s Retirement Offerings

March 27, 2024

Attracting and retaining talent has become much more difficult, and business owners need to ensure they are retaining their top-quality employees. Chief among these strategies is offering competitive employee benefits and retirement packages. A competitive employee benefits package is often cited as one of the main reasons an employee chooses to work at a company. Conversely, a lack of solid retirement plans for businesses is a common reason why employees leave.

Your challenge is to find a way to compare your employee benefits package, ensure that it meets your business objectives, and create an affordable employee retirement package. As a leader in designing employee retirement plans, First Western Trust understands the major difficulties associated with these areas. We can help you learn how to create a retirement benefit plan that keeps your top talent.

Evaluate and Compare Current Retirement Offerings

A critical component of designing an ideal employee retirement plan is answering a few critical questions about its design. These questions include:

• What are your goals with your retirement plan?
• What’s your budget? What are you paying in fees to your retirement plan vendor?
• Are employees leaving your organization because of a subpar benefits package?
• Is your plan up-to-date with the latest ERISA, state, and federal regulations?

Answering these tough questions is critical. The answers here can guide you toward specific ways to update your plan and ensure that your offerings meet the requirements.

Next, you must ensure your retirement plan can outcompete other employers looking to poach your top talent. Gaining access to this information can be challenging, as this data is often difficult to obtain. You will need to work with professionals who have access to this information and can help you determine what specific improvements you need to make to your retirement offerings.

Designing A Plan That Works For You

Any changes you make to your employee retirement package must be done in a comprehensive manner that reflects the current benefits market. Questions that you need to answer include:

• How flexible are your offerings? Do you provide potential employees with various options that can fit various retirement needs?
• Do you offer enough investment options to meet the retirement goals of the most risk-averse and risk-tolerant employees?
• Does your business maximize deferral options, ensuring employees can put away as much of their income as they want?
• Are your fees competitive?

The answers to these questions can guide you toward creating a comprehensive employee retirement plan that meets the needs of your employees and is an asset for employee retention and recruitment.

Educate and Outreach

You can have the best benefits package, but if your employees don’t understand their employee retirement package, its value is non-existent. Your challenge is to educate your employees about the employee retirement plan you offer.
Remember that educating your workforce about your employee retirement package doesn’t just mean sending a company-wide email and moving on. Each business needs a different and customized outreach strategy to ensure that they appropriately discuss their benefits package. Such outreach may involve numerous strategies, including:

• Producing marketing material that meets the specific needs of your employees
• Webinars or seminars
• In-person or virtual meetings to discuss your benefits and retirement goals with employees

Providing life-cycle services that give employees information about where they should be to meet their retirement goals, including how much they should be saving and how much risk they should tolerate in a retirement plan.
At First Western Trust, we can work with you to create an outreach plan that meets your needs and educates your employees. We can also work with your employees to ensure they understand the importance of enrolling in a retirement account.

Doing so will benefit your staff and ensure they take advantage of a critical employee benefit. This, in turn, will likely positively impact your employee retention.

Final Thoughts

In this business environment, offering a competitive employee benefits package can help an organization stand out. Designing such a plan requires the right comparative data, a comprehensive understanding of your business goals, and having appropriate outreach opportunities. Completing these steps will ensure that the benefits package you offer for your employees will meet their needs and allow you to retain top talent.

At First Western Trust, follow the latest business trends and can help adjust retirement plans for businesses that ensure you are offering top talent the benefits they expect. In addition, we can assist you in comprehensively creating retirement plans for businesses that enable you to keep your employees happy. We are here for you every step of the way and can enable you to learn how to create a retirement plan.

Ready to learn more? Contact us today, and let us help you create the ideal benefit package for your employees.

Investment and insurance products and services are not a deposit, are not FDIC insured, are not insured by any federal government agency, are not guaranteed by the bank, and may go down in value. First Western Trust cannot provide tax or legal advice.