From our work advising small and medium-sized businesses, new businesses, and company owners, we find five factors distinguish strong pension offerings.
Here’s Moneycube’s rundown on how business owners and managers can set up and run a successful company pension and benefits offering.
1. Keep it simple
A company pension is something you want to set, and forget. So your pension provider needs to get the basics right, and work hard to minimise the impact on your business.
That means, for example: simple onboarding and offboarding processes, timely and accurate reporting to you, and no surprises.
Interested to set up a company pension? Read all about Moneycube’s services for companies
2. Sell the sizzle to employees
Engaging employees with your pension and benefits offering is vital. Most staff know they should be doing something about retirement planning, saving tax, and taking advantage of what their employer can offer – but often don’t know where to start.
Your pension provider should address this, so you don’t have to. A plan to engage employees should be built into your approach to pensions – for example through a dedicated micro-website or online access to a live dashboard, lunch-and-learn sessions, or one-to-one discussions with new team members.
3. Company contribution
Most employers contribute to company pensions on a percentage of salary basis (often matching employee contributions, up to a certain limit).
Without a company contribution, it’s hard to get a pension scheme off the ground. If you want the recruitment and retention benefits a company pension can bring, the company contribution rate is a major decision point.
Employer contributions to pensions are fully deductible for corporation tax purposes (up to certain limits).
4. Costs and performance
Pensions have moved on in the last few years. They’re more flexible, cheaper and more transparent.
That means there’s no reason to accept high costs, sustained weak investment performance, or, indeed, poor service and administration.
By running a slide rule over your company pension – with the help of an advisor like Moneycube – you can reduce or remove costs to the company, drive down charges to the employees, enhance benefits, reduce administration time, and improve customer service.
Read more about how Moneycube can help review or upgrade your company pension
5. Bespoke arrangements for senior management and owners
Bespoke pension arrangements can be a great way to attract and retain senior managers in an SME setting. Retirement may not be too distant to these individuals – so a strong pension offering is highly valuable to them.
The Irish pensions system offers scope to construct highly tax- efficient rewards for individual staff members, over and above any wider company scheme.
If your pension advisor can get these five requirements right, you’re well on the way to putting a great workplace benefits scheme in place for your business, and for your people.
If you want to explore your options further, we would love to help.
