ProShare’s conference last week was the first one in person since prior to the pandemic. It was so nice to see so many of our share plan community friends!
The theme was financial resilience, wellbeing and education. Missed it? Here are our top 3 takeaways:
1. There’s a cost of living crisis and labour shortage
Organisations needs to take a proactive approach by rewarding, educating and communicating with employees well, or they may well leave for better opportunities. An interesting idea is to have an ‘investment allowance’ as part of the reward offering – providing employees with freedom to allocate this to pension (long-term), share plans (medium-term) or savings (short/medium term).
2. Take up isn’t the only measure of share plan success
Listening should form the foundation of any good communications strategy, providing an ongoing qualitative feedback loops to assess success. This supports all the quantitive stats we can gather across the various digital channels, so success is defined more holistically overall. To support success, educating employees about share plans needs to continue throughout the journey. This should touch on the very basics, such as ‘what’s a share?’ and build from there, including this in the wider financial wellbeing programme beyond share plans.
3. Don’t forget about the gig economy
The gig economy – freelancers, contractors, as well as gig platform workers – has grown over the last 15 years. Gig workers may be an increasing part of your workforce – to keep them engaged and motivated we need to consider how we recognise, reward and tailor our communications to them. There are numerous legal and tax barriers to them joining share plans, but with some creativity, these can be overcome. Something to consider in the future, but in the meantime, if we communicate well with them, we can turn them into share plan advocates.
We look forward to seeing you at the next industry event! Check out our events calendar to stay in the know!
