Retirement planning and benefits
To get the most out of your retirement benefit budget, it helps to understand how satisfied employees are with specific plan features and how receptive they are to alternative plan designs. Buck's Retirement Planning and Benefits Survey can help you gain that understanding.
Perhaps the first question is: why should you care about what employees think about their retirement benefits?
The answer is that these benefits, when properly designed and communicated, can help you avoid threats to your organization, such as the loss of valuable talent if baby boomers retire en masse, worker shortages in key areas, loss of employee motivation, and higher costs for health care and retirement benefits. In short, retirement benefits can — and should — play a vital role in your workforce planning strategies.
Our approach
Buck's Retirement Planning and Benefits Survey helps employers make employee research a vital part of the plan design process. Our survey can be conducted online or through printed questionnaires and is tailored to your benefit strategy, retirement plans, and population. It typically covers the following dimensions:
- Expectations regarding retirement age
- Retirement savings behavior
- Expected sources and adequacy of retirement income
- High-priority retirement concerns (financial, health care, etc.)
- Attitudes toward retirement investing and investment management
- Interest in various retirement planning services and delivery mechanisms
- Preferences amongst different retirement income payment distribution/schedules
- Interest in "phased retirement" programs
- Understanding of current employer-provided retirement benefits
- Adequacy of communication about retirement benefits
- Satisfaction with customer service from third-party retirement benefit vendors
- Importance of retirement benefits to their commitment to the organization
- Satisfaction with defined benefit and defined contribution plan(s) and provisions
- Preferences for alternative provisions of defined benefit and/or defined contribution plans