To answer your questions on tailoring retirement benefits for a diverse employee base, we've asked our expert, Andrés Tapia, Hewitt's Chief Diversity Officer and Emerging Workforce Solutions Leader, to share his insights. If you'd like to ask a question on diversity or any other pressing human resources challenges you might be facing, email us, and we'll share responses to selected questions on a regular basis.
The increasingly diverse workforce has generated much discussion and implementation of strategies in the areas of recruiting and training. One area that has not been looked at as frequently — but where there are myriad diversity implications — is the strategy around designing, implementing, and communicating benefit plans that meet the needs of a diverse workforce. Our client data shows different diverse groups undersave in their retirement plans and underparticipate in preventive health care programs compared to the majority population.
Question: How can we get more of our diverse population to understand and participate in our company's retirement savings plan?
Answer: Understanding the cultural makeup of your workforce is key not only in helping your diverse population understand the importance of leveraging what you're offering in terms of the company's retirement plan, but also in seeing the value of participating. Different cultures have different attitudes and expectations around retirement. For example, Asian cultures tend to be more communal. Their focus for retirement is likely to be geared around how the retirement plan benefits "us" as a family, and not on individual gains. Latinos tend to have a shorter time horizon about the future, which influences their decisions about long-term savings. African Americans tend to save for home and college much more so than for retirement.
Are your communication materials appropriate for the audience you're trying to target? This goes beyond just having more diverse pictures in 401(k) materials, or putting them into another language. It's about — in a cross-culturally competent way — creating communications that move diverse employees to action. You'd be surprised how much the classic retirement brochure picture of the retired couple walking down the beach is not an attractive vision of the future for many members of diverse groups. We need to view employees as "consumers" of benefits and commit to embedding diversity into the HR processes to impact attitudes, not just toward retirement savings, but toward benefits as a whole. Depending on what retirement vehicles are offered by your company, you can address this by looking at your messages, images, communication channels, and incentives. Recognize the differences in your workforce population, and take these into account to come up with a plan that addresses the needs of all your employees.
PODCAST:
Listen to Andrés discuss trends on diversity and health care management. Running time for this podcast is 2:09 minutes. If you experience a slow connection, please right-click this link to download.
About Our Expert
Andrés Tapia is Hewitt Associates' Chief Diversity Officer and Emerging Workforce Solutions Leader, responsible for leading the company's internal and external diversity vision and strategies. Andrés is a published writer and prominent speaker. He has been interviewed by major media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and FORTUNE magazine in the United States, La Nación and El Clarín in Argentina, El Mercurio in Chile, Você, Valor, and Revista Amanhã in Brazil, and HR industry publications such as HR Magazine, Benefit News, and Benefits Canada Magazine. Andrés has created several groundbreaking and high-impact diversity learning and multicultural marketing programs. He holds a BA in history with an emphasis in journalism and political science from Northwestern University.
