Multichannel pension communication: An integrated perspective on policies, practices, and literacy demands

Abstract

The design of pension communication environments often leaves to be desired. This is partly due to pension communication legislation, which communication professionals often find difficult to interpret and to comply with. Out of discontent with the legally required media, many pension organizations decide to provide their own media in addition, based on the belief that these are more suitable for pension consumers. This is not a desirable situation from the perspective of the consumers: they will only receive more information, which may come at the expense of the findability of the information, their feelings of self-efficacy, and motivation. In addition, media are often considered as independent by both legislator and pension organizations, resulting in the separate evaluation and optimization of these media. Finally, it turns out that not all legal requirements are sufficiently met in pension communication practice, and conversely, that existing pension communication provides information that is not required by the law. We therefore argue to consider pension communication environments to a much greater extent as interconnected, with a well thought out media strategy and optimized legally required media. In the more distant future, we argue for one central location for pension plan members to find all their relevant pension information. A central premise within the optimization of the legally required media under the 2015 Pension Act was hierarchical structuring, which was applied to both the Pension 1-2-3 medium – the document all new pension consumers receive – and the digital platform My pension overview. The research results show that this type of structuring does not affect the findability of information in Pension 1-2-3, but has a small effect on the findability of the information in My pension overview. These differences are likely to be caused by hierarchical structuring and the application of design principles that reduce cognitive load. A second finding is that literacy demands on users in both studies seem to decrease as the medium is more hierarchically structured. These results are promising, because they offer practical clues to significantly improve pension communication for both high and low literate pension plan members.