Retirement planning as employer branding

Last night I had the pleasure of listening to Claes Hemberg at Avanza Bank speak about how Swedish people are jeopardizing their retirement by not caring more about how they are saving their money.

First of all, a whopping 40% of Swedes do not even save anything on a monthly basis. Second, those who do save seem to have a propensity for keeping their money in their savings account at basically no interest. Third, if Swedes trust the government only for financing their retirement, the average worker will have to live their retirement years on roughly 50% of their salary.

Interesting numbers, but has this got anything to do with Talent Management you might ask? Well, from an employer’s perspective several questions arise:

• Should you, as an employer, feel responsible for the post retirement quality of life  of your employees?
• If you do, can you use it as a differentiating factor in your employer branding (or is it a hygiene factor)?
• Should you provide support to your employees with regard to their private financial situation (including planning for retirement)? 50% of Swedish workers are positive towards receiving that kind of support from their employer, but it is not a very wide spread practice.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that people simply do not overly care about planning for their retirement until it is too late. You might have noticed that I have not mentioned the word “pension” even once in this blog post, since I know most people would have stopped reading immediately. But since I did mention it, you can stop reading now.