Stop building your pensions communication around your scheme and build it around your people instead.
Statements land in inboxes and stay there. Pensions contributions sit wherever auto-enrolment left them. Every year another campaign asks people to log in and check their pension, and every year hardly anyone does.
Penfold's 2026 Retirement Reality Check surveyed 2,000 UK employees. It found that 58% couldn't say what their pension pot is currently worth, while 90% said their workplace pension influences whether they stay in a job.
That gap isn't apathy. Pensions communication tends to be written for people who already understand pensions. Everyone else receives a document about a scheme when what they really want is a message about their money.
1. Give pensions their own identity
Emails that turn up in the standard corporate template get treated like the standard corporate template. So instead of an email titled "Pension Scheme Update", give the communications a campaign name and a look of its own, closer to a consumer brand than an HR notice, and it is far more likely to be opened. Cycle to Work is the obvious example. Nobody calls it the cycle-to-work salary sacrifice arrangement.
Defence organisation AWE ran a week-long campaign with provider nudge, built around the industry's "Pay Your Pension Some Attention" theme. It used storytelling and personalised nudges in place of scheme documents. Afterwards, 75% of employees said their confidence in their pension had gone up and 70% said they had taken action.
A campaign gets the email opened, but what gets it read is targeted content written for someone specific. A 24-year-old on the default contribution rate and a 58-year-old weighing up a retirement date need different messages about the same scheme.
2. Work backwards from the retirement people actually want
Most pension tools begin with a contribution rate and end with a projection. Ask your provider whether they can run it the other way round.
When someone can pick the retirement they want and see the monthly figure that gets them there, it turns into a decision they can weigh against their own budget. Talking in pounds rather than percentages helps too. The DWP's Lessons on pensions engagement research names this as one of the specific, manageable changes employers can make.
3. Put pensions on video
A short series will do more than any booklet: explain how the scheme works, what the employer puts in and what to do with old pots from previous jobs.
Take tax relief for example. Pension Bee found in March 2026 that 88% of UK adults don't know the rate of tax relief they get, and almost a third don't know that contributions attract tax relief at all. Show what a 1% increase really costs each month once tax relief has done its work, and what that 1% is worth by retirement. The cost is usually smaller than people expect. The difference at retirement usually isn't.
4. Use the payslip
Pensions booklets go unread, but payslips don't and on most of them the pension shows up as a single deduction with no context at all. Ask payroll whether it can display the employer contribution next to the employee's own.
Total reward statements take this further, setting the pension alongside salary, bonus and every other benefit. Payslips reach everyone every month, but the statement gives them the full picture once a year.
5. Equip your line managers
Pension questions tend to go to the line manager rather than to HR, and most managers have nothing to work from.
Give them a one-page answer sheet covering the five questions that come up most often, along with a clear line on what they shouldn't try to answer and where to send people instead. Add a prompt to the pay review conversation as well, because a pay rise is the best possible moment to raise a contribution rate.
Most employers already have something in place like an EAP, a financial wellbeing app and an adviser benefit, but employees rarely know it exists at the point they need it.
6. Ask what your provider can offer now
The FCA's targeted support regime has been live since 6 April 2026. Under it, pensions firms can make specific suggestions to groups of members in similar circumstances without assessing each person individually. A year ago, that would have counted as regulated advice.
That makes for a new question worth putting to your provider: have they applied for the permission, and what can they now tell your members that they couldn't last year?
The moments when people think about their pension are scattered across the year and different for everyone. A pay rise, a promotion, a return from parental leave or a significant birthday.
A campaign creates attention, but continuity is what holds onto it.
That matters more now the Pension Schemes Act 2026 is raising the bar on retirement outcomes. Employers will have to show their scheme is working, and the ones who can will be the ones who stopped writing about pensions and started communicating about people's money.
FlexGenius brings every element of reward into one place. In total reward statements, employees see their pension next to their salary, bonus and benefits, on the platform they already use to manage everything else. Targeted communications then get the right message to the right people at the right time, rather than the same one to everybody.