Do employees and employers truly understand what parity means when to comes to pensions, or are they likely to filter out outdated myths or noises about parity, until it is too late to make strategic changes?
Achieving parity means that pensions have to be adequately funded, and that they have to be adverse to controllable risk. But pension parity isn’t simply about mitigating one set of risks, namely those introduced by the market and companies in which we invest, but also about looking at the large scale changes to the way that we manage employees and do business. Parity is linked to building equity into our plans by turning a critical eye to what matters now, and what will matter in the future, to pension members. It’s about creating a cycle of risk management that is informed by employee engagement, training, mutual support and personal and corporate development, so that there are multiple layers of risk management in place.
In our new paper on planning for pension parity in 2020, we’ll discuss what’s going on underneath the surface when it comes to pension parity. We suggest that what pension managers should be trained to look for, may not always be easily found on reports and retirement savings statements. In this paper, we’ll also look at what pension parity really means, and how organizations can protect themselves against the risk of parity issues far into the future.
At Marris Miller, we believe that in Canadian organizations, pension parity is now perceived as a pension obligation. In 2020, that means that managers will need to develop their pension parity knowledge and skills more than ever before. We’re here too help.