2020 Signature Award Winners: Promoting Participation – Large Company

This category includes education campaigns and communications that promote employee participation – to save, or to save more for retirement, in plans with more than 5,000 employees. Entries could be complete campaigns or singular one-time communications efforts focused on overall participation, or increasing savings rates, or both. 

1st Place – Community Health Systems, Inc. with Principal®
Community Health Systems, Inc. is a general acute care hospital system with 99 hospitals in 17 states and 76,798 employees.
The objective with this campaign was to increase participation and savings rates among those who opted-out of automatic enrollment. The organization chose to leverage onsite HR staff to capitalize on the influence of HR departments and their competitive nature with other facilities. A human resources hub was created with posters to download, email, print, as well as giveaways for employee participation. Prizes were awarded for high performing HR departments, and they had monthly HR department check-ins to determine who was on top of the leaderboard. The results of the campaign were that participation increased from 74.7 percent to 78.3 percent and 50 of 99 locations achieved excellent engagement. This campaign won because the competition between HR departments was a fun way to garner engagement and they achieved great results even though they targeted a difficult population segment.

2nd Place – Gruma Corporation with MassMutual
Gruma is a corn and flour tortilla production company and a leading producer of wheat flour and other food products, with 79 production plants, and 7,449 primarily Spanish-speaking, employees.
The company wanted to help employees understand the benefits of saving in the retirement plan. They also wanted to make it easy for employees to sign up or save more. They used emails, a mailer, a newsletter, and a poster to solicit beneficiaries and onsite meetings all in English and Spanish. The images used in the materials, ears of corn, related to the company’s products. The outcome was that participation increased by two percent, there was a slight increase in average deferral rate and the mailer generated a 5.4 percent average sign-up rate. Gruma won because the simple graphics that tied-in to the company culture, along with the materials in Spanish increased employee engagement and participation.

3rd Place – Bechtel with Empower Retirement
Bechtel is an engineering, construction, and project management company with 8,690 employees.
The campaign’s goal was to increase already high participation in a plan that does not have automatic enrollment. To do this they focused on match “left on the table.” The materials used were emails, mailers, table tents, posters, flyers, and QR codes. The materials had an image of a $5 bill on a desk with a sticky note that reminded people “Don’t leave money on the table.” Bechtel exceeded its goal of a five percent response rate with a rate of 16.8 and 145 enrollments. Overall participation increased from 87.7 to 89.2 percent. They won because they engaged the HR partners to assess each location’s unique culture and they used multiple delivery methods including QR codes on the posters.