A Workforce in Flux

Art by Pete Ryan

As the so-called Great Resignation accelerates, a new survey from Willis Towers Watson (WTW) shows that over three-quarters of employers (77%) in the U.S. say they are having trouble finding and keeping employees. It is just the latest piece of research to indicate that the labor market will be tight next year, with a third of U.S. workers considering a job change or retirement.

All over the world, people are re-evaluating what they want from their working life in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey performed by Principal Financial Group.

Erik Daley, managing principal at Multnomah Group in Portland, Oregon, says, on the client side, the impact has been significant. For one of his advisers—aka consultants—over half of the regular contacts at one plan sponsor client are currently making a job transition. “There’s a lot of movement in finance and human resources [HR], areas where we have touch points with clients,” Daley says.

Multnomah Group is not feeling the effects of the Great Resignation, so far—something Daley says reflects the firm’s culture. He and the rest of leadership have created a flexible work environment and a place where people want to come and participate. “We have consultants from very different backgrounds with very different goals in life, and we try to create an environment where each of them can be uniquely successful. This is by far the most important thing we can do to retain consultants.” This helps them want to stay in their role, he says.

“When the firm is successful at helping clients position their retirement plans,” Daley says, “the client-facing consultants need to be able to share in that success, whether it’s through compensation or equity. This is the crucial longer-term retention component. It allows those consultants who are so critical to the firm and those client relationships to participate in the long-term health, growth and success of the organization.”

One reason Oswald Financial in Cleveland has great employee retention is that the firm is 100% employee owned—each employee has stock in it. But, David Kulchar, director of retirement plan services, says, similar to Multnomah Group, Oswald could be affected by changes in client personnel. “If the contacts we’ve built relationships with were the ones leaving existing customers, we’d have three or four people associated with the case who don’t know the new person coming in. That would be a bigger risk for us than losing someone, from the internal staff perspective.”

Client Service Teams

Of course, sometimes advisers or consultants do leave, and advisory firms must be prepared to keep client relationships stable, sources note. Both Multnomah Group and Oswald Financial have a team approach to clients. For each Multnomah retirement plan, there are two consultants and a benefits analyst who does internal work and coordinates service delivery efforts, Daley says. “Every client has multiple touch points with [our] organization. If a client is working with only one person, it doesn’t see the depth of what is happening behind the scenes to put that client in a successful position.”

A Multnomah client might have the opportunity to work with multiple advisory teams over the tenure of a relationship because the firm moves clients around periodically—about 10% to 15% each year are given a different consultant. “It’s not atypical of us to move a client from one lead consultant to another,” Daley says. “Clients can hear different voices; they may hear the same information but have it delivered by a different person in a different way that helps them better appreciate, and better act on, the information.”

This, Daley says, resembles the strategy of a professional sports team swapping out the coach every nine years, because the players tune out. “We go through a process of evaluating how engagement is going, and we use that as a way to self-identify where it may make sense to make an adjustment. Clients are very receptive to it. All we’re trying to do is achieve what they are trying to achieve, and sometimes that means changing up the voice.”

Kulchar says having multiple layers of relationships is important, so there is not just one person hugging that client and plan to himself. For example, “I’d be the lead adviser on a case, and I’d assign a day-to-day client relationship manager, and a money coach who works with the participants. Together we build relationships with the client so if the client manager in the middle leaves, the client still has me and the money coach whom it’s very familiar with. We also have a backup client manager on every case. That person sometimes joins the meetings, and he certainly answers questions when the lead client manager is on vacation or is taking a sabbatical, or something similar. With that, we have friendly faces surrounding everybody.”

Information Tracking

If an adviser does leave Multnomah, technology is the firm’s friend. Since the birth of the practice and its first 401(k) with a quarter of a million dollars, Multnomah Group has used a Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system. Daley explains that the firm has always had some employees working remotely and been moving advisers from one client to another. “With this software, we’re able to track every interaction, engagement and email with clients, plus we use multiple life-cycle tracking systems so we know where we are with every client at any given time.”

The CRM system allows the organization to share information across the enterprise without everyone having to be tied to an office building. “It’s important for pandemic reasons, but also it has been absolutely critical in ensuring that there’s no disruption in our approach, or our effort or progress when there’s employee movement on the consultant side,” Daly says.

“You obviously have transitions from time to time where something happens and someone retires or takes another position somewhere else,” he continues. “Those are orderly transitions, but you also want to be in a position where, if something catastrophic happened and we lost a consultant without that transition period, another consultant could step in reasonably quickly and be able to understand exactly what’s happening.”

When Oswald Financial acquires a client, the firm goes to the adviser on record or third-party administrator (TPA) and recordkeeper and collects as much data as possible for a fiduciary file. “All the documentation is in there—the plan document, the investment policy statement [IPS], communication policy statement,” Kulchar says. “Every time we have a meeting with a committee, the client manager on the case takes the minutes of the meeting. We then send them back to the committee for approval, and once we get approval we put those into the fiduciary file, as well. Then, when we go back for the next fiduciary meeting, we take the minutes from the previous meeting to make sure everything we talked about is reviewed again and to make sure any action items for [the committee] or for us were completed as a check-off.

“We store it in the cloud, and we don’t give the committee access to it. Why?” he says. “If, for instance, a committee member changes positions, we’re likely the last to know. And if that person had access, and a fiduciary file has been checked out, the client record becomes incomplete. We monitor that process very carefully for cybersecurity purposes.”