Retirement plan education and participant engagement expert Michael Kushner provided an update at the Wealth@wor(k) conference in Las Vegas Tuesday regarding where the industry is with in-person versus online meetings post-COVID.
“We were thrust into a really weird thing back in March 2020,” Kushner said. “When I say ‘we,’ I mean everybody from kindergartners to CEOs were thrust into a virtual world almost overnight. We went from in-person education to doing everything virtually.”
While he’s seeing a return to in-person, he noted society largely took its direction from schools.
“We’re following classroom cues,” Kushner explained. “When schools went back full-time, plan sponsors said, ‘Okay, maybe we can start getting back to doing in-person education.’ Once schools opened, that meant parents could go back to work. It was a trickledown effect.”
People are now lining up on different sides of the proverbial fence. They might have had a plan where they were doing it virtually. Do they want to keep doing it that way or go back to in-person?
“I’m a big proponent of being in person,” he added. “When you’re in a Zoom meeting, and I’m guilty of this with other subjects, I can set my Zoom meeting up and go do laundry, take a shower, run the kids to school and come back and I’m still technically ‘in attendance.’ Did I learn anything? No. But when you’re in-person, you can engage somebody and talk to them. You can look into their eyes. You can ask questions and run scenarios for them. You lose that personal touch online.”
When asked if there is anything he would do differently in meetings pre-COVID versus post, he said it would be more emphasis on something he’s always done.
“Interestingly enough, what I’ve done even before COVID is to always record my education meetings after I completed the in-person sessions,” he concluded. “I would then send it to the plan sponsor so they could post it as a CYA and send an email to all employees. If participants didn’t come to the meeting, they couldn’t say, ‘Well, I wasn’t educated. I didn’t know the plan was changing.’ So, I was in the virtual world before it became the norm, but I’m still getting back to in-person. Plan sponsors and participants are welcoming it back.
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
