As our work with automatic enrolment continues I want to share with you a salutary lesson we’ve picked up this week is the importance of sweating the small stuff (peppered with some references from one of my favourite 80’s TV shows)

We’re working with one of our November stager’s to ensure they communicate the automatic enrolment process. Whilst they are postponing their contributions they aren’t allowed to postpone their communication duties and therefore we’re working hard to ensure they meet these obligations.

We started in plenty of time (we spoke to the pensions regulator and confirmed we were allowed to start the initial ‘we’re postponing and this is what’s going on’ communications within a 2 month window – 1 month before and 1 month after their staging date) and thought it would be a relatively easy process.

After all, we had a template email, we’d get email addresses for all the employees and we’d ensure that everyone had their communications in plenty of time.

I’d clap my hands, put a big cigar in my mouth say “I love it when a plan comes together” and drive off in a big black van with a red stripe with my squad for a celebratory beer patting ourselves on the back for a job well done.

Unfortunately earlier this week,and as much as I’d like to pretend I was closer to Faceman (playing it cool) or Hannibal (leading the way), I was probably far closer to Murdoch until I took a step back, a breath and found a solution to the problem.

You see a spam filter in the head office of the firm we’re trying to help rejected a lot of the emails we were trying to send.

It was nobody’s fault and down to a large business understandably having really high quality and robust email security.

Lucky we’d left ourselves plenty of time to ensure we could get this fixed and I managed to find a solution which worked whilst working in partnership with the company’s HR, Payroll and IT teams (which to make things slightly more complex has bases in 3 countries)…

…and we’ve still got work to do.

To ensure that we have a back up for an email process as part of our communications plan we’ve also developed a ‘paper back up’ process designed to ensure everyone (and I mean everyone) is communicated with as legislation dictates.

We’re still hearing stories of employers leaving all this too late. Like BA Baracus they’re not to keen on jumping on the auto enrolment plane….and if everything runs smoothly that might be fine.

But as “The A Team” often found out….a plan often comes together after they had negotiate the issues and whilst the journey might be fraught with issues with plenty of time firms can ensure they are ready for auto enrolment and metaphorically drive away in their big black van with a red stripe!

To be clear….

Businesses should make sure that they start preparing early to ensure these issues and need to ensure that they are leaving a cushion of time between their staging date and today for automatic enrolment.

The danger is instead of defending themselves from a “crime they didn’t commit”…

….they’ll have to admit to a ‘crime’ they did (automatic enrolment non compliance) and pay the associated fines!