5 Rooms, 5 Themes: Retirement Security and other Hot Topics in the Spotlight

One room: the DCIIA Innovation Forum, Charlotte, North Carolina - March 2022

This piece is going to be more like a meal than a snack. So, we’re serializing it. These are the things you need to know from five rooms we’ve been in this month. OK one was a chat room, it’s true! These five hot topics are culled from conferences and calls thoughtfully curated and hosted by the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program, DCIIA’s Innovation Forum Team, Georgetown Center for Retirement Initiatives’ State Retirement Savings Program Network, NAST’s Legislative Conference Team, and even the Conference of the Western Region Chartered Financial Analyst Societies. So we’re going to spill it. The question is, what are you going to do with it?

Topic One: DEI - it matters - everywhere and in every way

• In the workplace. We’re going to focus first on the workplace most of us experience - the one that offers good benefits and looks, on some days, like a solid path to the kind of success we got educated for. What we heard: this workplace needs to look very closely at how it is providing opportunities, career advancement, and respect. We need our leadership, our credentialled rank and file, our podiums and our conference stages to be more diverse. When they are diverse, we need the speakers to be addressing their fields of expertise, not just the diversity gap.

• Challenges: We talked a lot about pipeline in this particular meeting. And also about practical solutions that included the creation of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion teams (committees, councils) that included CEOs, HR, and division leads. These teams are focused on the development of visions and goals for their organizations. “We have a data focus first,” said one membership organization, “and we are creating change by leveraging our influence, our voice, and by actively improving our pipeline through partnerships including HBCUs.”

• How is becoming more clear. “People don’t ‘do’ because they don’t know what to do,” another speaker said. It isn’t easy but the kids at the front of the pack are focusing on 1) definitions - what is diversity and what is inclusiveness; 2) data - determining what is important to know and how to collect it; 3) measurement - actual versus intended; and 4) tuning and improvement to keep changing outcomes.
  
  Another organization described their process as looking like the 5 W’s. “We ask ourselves who is in the room, what are we doing to empower everyone to get in the room, and how can we be inclusive in such a way that all the voices are heard.”

• Two more ideas we love: If you’re looking to deepen your network and improve your speaker stages, start following Sonya Dreizler and Liv Gagnon’s Choir, a diversity certification program for financial services conferences. We learned about Sonya and Liv through Emlen Miles-Mattingly, and loved this writeup on their launch.
  
  One more to follow - Yemi Rose, CEO and founder of OfColor, has a new and growing digital financial wellness program focused on fair access to credit, maxing out retirement contributions, and other elements of a financially secure existence. Yemi’s content speaks to people where they are. More on that shortly. #goyemi

• Back to the workplace - the basics. The workplace we’re talking about here is a smaller one, where there’s no retirement plan on offer and much less in the way of benefits. The workers here are very likely to be performing such important work that even in a pandemic they are required to show up in person. They are also very likely to be getting compensated at the bottom of the wage scale, to work on an hourly basis, to be in roles where schedules are highly variable and where turnover itself is high.
  
  While we are thinking about equity, we need to make sure these workers are getting equal access to retirement savings at work - where the paycheck is happening. Let’s make sure we’re not adding to the challenge by forcing them to go out and do something the workers in the first office never have to think about doing: finding and funding retirement savings on their own, after the paycheck has already hit the bank account.
  
  There are lots of ways of doing this. One of our favorites is State Auto IRAs. But it’s not the only way, by a long shot. So get out there and do your thing! Make something happen today!

We think you are amazing. Thank you for joining us on Part one of this spring journey. Part two is coming right up: We’re not the youngest people in the room anymore - What now? Stay tuned.

- Lisa

This piece was featured in the March 24, 2022, edition of Retirement Security Matters. For more fresh thinking on retirement savings innovation, check out the newsletter here.