COMANCO Environmental Corporation

The 401(k) plan of Comanco Environmental Corporation, headquartered in Plant, Florida, has come a long way since the company decided to make some changes in 2014. It wanted to increase participation, raise the average deferral rate and improve workers’ understanding of the importance of long-term saving—and to do this in spite of some challenging employee logistics.

The construction company sends employees to remote locations, including internationally, to build and service containment facilities for operations such as power generation utilities, mining operations and industrial chemical plants. Many workers live out of hotels for months, vs. gathering at an office, says Christine Topp, co-owner and vice president of administration at Comanco. Getting the savings message across required Comanco to pull on several levers, she says.

“Some employees we don’t get to see face to face, except maybe one or two times a year when they come in for training, or maybe at year-end,” Topp says. “The challenge is how do we communicate with them about retirement planning, and how do we stay in front of them?”

For Comanco to get workers to save more meant showing them the plan’s value for their long-term financial health. Additionally, “What we realized was the average construction worker doesn’t fully understand financial planning and we had to put it in its simplest form and really just handhold our employees,” she says.

Topp explains that technology has sometimes been useful. Comanco’s frontline workers at construction sites have company iPads, but the worksites may be without internet access and far from company offices, she notes.

And “when [workers are] in the field from 6, 7 o’clock in the morning and not getting back to the[ir] hotel room till 5 o’clock at night, the last thing they want to do is talk to us,” she says.

All of this demanded bolstering education and finding ways to make it available, Topp says.

Comanco went to work with its retirement plan partners—recordkeeper Voya Financial and adviser firm Advizrs. Advizrs produced videos with information specific to the Comanco plan to explain what the 401(k) does for workers and how to use it, and Voya provided supplemental resources for the plan’s online portal, Topp says.

Each new employee is now given detailed financial wellness and retirement readiness information regarding the benefits of saving long-term and is encouraged to take part in personalized individual education meetings provided to each employee by Advizrs, Topp says.

The sponsor also decided to take advantage of the one annual opportunity it has to meet with each employee: the person’s performance review, Topp says. After the review, the employee has an individual meeting with human resources, where the person receives information about the plan, can ask any questions, is shown how to log in to the online portal, etc., Topp says.

Participation has increased considerably, she says. As has savings. The sponsor raised the plan’s automatic enrollment deferral rate from 3% to 6%, with an automatic increase capped at 10%. “The average deferral rate increased from 4% to 9.32% in just four years, with approximately 40% of employees deferring 10%,” she notes.

For more muscle, the sponsor paired automatic escalation with a sweep of every nonparticipant or person enrolled at a deferral rate too low to qualify for a full company match: 50% of the first 6%, plus 15% of every dollar over and above.

Including the sweep was “very critical,” to the plan’s achievements, Topp says. “If you have this automatic sweep in place, then you’re helping your employees build their financial future without them thinking about it, worrying about it. For us, it was a no-brainer.”

—Noah Zuss