Meet the team: Pensions operations
For information
We were delighted to meet with Stephen Worthington, Pensions Operations Executive, who talked to us about the USS Pensions Operations department and introduced us to his management team. We’ll be meeting the members of the pensions teams in upcoming employer updates…
What department do you run?
I’m the Pensions Operations Executive which means that I have responsibility for running the day to day operations of the pensions administration department, ensuring that all member enquiries are dealt with.
Can you tell us what you like about working at USS?
The main strength of USS is its people - they care about the job they perform and you can see it on a daily basis.
Tell us about the Pensions Operations department, what do they do?
Pension Operations process around 130,000 pieces of work a year. To help facilitate this we’re split into seven specialised teams to ensure that we have the expertise in place to give members information accurately and in a timely fashion. They are:
- Data reconciliation,
- Transfers,
- Active Retirements,
- Deferred Retirements,
- Leavers,
- Bereavement; and
- Pension Technical Enquiries.
Each team has a team manager and an assistant team manager. They’re all focused on delivering the best possible service to members and
employers. We learn from our experiences to ensure that we are continually evolving and improving.
We’ll be meeting the individual teams in the pensions operations department soon, tell us about your management team…
I’m fortunate to have a fantastic management team in Operations and alongside the team managers I have three direct reports who, between them, have vast experience of the scheme.
Graeme Maddison (Assistant Head of Operations) is responsible for DC Operations, Member Service Desk and the Data Reconciliation team, Carol Bradshaw (Operations Manager) is responsible for the Active and Deferred Retirement teams and the Bereavement team and Paul Cowley (Operations Manager) is responsible for the Leaver, Transfers and Pension Technical Enquiries teams.
Between the three of them they have over 50 years of experience in dealing with USS administration. As a team we’ve faced numerous challenges over the years and our wealth of experience ensures that we are well placed to deal with any challenges we meet. In addition we all started work as pension administrators, so we are in a great place to advise how to enhance the administration and to understand what the day to day experience of the job is like.
What’s a typical day like for you and your management team?
A typical day starts with at least three or four coffees to get us going! Then we review the department’s work for the day.
We manage our work through a daily dashboard and meet to ensure we have sufficient people on each team to get through the amount of cases due, we can re-allocate team members if needed, making sure that all cases are completed within SLA. The rest of the day will be reviewing forecasted volumes, trends etc as well as representing the department at meetings to ensure Operations feed in to the collective management of the scheme.
.
We’ve featured process improvements, and improvements in turnaround times in these employer updates in the past, how have these come about?
The post-implementation period following the 2016 scheme changes was a massive challenge for Operations, as not only did we have a new level of complexity within the scheme’s benefit structure, we also had to get to grips with a new administration platform. The level of the challenge was evident in the number of processes that we had to complete, with the backlog at one point tipping 18,000 cases. This resulted in a degradation in service which impacted members and employers. Work in progress now runs at around 4,500 cases.
We were acutely aware of the strain we were putting on our clients. A lot of time was spent tackling the issue and when we put ourselves in a steady state we made a conscious decision to significantly improve our service performance. We set about these improvements over the last 18 months and we’ve seen average processing time across all requests improve from 19 days to eight days. Retirement quotes are now processed in as few as three days.
This service is obviously important to our members and they are our main focus, but we hope that the improvement also helps our employers. We remain focused on improving and every year we are targeting new ways of working to further enhance the members’ service experience.
We work in partnership with employers, do you have any special requests of our clients to make our processes work even more smoothly?!
We need employer support to ensure that we receive notification of member events as quickly as possible, especially retirements. We often receive late notifications of retirements and although we appreciate that this is often beyond their control, the earlier we receive notification the better chance we have to ensure our members receive benefits on time.
We have a continuous improvement cycle running in Operations and we welcome any suggestions with regards to improvement/enhancements. If clients come across anything that can help then please they can share that information with us via Nichola Roane, Client Relationship Manager employercommunications@uss.co.uk.
If our clients have any specific queries, who should they contact?
If they have any enquiries then they can contact the relevant team directly. Although they shouldn’t hesitate to contact the Operations management team if there’s anything they’d like to discuss to discuss with them.
Their contact details are on the employer portal as well as in the regular employer updates.
And finally! The Quick Fire Favourite Five:
Share with us your favourite:
Film: Anchorman
Musician: Foo Fighters
Drink: Corona
Food: Meatballs with spaghetti
Holiday destination, when not here at USS: Florida