In my last column I talked about the gender gap between men and women in their knowledge and confidence of key financial concepts and the risks this gap poses for employers in delayed retirement and health care costs. I also promised to provide some best practices for avoiding these risks and potentially saving employers hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Since then, we’ve published our Q2 2011 research on Employee Financial Trends and continue to see women picking up the pace in improving their financial situations and focusing on longer-term goals like retirement. This is encouraging considering that there are more women working today and therefore more women at high risk of not being able to retire on time.

Though they are saving more—91 percent of women indicate they save in their employer retirement plan—they have more obstacles in retirement and throughout their lives that hinder their ability to meet their financial needs. On average, women live longer in retirement than men, receive less pension and Social Security benefits, and earn less throughout their lifetime.

Because of this, women need more help in gaining knowledge and understanding of their benefits and finances, and there are some best practices benefits managers should be aware of and follow when it comes to providing retirement education that reaches female and male employees equally.

The traditional form of benefits communication hasn’t done this. Women often can’t relate to it because they tend to learn in more collaborative and holistic environments rather than self-service environments. This means employers should be shifting their benefits communication and education to a holistic and ongoing program that looks at all benefits under an umbrella of how they relate to employees’ financial goals. Our research has found that this type of program achieves the objective of getting both women and men to effectively change their behavior and save more in their company retirement plans.

Here’s how employers can shift their current benefits communication to meet women’s learning styles and needs through a benefits planning approach rather than the traditional type of benefits communication:

• Provide ongoing benefits communication rather than annually or as a one-time event.
• Make it holistic, incorporating all benefits and helping women to see the value of these benefits in helping them to achieve important life goals. Traditional communication has been technical and focused on details of specific topics rather than the overall picture of how benefits work together with employees’ finances.
• Make it personalized, specific to individual employees’ needs, rather than transactional. This can be achieved through one-on-one financial and retirement planning consultations, and through helpline services that allow employees a way to ask personal questions that apply to their goals.
• Make it relationship oriented rather than self-service oriented since women are more relationship driven. Provide a regular resource for education using the same educator so employees feel they have someone to go to and aren’t left with questions about their benefits.
• Subtly market the program to women in some of your marketing material whenever necessary or when the education is fitting for a group of women specifically, but be sure to do this in a way that does not alienate men.

Our own studies have found that women are twice as likely to participate in financial education as men, and they have a greater tendency to make the concepts they learn stick. This means that with both genders shifting their focus to retirement and realizing how far behind they are, employers have a strong opportunity to influence their female employees as well as their male employees to better plan for retirement. With more economic uncertainty and changes to employee and government benefits, they need it more than ever.