A New Employee Benefits Website Message Center and 401(k) Enhancements are Now Live

As part of NRECA’s commitment to maintaining an engaging and useful Employee Benefits website for you and your employees we have recently completed additional enhancements. We are excited to share the details of these enhancements to the Message Center and certain 401(k) Pension Plan pages. As with prior enhancements, member feedback has played a big role in ensuring the website reflects your needs as well as those of your cooperative’s employees.

The upgraded Message Center incorporates many features that make it similar to your favorite email client. As a benefits administrator, you will have “personal” and “administrative” inboxes as well as a sent folder to view messages you sent to NRECA. You’ll have access to fully featured text formatting and editing along with larger attachment capabilities – up to five files and a total of 20 MB. Additionally, you and your participants will be able to enjoy:

Inbox previews in the top navigation bar as well as message preview snippets. Your navigation toolbar will also note the number of messages awaiting your attention
Sorting, searching and filtering capabilities for messages
A new trash folder replaces the “archive”
Updated look and feel for the preferences screen

Additionally, you and your participants will now be able to enjoy several improvements to the 401(k) Plan section of the website:

Guided events for modeling/requesting loans and hardship withdrawals. These transactions feature an enhanced design, more direct language and will guide participants step-by-step through the process until the transaction is complete. Go to My Retirement > Loans, or My Retirement > Withdrawals.
Expanded account activity history. Participants can now view all of their account history in increments of up to two years and this information can also be exported into an Excel worksheet. Go to My Retirement > Activity History.
Streamlined investment information. Data that was included on multiple pages is now located in one convenient and comprehensive webpage under My Retirement > 401(k) Investment Information.
With benefits administrator access to the website, you will see improved screens to view participant 401(k) data and activity in addition to being able to model loans and withdrawals on their behalf. Accessed within the Admin section under Co-op Retirement > 401(k) Pension Plan Administration.
Annualized personal rate of return for participant 401(k) accounts. 401(k) Plan participants viewing their personal rate of return on the main participant dashboard (landing page) and the more detailed “My Retirement” page, will see a personal rate of return that was calculated with annualized data, rather than cumulative returns. The change may cause some employees who have participated in the 401(k) Plan for a number of years to see a lower personal rate of return. This does not indicate any change in performance or account value. Showing annualized, rather than cumulative, is more in line with industry standards and makes comparing returns used in communication and education materials easier.

To help you announce these changes, please feel free to use this template. You can modify and use this content based on your co-op’s benefit plans as an email, post it on your co-op’s intranet site or how you best communicate with your co-ops employees.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Member Contact Center at 866.673.2299. Representatives are available Monday through Friday, 7am to 7pm, Central time or by emailing contactcenter@nreca.coop