Why wellbeing belongs in pensions admin governance

A trustee asked me something at a recent service review that I have thought about ever since.

She asked: "How is the team doing?"

It caught me slightly off guard. I had prepared to explain the numbers in the report pack, but not whether those results were sustainable.

In retrospect, it was the most forward-looking question asked at the meeting. Service reports are dominated by lagging indicators. They tell trustees what has already happened. They rarely reveal whether performance is sustained by a resilient operating model or by overtime, individual goodwill and a small number of people carrying too much knowledge.

Both models can produce a green service level agreement (SLA) report. Only one is likely to keep doing so.

The evidence is already visible

The Pensions Regulator's (TPR) recent survey of administrators found that a large majority continue to report significant challenges in recruiting and retaining skilled and experienced staff.

TPR's more recent market oversight work reaches a similar conclusion, describing a resilient and capable workforce as essential to high-quality administration, highlighting knowledge-sharing, succession planning and key-person risk as crucial.

For governance purposes, "wellbeing" may therefore be too narrow a label. The more useful concept is workforce resilience: whether an administration function has the capacity, knowledge, support and operating controls required to deliver consistently through peaks in demand and periods of change.

Administration is a human control system

Standard transactions may follow rules and workflows but the cases requiring the most attention are the exceptions: incomplete data, unusual service histories, ambiguous scheme provisions and discretionary decisions.

As automation absorbs more routine work, the remaining human workload becomes increasingly weighted towards complexity and exceptions. Administrators must interpret, challenge and explain these.

The quality of that work depends on concentration, technical confidence and access to the right support. When those conditions weaken, deterioration does not necessarily always appear first in a staff survey or absence report. In my experience, it begins with more rework, slower hand-offs, inconsistent decisions, incomplete case notes and questions escalating further than they should.

Hybrid working needs redesigned controls

The evidence on hybrid working is more nuanced than the debate sometimes suggests.

A study of 61,182 Microsoft employees found that full-time remote working made collaboration more static and siloed, reduced synchronous communication and potentially made it harder to acquire and share new information.

These findings suggest that hybrid working is not, in itself, the operational risk. The risk arises when organisations move to distributed working without redesigning supervision, learning and knowledge transfer for that environment.

Pensions knowledge is absorbed as well as taught. New administrators learn by hearing technical discussions, observing how experienced colleagues approach difficult cases and asking questions before they become formal escalations. A resilient hybrid model must recreate those opportunities deliberately through case clinics, structured coaching, peer review, accessible technical support and purposeful time together.

Members are arriving with different expectations

Member demand is changing in both speed and substance. People expect clear, proactive and digitally accessible answers, and increasingly arrive with calculations and interpretations generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

The Financial Conduct Authority's 2026 Mills Review notes that AI is already widely used in financial decision-making. While it can improve access to information, it also creates risks around accuracy, explainability and reliance on plausible but unverified outputs.

Members may therefore be better prepared but also more confident in an answer that is wrong. Administrators must identify whether the difference results from an incorrect input, generic tax assumption, overlooked scheme rule or discretion, and explain this without discouraging further questions.

This adds verification and communication work. Case volumes may remain stable while complexity and handling times rise. Capacity models must therefore look beyond transaction counts, particularly as TPR expects dashboards to increase member engagement and expectations.

Emotional labour is part of member service

Administrators frequently speak to members at moments of retirement, bereavement, divorce, ill health, redundancy and financial distress.

TPR's administrator survey found that 69% identified recent life events, such as bereavement, divorce or job loss, among the vulnerable circumstances they encountered most often.The academic term for the effort involved is "emotional labour". A broad analysis covering 95 studies found strong associations between emotional dissonance, surface acting and impaired wellbeing, alongside smaller negative relationships with performance.

For administration teams, the practical implication is that empathy needs an operating structure behind it. People need training for difficult conversations, functioning escalation routes, discretion to spend longer on sensitive cases and opportunities to decompress afterwards.

A script alone should not be a vulnerable-member strategy.

What should trustees monitor?

Trustees should not seek personal information about individual employees or attempt to manage an administrator's workforce. They should, however, test whether the delivery model supporting their scheme is resilient; and that approach is consistent with TPR's General Code, which expects trustees to monitor administrator performance, obtain assurance over internal controls and work with service providers to understand and secure the resources needed for forthcoming legislative or scheme changes.

A useful administration dashboard should connect three types of information:

• Demand and capacity: workload, case complexity, work in progress, overtime, vacancies and project demand.
• Quality and flow: right-first-time rates, rework, quality assurance failures, case ageing, repeat contact, complaints and escalations.
• Workforce resilience: turnover, average tenure, training and coaching, management capacity, succession planning and reliance on individuals for scheme knowledge.

No single measure proves that a team has a wellbeing problem. The pattern matters.

If SLAs remain green while overtime, rework and turnover rise, the service may be consuming its own resilience.

Beyond wellbeing programmes

The World Health Organization identifies excessive workloads, understaffing, limited job control and insufficient colleague support as workplace risks. The condition of the administration team is part of the condition of the control environment. It influences accuracy, continuity, knowledge retention and the quality of conversations members experience at some of the most important moments of their lives.

I still think about that trustee's question.

"How is the team doing?" sounded conversational. It was really a question about operational resilience.

The better follow-up is: "What evidence supports the answer, and what does it mean for members six months from now?"

Dan Taylor is client director at Trafalgar House