HP Inc.

Role: Content Writer

Project Focus: Technical Writing, Copywriting, Content Management, Marketing Operations

Background

I led a content writing and management project, standardizing, documenting, and developing a shared content database for 401(k) plan FAQs.

The problem

HP Inc. didn't have a single source of truth for their review, answering, or managing 401(k) investment questions from stakeholders. This caused internal teams at HP to spend valuable time searching for investment information and points of contact every time an investment question arose. 

The lack of structure, organization, and documentation caused delays in response time, inconsistent responses, inconsistent copy and voice across communications, and an increasing amounts of content and knowledge trapped on individual hard drives.

The idea: Bring structure, process, and documentation to cross-departmental investment information and content through a centralized database. This would enable shared access across teams, allowing them to collaborate, edit, update, and distribute accurate and consistent investment information to stakeholders, saving time and reducing error rates.

The challenge.

Content development and management for investment information was shared by three teams and owned by no one; fixing it became a game of hot potato.

Accurate investment content required a CMS

HP Inc. had three core teams coordinating and delivering investment information to stakeholders: HR, Treasury Ops, and Treasury Investments.

All teams held different pieces of investment information with no one solely responsible for managing the process.

The flow of information between teams wasn’t defined, nor was there a formal process outlining the management and handoff of investment questions and content.

Research

To solve our content development and management problem, I wanted to understand our content and the systems we used to for investment questions, source information, and sharing out responses. I conducted an audit, reviewing our investment content as well as the systems used to manage and deliver investment information amongst teams. 

I conducted a listening tour to understand HR and Treasury team staff experiences to elucidate how they worked through investment inquiries from stakeholders. This helped to codify areas of friction amongst staff or within the process.

Content and systems audit

As part of my audit, I outlined questions that guided my review.

  • What (if any) is the current process between HR, Treasury Ops, and Treasury Investments?

  • Who are the people involved? What do they do?

  • Is content being created on a schedule? Is content stored in any one place? If yes, what format is the content, what is the platform being used, and who has access?

  • [Is there / What is] the process for updating content?

  • Are certain investment questions raised more often than others?

  • What information would help our plan members?

  • What regulations, market situations, or internal guidelines might impact the information we release?

Key insights

Audits and interviews revealed there wasn’t a strict protocol for answering questions. HR would most often reach out to Treasury teams if and when a stakeholder had an investment question. A variety of staff were involved at varying points, without a single threaded leader managing.  

Stakeholders had access to the company’s annual 401(k) investment prospectus via the corporate website and HR intranet, but these documents were only updated annually and could have outdated information.

All other investment information was either pushed out quarterly via the 401(k) plan’s administrator, or was contained internally amongst HR and Treasury teams.

Neither a shared network drive nor a content management system was used to aggregate, update, and share information across teams for managing stakeholder inquiries.  

Listening tour

By listening to staff share their experiences, I was able to fill in knowledge gaps and answer questions unanswered during my content and systems audit. The interviews and audit data formed a starting place for designing a human-centered solution for creating, handling, and managing our investment content.

Key insights

After speaking with staff across all three teams, I found people were concerned about their workloads and giving incorrect information.

Investment staff held specialist investment knowledge, but didn’t have bandwidth to write bespoke answers to investment questions. 

HR staff didn't know who to contact on either Treasury Operations or Treasury Investments to answer stakeholder questions. This caused inefficient email chains as those emails often didn’t land in the correct staff members inbox, resulting in multiple outreaches or forwarded messages until the email landed in the right person’s hands or someone was willing to take on the work.

Furthermore, there wasn’t a project lead amongst HR or Treasury who owned investment questions. HR staff didn't feel qualified to answer stakeholder questions, Investment staff believed it was an HR issue, and Operations staff referred back to the Investment team to handle investment-level questions. 

The company held a fiduciary responsibility to all 401(k) plan members; how well staff communicated the company’s investment choices and policies could impact HP’s litigation risk. HR and Treasury staff were keenly aware of this risk and needed a sustainable solution.

The solution

In order to better manage distributed investment content and mitigate fiduciary duty concerns, I recommended a shared database for information storage and management, a master database of all investment FAQs, and a comprehensive and documented workflow outlining how to handle and managing investment information from creation to distribution.

This solution would manage and direct investment content for staff. Helping them to use, share, iterate content and unwind buried, institutional knowledge lost through staffing changes.

My approach

I chose to leverage existing and underutilized technology resources at HP Inc. to manage our investment information. Microsoft SharePoint was available and could be rapidly customized and deployed across all teams. From my audit and interview data, I created a process, documented the workflow, and collected investment FAQs to post to the site database.

Content management

Using Microsoft SharePoint, I created a consolidated site for our investment content accessible to HR and Treasury teams. The site held all supporting investment data for communications used across internal and external documents, including quarterly investment reports and reviews, compliance policies, and investment questions.

Process workflow

I documented the location of the SharePoint site, types of documents included, and how to save and use various document types for investment communications. I also wrote a process for answering incoming investment questions from stakeholders, including points of contact across teams, and a defined owner of the investment FAQs moving forward.

Investment FAQ database

I aggregated all investment questions HP Inc. had received as well as every answer we had distributed to plan members or stakeholders. Based on staff interviews, I also wrote new FAQs for other important investment topics that hadn’t been asked, but were likely topics. I focused on topics relating to fiduciary duty and issues raised in recent corporate 401(k) litigation. All content was uploaded into our shared database accessible to all.

My solution aimed to close information gaps, provide staff with clearly defined content management practices, and guide them to answers quickly, without detracting from their job responsibilities.

  • Thank you for your inquiry and your interest in the brokerage window. Investment in corporate bonds over an OTC exchange is not permitted through the brokerage window, however the brokerage window offered under the 401(k) plan offers over 5,000 mutual funds, which we believe provides a sufficiently broad range of investments and alternatives to support the retirement savings goals of the vast majority of plan participants.

    The investment options available under the 401(k) Plan are under the oversight of the Investment Review Committee. The investment options chosen to be offered under any plan (including through a brokerage window) must be selected prudently, and need to be appropriate investment choices for all 401(k) plan participants, taking into account the fact that there will be a range of financial expertise in any such population of current and former employees.

    Investment options are selected to further the primary purpose of the Plan, which is to help individuals save for retirement. It has been determined that allowing individual bonds for investment through the brokerage window are not investment options that promote the Plan’s retirement objective, where a “buy and hold” strategy is generally considered to be more appropriate to further retirement savings goals. In making this decision, the Committee considered the fact that investments in bonds may be subject to complex pricing volatility, have liquidity constraints and are very expensive investments for a retail investor, and thus may not be appropriate for the purposes of the 401(k) plan. Accordingly, the Plan does not offer individual bonds as investment alternatives.

  • In 2010, the Plan switched over a majority of its offerings to white label funds from mutual funds. This decision was made after assessing best practices in the defined contribution landscape, existing regulatory standards and our fiduciary duty to participants.

    With increasing regularity, companies are expected to offer employees funds that supply keen performance while keeping fees to a minimum. As traditional pension funds are waning and 401(k) plans become the gold standard, employees now carry a greater burden in selecting an investment profile for their retirement. This burden has moved regulators to demand that more liability be transferred to a company’s oversight and selection of their 401(k) plan’s structure and cost. Not only should fund choices be straightforward and comprehensive, but also cost effective to participants.

    Today, our Plan has a large participant base with assets totaling over $16B. Because of our size, we can leverage our buying power to tailor our funds to fit our needs, negotiating better fees without losing investment sophistication. Whereas smaller companies may invest primarily in mutual funds, with different companies’ funds pooled together, we pool our own participants’ contributions to create our own unique fund, accessing the same high quality managers at a fraction of the price. This practice is known as “white labeling” – where a set group of participants are able to create their own unique investment pool.

    Our white label fund fees are exponentially lower than a mutual fund’s because we have taken responsibility for some of the administrative overhead. This decreases the administrative burden on the mutual fund, allowing us negotiating power for their services. This method harnesses the best investment prowess available while giving employees a better cost per investment.

    We are proud to offer our participants as diverse a lineup of investable funds as possible, taking into consideration risk and cost. Through the creation of white label funds, we have been able to hire extremely adept asset managers running high conviction investment strategies, which in turn allow our participants greater opportunity to successfully diversify their investment portfolio.

  • We believe that fund design and manager selection go hand-in-hand. Building a strong portfolio requires a holistic view that considers both thoughtful fund design and diligent manager selection. We review managers for appropriateness and conduct manager searches to support the goals of the fund's structure, taking into consideration the strengths and merits of managers in relation to the design of our funds. In comparison, many of our peers often start with manager selection, fitting managers into assigned style boxes, resulting in a portfolio that is style and market cap neutral to the benchmark without really having a broader strategy in mind. We believe that it is important to know what we are investing in and the role each manager is expected to play in the portfolio.

    While the quantitative and qualitative criteria we use for manager selection and evaluation are common to standard practice, we place a greater emphasis on how a manager blends qualitatively with other managers in a fund or portfolio based on their investment strategy and approach. Managers are measured across a wide set of factors, including but not limited to: asset size, cash flows, investment in other asset classes, performance target, appropriate benchmark, risk tolerance, fee sensitivity, internal due diligence measures and independent thinking.

    If a manager is no longer deemed an appropriate fit within a fund, we may make the decision to terminate based on one or more factors such as: underperformance over an extended period of time, a mandate is no longer appropriate due to fund strategy or compliance issues.

Investment FAQs

In writing investment FAQs, I followed HP Inc.’s brand standards.

As a 401(k) Plan Sponsor, HP Inc. was a fiduciary to its plan members and stakeholders, all information had to be reported accurately and therefore took on a formal tone given the serious subject matter.

Final thoughts

Limited reach

Putting order to a chaotic system was a fulfilling endeavor, but in analyzing how our teams were working together, I found even more opportunities to collaborate on content and build out strategic plans to leverage our knowledge for the benefit of stakeholders. However at the time, our team had limited scope to pursue additional content projects.

Thinking broadly

Putting stakeholders first, I was able to empathize with the types of information they might need in addition to simply having questions answered. I was able to go from a reactive position to a more proactive one, which can provide even greater outcomes when conceptualizing content creation and management.