3 ways to guarantee your financial wellbeing project fails

Financial wellbeing remains a hot topic in HR and reward with seemingly endless numbers of providers willing to take your money and provide a myriad of services. Increasingly it is becoming difficult to see the wood for the trees and challenging to navigate this complex environment of suppliers.

Through our work and speaking with different companies which have launched both successful and underwhelming services within this sector we have compiled 3 common reasons for failure which on the whole can be easily avoided:

1) Failure to measure

One consistent trend we see in programs which have not performed well is the lack of data and process. Too many assumptions in this space can lead to poorly tailored services that do not tackle the issues the workforce are struggling with.

The most common service we see which personifies this mistake is the generic financial education website. Employers will direct employees to a third-party website containing a plethora of information which is neither personalised nor relevant to the individual. These services are usually implemented because the HR team's brief is to just sign-post employees to a system and let them 'help themselves' when they get there.

If employees were already this way inclined to take this approach, they would simply Google the answer to the financial problem they wish to sort out. Employees need services which provide solutions not just more information.

2) Low engagement

We have written before on ways to turbo charge engagement but many of these levers are still not being used. Low engagement will lead to poor employee feedback in the service and the eventual demise of the project.

If employee financial wellbeing is a core part of your HR strategy then it should be treated as such. Any services used in this project must be instilled from day one. This can be achieved by including them in the new starter process; annual appraisals; bonus reviews; in fact any other opportunities where you have the employee's attention.

For these programs to work there also needs to be significant buy-in from senior management because companywide initiatives will take a lot of work but can be highly effective. If you are able to give employees a dedicated 20 minutes per month which is diarised, respected by line managers and marketed effectively, this can be used to massively improve the engagement not just in financial wellbeing programs, but any reward initiative.

3) The inability to transact

This comes back to the core drivers of why an organisation wants to implement a financial wellbeing program. If the end goal is tangible, such as they want to see a decrease in employee debt; an increase in the number of employees saving or better retirement outcomes then these can be measured, benchmarked and improved.

The key to driving positive changes in these metrics is by making the ability to transact or take action as easy as possible. For example, the generic website mentioned before does not give the ability to transact so will only slightly increase the likelihood of action. If the service gives a detailed personalised recommendation on what the individual should do and then provides the means to take such action there and then, you will rapidly see improvement.

These sorts of services are becoming increasingly popular with the rapid adoption of digital automated advice solutions in the workplace. Through slick user experiences and personalised financial advice delivered as an employee benefit, employers are seeing a new way of providing tangible value to their workforce and demonstrable ROI.

Financial wellbeing is not a fad. Household savings rates are at their lowest levels since the 60s according to the ONS. This is leading to spiralling levels of debt and poor financial resilience. These issues are unlikely to go away anytime soon so the effectiveness of workplace financial wellbeing initiatives is critical to the ongoing health of the workforce.

Phil Blows is director of Wealth Wizards.

This article is provided by Wealth Wizards.