Four tips to improve employee financial wellness at Christmas and beyond
What is employee financial wellness?
Financial wellness doesn’t just mean providing a healthy salary or any extra salaried benefits, insurance or rewards. In fact, it’s everything which affects your money and personal financial situation. This can include personal financial coaching, digital investment tools, budgeting apps and much more. Some of these tools can be implemented rather quickly and help employees budget for Christmas presents – an expense which can take a huge toll on personal finances.
Employee financial wellness means providing answers to common financial worries, such as:
- Support to increase financial safety net.
- Help to budget incomings against outgoings.
- Savings tools for private financial investing – such as saving for a holiday, car, deposit or child’s education.
Employers with a financial wellness culture already offer their employees support to ease personal money worries. They offer education around financial topics, and arm employees with tools for improving their financial wellbeing. This is quickly becoming the new standard of the modern employer.
Why should employers invest in employee financial wellness programs?
More than half of employees who participated in a recent survey from Bank of America Merrill Lynch revealed that financial stress regularly interfered with their ability to focus and be productive at work – Workplace Benefits Report (2017). An actionable financial wellness strategy creates employer branding capital, which can support employers in their efforts to attract, recruit and retain top talent.
The importance of promoting financial wellness in the workplace
Financial wellness benefits aren’t just popular for employees who juggle family budgets or are planning for retirement. They’re surprisingly effective for those at the beginning of their lifecycle – recent graduates and generation Z employees.
In our revealing Employee Happiness Index 2018, we found that today’s young employees need support to manage personal finances more than any other workplace demographic, with more than half stating they feel anxious when they think about their personal finances.
The current state of the housing market, coupled with rising student debts, should make financial wellness benefits a no-brainer for modern employers – particularly if they want to recruit today’s graduates and young professionals.
Popular examples of employee financial wellness
A handful of progressive employers are finding new ways to ease employee financial worries:
- Swedish bank Klarna provide all new parents at their workplace with 20 weeks’ parental leave at full pay, as well as a childcare benefit during the child’s first two years.
- Professional services company PwC provide all employees with extra financial support to help pay off student loan debt.
- Internet-related services company Google pays 50 per cent of a deceased employee’s salary to their spouse or partner for 10 years.
Four steps to providing effective financial wellness programmes
1. Leverage employee data
Collating, analysing and making use of the employee data you have can help you tailor an offer which meets your employees’ financial needs. From student debt repayment plans for recent graduates, to preferential mortgage rates for millennials and pension planning for, well, all employees.
2. Educate and coach your employees
Good money management and effective planning can begin with a simple piece of advice. There’s a whole industry specialising in providing large-scale personal solutions to entire workforces. From digital investment services to professional financial coaching, employers have the power to make it easier for their employees to find financial stability. And this can often be enough: more than 45 per cent of employees in Benify’s recent survey said that just having a better understanding of their personal financial options would increase satisfaction.
3. Maximise employee engagement with financial matters
Use targeted technologies to tailor communication. If you’re looking to increase engagement with your pension, you can tailor messaging, tone and content per your policy and the employee’s lifecycle stage. Want to highlight your childcare benefit? Lift your messaging to focus only on those who have recently returned to work after parental leave.
4. Offer the right financial tools and services
Make sure your offering resonates with your employee demographics. What do your employees need help with? What do they worry about? Stay on trend by offering the latest services within personal finance management. Lifeplan, for example, recently became the world’s first pension adviser to push personal financial advice direct to customer’s smartphones. Quite often, the most effective solution can be the easiest to implement.
Learn more about financial wellness by downloading our free eBook Financial Wellness: The Topic You Can’t Afford to Ignore.
This article was provided by Benify.
In partnership with Benify
Benify offers the market's leading global benefits and total reward platform.
