REBA Award Winner: Financial category - Yorkshire Building Society
Size: 3,900
Sector: financial services
Initiative: Financial wellbeing programme
What Yorkshire Building Society did
As a financial services provider, Yorkshire Building Society believes its customers, members and its regulator expect its own staff to be in charge of their own personal finances. But like any other employer its employees are faced with many different money challenges related to their personal circumstances and the changing world around them.
In 2017, the building society researched its employees’ financial wellbeing. It found one in ten struggled to sleep due to financial worries, 37% had less than £500 in savings and 66% said that they did not know how much they needed to save for retirement. These personal challenges were set against a backdrop of changes in Yorkshire Building Society itself which had led to uncertainty for some employees and increased anxiety about their financial health.
Responding to these circumstances, Yorkshire Building Society introduced the first wave of its financial wellbeing programme in April 2018, focusing on education, ease of access to appropriate resources and products, and help for colleagues who are in difficulty.
To back this up, the company also launched three complementary engagement campaigns: Taking control explored financial education and access to tools to take greater control of their finances. It also included videos of employees sharing their money worries – including senior leafders, which helped to reinforce support from the top of the organisation for financial wellbeing.
Getting into a savings habit enabled staff to understand how small changes in their day-to-day spending could add up to a significant pot of savings over time. Finally, Coping with the unexpected enabled staff to focus on creating the ability to save, resolving a financial crisis and coping with financial worries.
Yorkshire Building Society has been keen to make sure that both senior leaders and line managers are engaged in the strategy and able to build a culture of financial wellbeing. In addition, the company has put a strong emphasis on employees’ own ownership of their financial health, using tools and resources supplied by YBS.
Although its strategy is relatively new, the company is already starting to see results. It has seen a reduction in the number of staff who are losing sleep over money worries, and an improvement in the percentage of colleagues who now have over £500 in savings.
Yorkshire Building Society’s Chief Risk Officer Richard Wells concluded: “When our customers are struggling financially, we encourage them to tell us as early as possible so that we can provide the support they need. As a responsible employer, we should take the same approach with our colleagues – we want to help them to understand their own financial situation so they can make good choices to improve or maintain this.”
Why it won
Our judges were impressed by Yorkshire Building Society’s commitment to looking inwardly at the financial wellbeing of its staff as well as that of its customers. They also praised the breadth of the first phase of the programme, plus future plans to embed financial health in broader HR initiatives, policies and processes.
“Yorkshire Building Society has done the hard part first in tackling savings habits,” said one judge. “This area is a huge challenge, so it’s really impressive that they have looked at this issue.”
The financial wellbeing policy also links well to the company’s wider mental and physical wellbeing strategy, and it was praised for being both “authentic and responsible.”
If you'd like to know more about how to build a winning financial wellbeing strategy, sign up for REBA's Finwell Forum on 7 March 2019. The day is full of opportunities to hear from practitioners about how they have introduced financial wellbeing into their own organisations.
