3 ways employers should expect more from financial wellbeing

Financial wellbeing providers have been helping people across the UK battle the cost of living crisis. But organisations should expect more from them on three fronts

As a market, financial wellbeing was unheard of until just a few years ago. Since then, it has flourished, with many organisations introducing financial wellbeing as a key pillar of employee wellbeing.

With the cost-of-living crisis clawing bigger and bigger chunks out of incomes, we’ve seen firms across the UK become increasingly concerned about employees’ financial wellbeing. Their goal has been to mitigate the effects of financial stress on their employees.

Organisations are well placed to step in to help employees. And we think they should look to add the following criteria to their assessments of providers.

1. Ability to support financial inclusion

While financial stress affects every worker, individual needs tend to change depending on factors like industry, level and region. Firms must ensure they’re using providers who offer support that is financially inclusive.

That means offering forms of financial education and support that are designed to accommodate the needs, struggles and goals of every individual. Topics of educational content offered should be wide-ranging (spanning areas like getting out of debt, buying a first property, building a pension, budgeting, saving and investing, and more). Personalised one-to-one support must be available.

2. Attention to employee engagement

Financial wellbeing providers must know how to work with organisations to engage workforces. A big problem is onboarding, which creates administrative chaos for HR teams. Another is maintaining engagement. According to Forbes, 92% of people who lose their login details for digital services never return to them.

Organisations should consider providers that offer products that help staff create new, healthier habits around money in a user-friendly way designed for their workforce. For example, if you employ large numbers of deskless workers, offering services through platforms they already use, like WhatsApp, can be an effective way for organisations to ensure engagement remains high.

3. Continual development and experimentation

Providers must invest in research and development. Innovation is about creating new, more straightforward means of helping people solve problems.

Providers should consider the needs of every organisation independently. And work with stakeholders to uncover personal finance challenges that employees are facing – for example, through surveys and interviews – and be willing to address specific needs in new ways.

Through their selection of financial wellbeing providers, organisations have the opportunity to help millions of people make progress in an area of learning that, more often than not, they missed out on growing up.

But financial literacy studies show this is much easier said than done. Indeed, across the Western world, financial literacy levels have remained low. Personal finance is not something generally taught at school. And if you weren’t taught about it in the home, either, then chances are you’ve had to figure things out as you go.

The financial wellbeing market, then, has the potential to do so much more in positively impacting the lives of workers – especially those in deskless roles.

It starts with organisations expecting more from providers. This will help ensure improvement to financial wellbeing services across the board, and help providers deliver better value to end users.