How to build a coherent financial wellbeing strategy
Recognising needed areas of support
To make your strategy coherent, you first need to understand how employees feel about finances and where they may need support. As always when looking at a framework to support people, it is useful to talk to them and understand directly what some of their day-to-day challenges are.
We recommend that our clients undertake a specific financial wellness survey designed to provide the insight required to design the action plan. In addition, this can provide a tangible wellness score that will allow you to not only benchmark progress against your actions in the future, but also allow you to benchmark against others doing a great job with financial wellness.
Designing a strategy
The next stage is where most employers go wrong with wellness in general. With the increase in financial wellness products in particular, it is easy to slip into the habit of launching more and more ‘stuff’ at your people. Debt, savings, education, mortgages, flex pay days and good old fashioned discounts all provide options to employers to help financial wellbeing of their people. However, as with most benefit schemes today, when designed in this way, take-up rates and general interaction remain very low. This is why a coherent communication strategy should be your next priority.
Reward and benefit communications have become increasingly sophisticated in the workplace. However in general terms they follow an ‘enable’ methodology. Enablement has been the bedrock of financial product communication in this industry for quite some time. To enable people, the normal process is as follows:
- Identify the people you want to communicate with (all employees, office location or perhaps demographic).
- Provide clear instructions on what you are doing, why you are doing it and how people can action.
- Create a ‘call to action’ – normally to login to your benefit technology of choice and enable selections of the above product types.
The problem is that take-up rates of the products and logins to the various solutions and tech you offer will remain low and, as a result, your grand design of a financial wellness strategy is in danger of falling very flat.
Why is this?
By providing products and enabling, you are not talking personally to employees. Research we carried out this year highlighted that the classic enablement strategy appeals to fewer than 30 per cent of people who have a personality type of higher conscientiousness. You will know these people as the ones who always read what they are sent and they will be the ones that turn up to the planned financial wellness seminars you are running. The fact is that we (industry and employers) are good at talking to the people that will already do the right thing as far as their finances are concerned.
The most important thing you can do to make your project a success is understand the need to differentiate your communications to reach a much wider audience. Our research highlighted that people’s personality type over demographic, financial literacy and even education has a higher impact on their propensity to do the right thing when it comes to money. We discovered four types of people in the workplace based on personality type:
- Happy Savers – do the right thing and have higher emotional stability about money.
- Worried Savers – do the right thing generally but have lower emotional stability about money.
- Happy Spenders – don’t generally do the right thing with money but have higher emotional stability about it.
- Worried Spenders – don’t generally do the right thing with money but have lower emotional stability about it.
Enablement strategies work well for Happy Savers and to a degree, for Worried Savers. They do not work well for our ‘Happy/Worried Spenders’. For your strategy to be coherent, it needs to be so for all your people. This means a different approach to communications that become more personalised to individual personality types and motivators.
Happy Spenders (like me!) need to be enticed with bargains, fear of missing out (FOMO) messaging and deadlines, whereas ‘Worried Spenders’ need time and gentle persuasion tactics. Even our conscientious ‘Worried Savers’ need more than just enablement, they need affirmation to try and shift them to a happier state, otherwise they may be financially stable but if they’re still worried, they are not financially ‘well’.
A coherent financial wellbeing strategy will not be about the products you select. The coherence will come from marrying up the needs of your people and how they feel about money to a communication strategy that is ultra-personalised and speaks the language of the individual.
The author is Nick McClelland, sales and commercial director at JLT Employee Benefits.
This article was provided by JLT Employee Benefits.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member,
