09 Feb 2022

How to ensure your global financial wellbeing programme is inclusive

How do you keep employees happy when everyone has a diverse set of needs, desires and challenges? Start by looking at aspects of life that impact most people and work back from there.

What’s the alternative?

Unhappy employees are expensive - and businesses can’t afford to ignore the warning signs. A report published in 2020 by Deloitte, Belonging: From Comfort to Connection to Contribution, found that people feel the world is, ‘“less stable, more polarised, and more volatile”, so they’re looking for refuge and solidarity at work. If your workplace’s environment offers stability, support and understanding, you’re 60% there on the happiness and engagement scale. To fill the 40% gap, you need to help your employees find their purpose, feel included – while being their authentic self – and, most importantly, treat them fairly, particularly when it comes to money and salary.

Excluded employees means unprofitable businesses

We don’t need to tell you what happens when employees feel excluded. A report by BetterUp, The Value of Belonging at Work: Investing in Workplace Inclusion found that people who feel included, and that they belong, are:

• 75% less absent than employees who feel excluded – this equals $2.5m (£1.85m) worth of lost productivity each year (per 10,000 people)

• 50% less likely to leave than employees who feel included – that’s around $10m each year (per 10,000 people).

• 56% more likely to perform better – that’s a gain of $52m each year (for every 10,000 people).

Inclusion and wellness are intertwined

The after-effects of exclusion can be both physical and psychological and that plays havoc with people’s overall wellness. Wellness and inclusion are closely intertwined – you can’t address one without the other. Organisations attempting to champion inclusion will find it’s much more complex than simply work culture. For an individual to feel as though they truly belong, organisations should cater to all aspects of life, assessing when and where people feel excluded. Then, acknowledging each employee’s unique background, experiences and state of wellness, including physical, mental, social and, most importantly, financial.

Financial security equals workplace stability

One sure way of developing workplace stability, trust and fairness is through an inclusive financial wellness programme. What makes you feel more stable than strong personal financial security? When it comes to money, access to support, skills and knowledge should be available to everyone, no matter who they are or where they live. Sadly that’s not the case. According to Deloitte’s September 2021 report Accelerating Toward Greater Financial Inclusion, 91 million people in the US are considered “credit-challenged” and “it is 62.5% more likely for people of color to be offered costlier financial options than their equally qualified white counterparts.”

The system is broken – there’s no doubt about it. Without government intervention, the only way we can rebuild is through financial education and by helping as many people as possible to understand the best way to manage their money. This is at the heart of an inclusive financial wellness programme.

What is an inclusive financial wellness programme?

An inclusive financial wellness program needs to be impartial – that means employees shouldn’t be exposed to financial education littered with sales pitches for services and products. And, secondly, the programme should be built on financial education underpinned by technology. The technology needs to be designed for inclusion and developed from behavioural psychology. Transparency, insights and inclusion are the essential ingredients to employee engagement.

The main aim of the programme is to ensure your staff are fully armed with all the information they need to make the best choices for them and their circumstances. That includes awareness of the employee benefits available to them. There will be benefits in your stack that could significantly improve your employee’s financial wellness – but they don’t know about it yet – reminding and prompting employees of all that’s on offer is critical.

That being said, there might be benefits that unconsciously discriminate through a lack of consideration for your diverse workforces. For example, if you only launch a benefit that targets your highest earners, but most of your people are just above living wage, you would be discriminating. Whereas, if you rolled out a benefit for low earners when the majority are high you wouldn’t be meeting needs. It works both ways. Similarly, relationships with money change with culture. Benefits and communication could exclude people based on location. Data is the key to getting around the challenges of rewarding a global workforce and understanding trends within these disparate financial needs and attitudes. Then, allocating personalised benefit experiences that are communicated in a way that’s accessible to that audience.

How do I get started with an inclusive financial wellness programme?

You might be thinking: ok what now? How do I get started with an inclusive financial wellness programme? The first step is to use data to understand your people’s diverse financial needs. You can then build a full picture of their financial world by assessing key insights holistically – with information that is sometimes overlooked, ie how many dependents they have. Data is the door to getting a better grasp of your people’s true financial needs, behaviours, dreams and goals. Or, if you’ve got all the insight you need - and you’re ready to kick-start your planning, check out nudges' latest ebook, the value of impartial financial education.

This article was provided by Nudge