Reward director masterclass: ways to link financial wellbeing and broader health benefits

One of the more interesting HR observations over the past few years is that benefit strategies, or any internal business strategy for that matter, work best when they are structured to form part of the ‘whole’. The ‘whole’ meaning – aligned with an overall strategy, rather than functioning in a vacuum or as a standalone entity.

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It is also important to ensure that your financial wellbeing and broader health benefit strategies are aligned. Getting this right will ensure the benefits provided under these strategies are linked so that they positively affect one another and can complement each other in achieving greater levels of overall employee wellbeing.

Ideally, you’d want to be able to measure the success of a benefit (eg its return on investment), as well as the impact of this success on other benefits.

The root cause

We know that problems with health, and particularly mental health, are often present as a consequence of financial problems. In cases like these, it is a symptom rather than the root cause of a problem. In practice, these issues are already linked. It should therefore be an important aim when formalising any wellbeing strategy to link different types of benefits in terms of delivery. The effectiveness of health benefits will increase in an environment with healthy levels of financial wellbeing, where root problems are addressed.

In today’s complicated talent management environment, an organisation cannot afford to offer a suite of employee benefits only as a tick-box exercise. Offering product for product’s sake is an incredibly easy trap to fall into and in many instances HR decision makers might eventually become disillusioned and even lose faith in the validity of wellbeing solutions altogether. Not to mention the potential damage to your organisation’s bottom line by having to absorb the cost of failed interventions.

The correct approach, from the outset, is to ensure you establish the objectives you as an organisation want to achieve through the benefits that you offer. These objectives should be aligned with your overall business strategy. By doing this, a strategic framework should be set within which both your financial wellbeing and health benefits can be delivered.

Establishing your benefits framework

This framework should very clearly define the following:

Established timeframes Over what time periods will you be measuring the success of your financial wellbeing and health interventions? Are these time periods practical and of sufficient length to provide reasonable indicators?

Flexibility Are your strategies flexible enough in order to allow tweaks and adjustments? Should you find that the benefits you offer no longer address the needs of your employees, or are no longer aligned with those in related strategies, will it be easy and cost effective to adjust your strategy?

Can you measure success? Ensure you have a well-defined and practical way of measuring the return on investment of any interventions you offer your employees. Combined with this should be the measurement of the impact of one intervention on another. For example, does a big take-up and engagement with a particular financial wellbeing product result in the use (or less use of) a particular health benefit? How does this impact on the overall success of your strategy, both in terms of return on investment and the increase in wellbeing of your employees?

Robust analytics and data systems You should be able to gather employee data and opinion in an effective manner to be representative of the whole workforce. This data should be accessible and analytical processes and tools should be in place to interpret the data. This will enable benefit strategies to be aligned with the true needs of employees.

Finally, your engagement strategy should deliver targeted communication to your workforce, in line with your wellbeing strategy and linking different cohorts of employees with the most appropriate set of benefits.

The author is Riaan van Wyk, workplace wellbeing consultant at Barnett Waddingham.

This article was provided by Barnett Waddingham.