Sandra Perlaki – How Shell manages financial wellbeing

An integrated wellness strategy

Financial wellness is one of three core pillars (wealth, health, lifestyle) at the heart of our global wellbeing strategy at Shell – “Be Well”. It is sponsored from the top of and throughout our organisation.

We support employees from ‘hire to retire and beyond’ as we know that to achieve our aim of being best in class in our industry, we must attract, nurture and retain the brightest talent throughout their career. Proactively supporting our employees to better manage their personal wealth is one way we actively demonstrate employee care.

Financial wellness

We partner with Close Brothers, a leading provider, which we have worked with for many years, to deliver a holistic programme, “Your money, your future”, which aims to:

• Improve employee financial outcomes through them being better informed about their rewards and benefits;
• Reduce employee time worrying about finances;
• Increase employee financial awareness from day one to retirement and beyond.

This is at the core of our financial wellbeing programme which is:

• Open to all UK staff, irrespective of location, seniority, pension scheme, age or life stage;
• Accessible to everyone, via face-to-face seminars, webinars and online to include home and offshore workers and UK expatriates;
• Delivered by a leading external specialist to provide expert insight and market perspective via qualified financial advisers;
• A reward package that is strongly competitive with best-in-class pension benefits.

Keeping it evergreen

In 2017, we completed a holistic review of our rewards and benefits. To ensure we understand the needs of our business and our employees we engaged with employees through focus groups, and with senior leadership, we analysed benefits usage, and conducted benchmarking and analysis of best practice in the market and amongst our competitors.

As well as enhancements to our health wellness programme, we ensured that our financial wellbeing programme is well positioned to meet the identified needs now and into the future. Our enhanced programme offers:

• Face-to-face life-stage seminars – early, mid and late career; in a digital age, we continue to invest in face-to-face delivery as it provides the best engagement; early career introduces joiners to our benefits and how best to use them so they establish good financial habits from day one; late career supports people in the crucial countdown to retirement so mitigating the risk of poor retirement decisions; and mid-career provides reassurance that financial plans are on track;
• Programme of topic-based webinars offers continuous ‘bite-sized’ education to support a specific need or interest irrespective of life-stage and physical location;
• Online education and event booking so employees can access top tips, case studies, and videos and book onto a seminar in only a few clicks when and wherever suits them;
• Dedicated ongoing support for key corporate activities including redundancy exercises to provide support around extreme financial uncertainty;
• End-to-end support: access to experts to support better outcomes;
• Integrated and targeted multi-channel communications to encourage take-up and so maximise impact.

Insight-driven strategy

Insight, to understand the effectiveness of our programme, is fundamental to our strategy. We gather an extensive range of metrics including employee self-assessment which demonstrates how colleagues evaluate improvements on their knowledge and confidence to make financial decisions; evaluation surveys (satisfaction with seminar, presenters and recommendation to colleagues); employee feedback to garner ideas for programme improvement; employee engagement – monitoring the number of colleagues accessing the programme by location and service type; click-through rates and website analytics to measure communication success, peak activity and the number of employees registering to access the programme – new and existing; Net Promoter Score; Benefit uptake monitoring Shell’s financial benefits including the employee assistance programme, share benefits, pension contributions; Monitoring access to the Shell pension portal (for example, number of visitors, changes made, use of the pension saver modeller, enquiries to the helpline).

The results speak volumes for how the programme has helped to achieve our objectives (August 2016 – November 2017):

• +83 Net Promotor Score: significantly above the industry average indicating exceptionally strong employee loyalty;
• 91% overall satisfaction;
• 31% average increase in knowledge demonstrating continuous knowledge improvement;
• 29% average uplift in the likelihood of staff making a change to their finances showing real impact on employees’ financial outcomes;
• 20% of employees use the financial education programme each year indicating significant reach;
• 25% average uplift in confidence to make decisions improving financial outcomes and reducing stress;
• 16% average uplift in employees valuing company benefits indicating employees appreciate Shell’s benefits and feel nurtured and cared for.

“The health and safety of our employees is our number one priority,” says our UK country chair. “Financial wellbeing is a fundamental part of this, as the pressures on today’s workforce have never been greater. Our employees are often raising young families, caring for elderly relatives and trying to plan for their own future in a period of real economic uncertainty. Our comprehensive financial education programme helps colleagues understand what support is available and how to get the most out of it. It is a key pillar of our overall wellbeing strategy, and I’m really pleased to see increasing numbers of colleagues benefiting from it.”

This article is written by Sandra Perlaki, UK policy, benefits & services manager at Shell.

Sandra will be speaking at the Reward Leaders Forum on 18 April 2018. Register your interest here.