Top 4 financial wellbeing benefits questions – and answers
The discussions revealed the top four questions currently on the minds of total reward leaders, aimed at tackling their most pressing workplace hurdles.
1. How can employers understand what people want?
Quote from the discussion: “We have done a good job putting in the basics around communication and solutions, but we need to do more to meet people where they are at.”
The conversation kept returning to personalisation. From package options, driving awareness, to supporting benefit education and understanding, it seemed the collective goal from the audience was to enable better benefit behaviours by understanding employee needs.
Begin with assessment and insight. Find out your employees’ challenges, interests and behaviours. A good starting point is a financial health check-up, from there you can start to plan more personalised financial education experiences.
2. How can employers gather employee data to understand what motivates different groups and demographics?
Quote from discussion: “People are forgetting things they provide. We need to focus on all demographic; executives need to get involved and help too.”
When we asked how they gathered employee insights, people said “we talk to our EAP to get data”, and “track 401k loans and stats through our record-keeper”.
Reading between the lines, it seems employers are struggling to bring their employee data together, to identify how different individuals and demographics engage and use benefits.
Organisations need a single source to start to solve some of those workplace challenges, e.g. 401k loans (in the US), childcare costs, student loans, fair wages, healthcare complexities and education, stocks and shares education and tax.
For corporate organisations with front-line workers, the question is how to reach the entire workforce.
Our recommendation to gather data on employees is to consider working with a financial education provider to access segmented employee analytics and address challenges through personalised education.
3. How do employers balance their annual benefit communications and plan?
Quote from discussion: “Open enrolment is like drinking from a fire-hose, so we are figuring out ways to break down our benefit communication throughout the year.”
We were curious to know more about employers’ communication strategy.
Most employers said they focus their energy on open enrolment and tend to have a calendar of events (generally lunch and learns) promoted through targeted communications.
Employers need support to map out the full year of benefit activity and communications – tailored using employee insights and data.
The way to balance benefit communications and planning is to identify a technology that can deliver benefit education throughout the year, to the right people, at times that matter most to them.
4. How can I make benefits more accessible?
Quote from the discussion: “Most benefit pages are locked behind a username and password, they aren’t accessible to the workforce, their spouses can’t access them, and many give up if they forget their username and password.”
Another quote: “During open enrolment most of the benefit inquiries received were from spouses.”
When our partner or family are struggling, we struggle too. This sentiment is understood by employers, but it seems there is a distinct lack of accessible benefits on the market that support this need.
The best way to make benefits more accessible is to find a solution designed for inclusion and takes a holistic view of people’s needs, challenges and circumstances, i.e. Nudge is accessible to a full workforce and family.
That means employees can invite up to five people to access personalised financial education, no matter where they are in the world, in the language that works for them, with locally relevant content.
Find out how to personalise your employees’ financial wellness and explore:
- The unique routes your diverse workforce can take to achieve financial wellbeing
- How inclusive financial education adds relevance to your total rewards strategy
- How you can prove the impact of your financial wellness strategy
In partnership with Nudge
A leading financial wellbeing benefit using behavioural science & technology to help employees.
