Ways to understand employees’ financial pain points – and how to help solve them

Financial wellbeing may be high on your agenda to support your employees and improve your business objectives, but where do you start?

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Your workplace provides a favourable environment for supporting your employees’ finances, after all, this is how they currently engage with finances like pay and benefits. Knowing this is one thing, but delivering a meaningful and effective financial wellbeing strategy can prove difficult, with each employee having their own individual circumstances, issues and preference for receiving information.

Where to start

For everyone, both employers and employees, the starting point has to be identifying what causes financial stress.

Key life events are obvious stress points – bereavement, retirement, birth, marriage, divorce, buying a house, education – all of these events present significant emotional and financial stress.

Internally you can survey your employees to better understand what their financial stresses are and how they feel they can be supported. Using external research can bolster this and help identify the main issues that could be affecting the majority of your employees. There is a wealth of research available – the FCA’s Financial Lives Survey for example provides some interesting statistics on the financial concerns of different age groups, earnings bands and regions.

Using management information from your internal systems, like payroll and flex platforms, can help identify who is experiencing key life events or accessing benefits. This helps you to know your people and what they are discussing.

Using these points will build a picture of the financial pain points your employees are experiencing. The next step is to overlay this with the benefits you offer, identifying how your benefits compliment and distinguishing if there are any gaps that require additional support.

Inform and educate

You are in a unique position to be able to inform and drive messages to your workforce, opening the communication lines and familiarising finances. We need to break down the barriers and encourage and remind employees that their finances shouldn’t be ignored but dealt with, reviewed and monitored.

The way you communicate will be personal to your business and your understanding of your employees’ preferences, whether that’s in person (group, one-to-one sessions and seminars), online (online benefits platform, employee benefits platform) or in print (posters, scheme handbooks, educational guides, internal promotions).

However you choose to communicate, remember to:

Keep it simple – use plain language to break down the financial jargon and clearly explain the subject matter with a focus on the key messages and the actions they are designed to promote.
Keep it short – finance is seen as complex and people can quickly get lost.
Seek support from your providers – could they offer onsite help, or literature. Your employee assistance programme for example, may offer employees access to experts or online resources, helping them with a range of topics including money management – providing comfort that this is free and confidential.

Provide a solution

Unfortunately, education alone only equips employees with the ability to act; it is often not enough to drive people to take action. Offering a solution provides a clear pathway for employees and encourages them to effect a change.

Review your benefits offering to see how this currently/could support your employees’ finances?
Could you provide access to savings plans, fair finance and other useful products to improve financial wellbeing?
You have the ability to let people make change through salary deductions via payroll, as payments are taken before employees get paid, decisions stick for longer.
Highlight third party resources – Money Advice Service, Pension Wise etc.

Take the time

Putting the time aside to sit down, understand and review our finances often moves to the bottom of our growing to do lists, daily living taking priority over the future. Giving employees the time to understand and focus on their financial matters through the workplace could be the catalyst for improving and easing their financial pain points, providing invaluable time to understand and engage with them.

Employers should think about the timing of discussing finances with employees. There might be clear starting points in the year when tackling this subject would feel appropriate, for example the new tax year, post-Budget or your flexible benefits window. Consider coinciding with nationwide campaigns like the “Talk Money” week initiative from The Financial Capability Strategy, which aims to improve financial capability across the UK, or could you use internal systems to communicate at a time that is relevant and personal to an individual.

It is likely to take time and a consistent focus to get changes to happen, and possibly even for people to feel comfortable addressing financial problems via the workplace. However, creating an open, positive culture of financial wellness that is accessible and ever present, is a good foundation to allow that change.

Find out more

For more information on financial wellbeing and download our guide: helping your employees make better financial decisions.

The author is Liarna Whittington, associate consultant at Johnson Fleming.

This article was provided by Johnson Fleming.