What employers are still missing about financial wellbeing
Most employers now offer some form of financial wellbeing support, whether that's earned wage access (EWA), financial education, or automated saving. But most of these benefits are still designed and evaluated from a distance - through usage statistics, take-up rates, and satisfaction scores.
Useful as that is, it tells us what employees are doing, not why, or what it actually feels like to rely on these tools when money is tight.
Earlier this year, Hastee published survey findings using EWA and other financial wellbeing tools. It showed that flexible pay helped people cover essentials, take on extra shifts, and rely less on high-cost or informal borrowing. But one result was puzzling: Despite lower savings rates and weaker financial resilience than the national average, employees using these tools reported unusually high financial satisfaction. The numbers alone couldn't explain that gap.
Working again with the Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing at Aston University, Hastee took a different approach: three in-depth panels with 18 employees across various industries such as health and social care, hospitality, security, retail; listening to how they actually experience these tools in their day-to-day lives. The result, Lived Experiences with Financial Wellbeing Tools, is less about what employees do and more about what that experience means to them - and it has real implications for how reward strategies are designed.
One benefit. Many different employee needs
The most important shift in thinking this research demands is that EWA isn't a single, uniform behaviour. Its value often depends entirely on the alternative it replaces.
For employees already carrying credit card debt, it functions as a way to break a cycle of interest charges: "I just feel like I'm constantly chasing my tail with bills ... it's just constantly never-ending," one participant told us, describing EWA as a way to avoid adding to that pressure.
For others without easy access to mainstream credit, the alternative was asking friends, family or colleagues - something several described in strikingly personal terms: "Kind of gives me some dignity when I get into a spot, because no one has to know how I'm managing my finances if I don't want them to know."
For reward professionals, this is a useful reframe. A single benefit can be doing several different jobs at once across a workforce, which means a single measure of "success" - take-up rate, say -will never capture its full value. Understanding what a tool is replacing in someone's financial life is as important as understanding how often they use it.
Different life stages. Different financial needs
A second theme worth employers' attention is how much proactive communication shapes the value employees get from these tools.
Most panellists told us the tools, particularly EWA, weren't covered during onboarding; they found out about it themselves, often at a moment when they needed support most.
One manager on our panel observed fewer anxious queries about early pay and entitlements after actively promoting the financial wellbeing tools to their team - a small but telling signal that the visibility and ability to see and track their earnings builds confidence and trust.
This points to an opportunity rather than a shortfall: financial wellbeing tools introduced clearly and positively, as a normal part of the wider reward package, appear to help employees engage with them sooner and more confidently.
That, in turn, supports the retention and overtime benefits identified in our first report - suggesting communication strategy deserves the same attention as product design when it comes to financial wellbeing.
Designing for the life course
Perhaps the most forward-looking finding is that usage shifts meaningfully across an employee's life.
Young adults without dependants used EWA rarely, for one-off emergencies. Parents leaned on it around childcare costs and unplanned expenses. Employees navigating major disruptions, like an unplanned house move, used it for day-to-day costs while turning to family for larger sums - several telling us the experience prompted them to think seriously about saving for the first time.
This suggests financial wellbeing strategy shouldn't be static. As Kris Fuzi of the University of Birmingham's Centre on Household Assets and Savings Management said in the report, the research "sheds light on the important role employers play in facilitating employee financial wellbeing" across these different moments, not just at a single point of need.
The full report, including methodology and further findings on financial exclusion and lifecourse usage, is available to download: Lived Experiences with Financial Wellbeing Tools.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Hastee – A Zellis Company
Financial wellbeing solutions helping employees reduce financial stress.
