Why employers need to educate employees about benefits
Nudge invited global leaders in rewards, wellbeing and financial wellness to discuss and share insights on the most efficient and effective ways to ‘Drive awareness, understanding and action on benefits through education’ at a webinar held in October 2023.
Tim Perkins, nudge co-founder and CEO was joined by Luke DeBoer, Financial Wellbeing Manager, Delta Air Lines, and Barry O’Brien, Senior Director, Total Rewards, PepsiCo.
Tim began by outlining the issue: “You’ve got the employee benefits that people need to solve their financial issues. However, as I’m sure you found, communicating your benefits and driving take up is hard. Particularly globally.”
This is because 76% of employees have experienced challenges with their benefits, particularly understanding and making the most of what’s available to them.
Tim identified market trends that outline the scale of the education opportunity in benefits.
- India and scams
Nudge data employees in India are being seriously affected by scams – 80% of people in India say that they’ve lost money due to fraud and complicated by crypto. - Debt in UAE
There’s been a spike in people in the UAE learning and engaging with content about debt as it is no longer a criminal offence to be in debt in UAE. - US and vehicle costs
There has been more interest from people in the US who want to learn about finances related to vehicles and travel. The annual cost of vehicle ownership is high in all countries, but has been very high in the US.
3 steps to delivering benefit edu-action with examples from Nudge’s experts:
1. Driving awareness
The most crucial step in driving awareness for both Delta and PepsiCo is using multiple layers of data to understand their employees (from listening to surveys), and since both global organisations have people in different situations – from the air, to offices, to warehouses - an omnichannel approach is essential to reach their diverse global employee communities:
Luke DeBoer, Delta: “A lot of our people are in the air, traveling, and we have many different divisions [at Delta] and they all need different, varying modes of communication. So we cannot, and will not, have a singular form of communication to reach our different employee divisions.”.
Barry O’Brien, PepsiCo: “We use a lot of the different channels that are available to us and sometimes we need to get very creative. We do quite a bit of listening and surveys to give us an education into the channels that specific cohorts would prefer.”.
2. Understanding
Again, both Delta and PepsiCo rely on insights, directly from the employee discussions on internal communication channels, to bring deeper understanding of what’s impacting people.
Luke DeBoer, Delta: “We take a personal financial planning perspective on our benefits. And ask ourselves blinded questions such as, what should our people be doing? What’s on their minds? And by that, I mean not necessarily the features, but the benefits. What are they working towards? When people save in a 401k [In the US], for example, they’re by and large not thinking about all the features, they’re thinking about stopping working one day through retirement, right? So, we think about the benefit, not in terms of the employer base benefits, but rather the ultimate benefit of taking action in mind.”.
Barry O’Brien, PepsiCo: “More than 50% of our calls are not with the actual employee but with the spouse or partner. Because within the family, the person who manages the finances for the family might not be your employee. That insight immediately unlocked thinking on to how engage employees’ family members.”.
3. Driving action
Delta has implemented a successful incentive campaign and PepsiCo is using personalised, persona-based, education to integrate its benefit offering.
Luke DeBoer, Delta: “We told our people, hey, if you participate in this programme and accomplish some simple tasks, we’ll give you a thousand dollars. And that was directed straight into their emergency savings account. That $1,000 was broken up into two sub-contributions of $750 and was put into eligible employees’ accounts. Once they completed financial education and at least one financial coaching session.”
Barry O’Brien, PepsiCo: “We are starting by focusing on building financial literacy which will be a multi-year journey through a partnership with Nudge. I'm super-excited about the ability to drive action and learning through Nudge’s content and signposting. We probably have every benefit that exists out there so how do we help connect the experience, and how do we actually feed the benefit ecosystem for our employees and their individual needs?”
Find out more: Global benefit edu-action: How to drive awareness, understanding and action on benefits through education.
In partnership with Nudge
A leading financial wellbeing benefit using behavioural science & technology to help employees.
