Financial wellbeing at work matters. The last few years have made it difficult to ignore the reality of financial pressures for our employees, and we know that stressed employees can be unhappy and unproductive. So the question now isn’t whether a financial wellbeing strategy makes sense. It’s how to build a financial wellbeing strategy that creates real change.
We’ve looked at how financial coaching can help your employees achieve more meaningful behaviour change, and whether financial coaching is worth the investment. But beyond introducing financial coaching, how else can you increase the impact of your financial wellbeing strategy?
We’ve got three practical steps to make a positive difference to your employees’ financial lives, inside and outside the workplace.
Table of contents
1. Address their reality, not your assumptions
It’s easy to reduce your employees to a set of HR categories: young or old, male or female, new starters or those nearly at retirement. And yes, employee demographics can help you make a start on a strategy that broadly supports the people who work for you. But the reality is that each employee is an individual.
What’s more, each individual will have complex needs, worries and questions. Attempting to address these with a strategy that’s built around discrete internal structures (employee benefits, pension scheme or learning resources, for example) can miss what’s really needed.
Consider what your employees’ biggest points of friction are. Often, this will be centred around major life milestones like purchasing a property or planning retirement. But they can also be feeling stuck in bad habits like building debt or avoiding decisions.
Providing employees with a personalised pathway to action can be the key to easing this friction. Coaching might be part of this, with its emphasis on individualised support and achievable actions. But Maji’s platform also leads employees on a personalised digital journey through a wealth of resources, powered by its financial health check tool.
2. Get the most out of existing benefits with an integrated strategy
Introducing your financial wellbeing offering as a totally separate benefit to everything else you provide means you won’t get the best out of either.
Employees rarely think, “I should use the financial wellbeing programme today”, or “I need to use my employee discounts.” Rather, they’re more likely to have real-life dilemmas and problems to solve: “I’m worried about getting to the next payday”, or “I don’t know what I’m doing in retirement.”
A financial wellbeing strategy that integrates your existing benefits can help them navigate these scenarios using the resources you already have on offer. Coaching is one possible solution: the coach can get a deeper understanding of what each employee needs, before helping them identify which benefits might best support their goals.
A digital platform like Maji’s can also foreground benefits when employees need them. For example, shopping discounts are highlighted on the spending planner so they can understand what they could save, or matched pension contributions are emphasised in retirement modelling.
3. Make behaviour change your goal
It’s tempting to look for the easiest measurements of success. How many people have downloaded the benefits app? How many shopping vouchers have they used? How many hours of coaching have we done?
But engagement is only part of the story. Meaningful change should be the ultimate marker of your strategy’s success. For example:
- Increasing pension contributions
- Feeling less stressed about money
- Building a realistic budget
- Taking steps to reduce debt
- Setting goals for the future
Capturing such information can be tricky. You might decide to do this through employee surveys or interviews, although this can be difficult to do anonymously. Using a digital platform like Maji can help you collect information on many of these metrics at scale across your company, without employees needing to give you their confidential information in person. The financial health check tool, for example, gives you data on employees’ emotional wellbeing connected to money, updating over time as they return to give new answers. You can also understand at a glance how many employees have completed actions like creating a spending plan or increasing pension contributions.
Making financial wellbeing at work, work
You can stuff your financial wellbeing strategy full of interventions, but you need to make sure employees are truly supported to make meaningful change. Building a journey that takes employees from stress to action, helping them access their existing benefits and reduce friction points along the way, is important. And measuring success not in clicks or downloads, but in actual impact, is key to understanding whether your strategy is hitting the mark.
Maji’s financial wellbeing platform can help you reach employees wherever they are right now. Whether that’s worrying about the cost of living today, or preparing for their financial future, Maji gives them the tools and resources they need, when they need them. This includes coaching, a powerful way to give employees 1:1 support focused on their actual goals and obstacles.
To find out more about how Maji could flesh out your financial wellbeing strategy so it really moves the needle, schedule a demo with the team.
