Guide to Employee Financial Wellness
Step 2: Assess Your Employees’ Financial Wellness Needs
Not all employees have the same financial wellness needs, even those who work in the same jobs. The Connecticut United Ways’ “Making Tough Choices” tool will give you the experience of managing a monthly budget on a limited income with limited assets and can give you a better idea of what your employees are dealing with and what they might need.
In step one, you assessed your employees’ financial needs at a high level. Now, you will need to ask employees what they want and need from a financial wellness program. Make sure you are prepared to respond directly to the needs you are asking about.
A great way to ask employees about their financial wellness needs in a confidential, low-pressure way is through an anonymous survey. Web-based tools or plain old paper copies with an anonymous submission box are simple and easy ways to administer the survey.
Ask Before You Act
The CEO of a company in Big River City read on an HR management website that short-term loan programs are the newest trend in employee financial wellness. The CEO thought this program might be helpful for his employees.
Before doing anything, he asked the employees if this was something they even wanted or needed. As it turns out, Big River City has several community credit unions and very few payday lenders — in other words, affordable loans were already pretty accessible. The CEO didn’t need to offer a loan program because their employees already had access to good loan options.
What he did find out from his employees is that Big River City has a lot of credit card fraud, and employees were struggling with low credit scores and wanted ways to improve them. So the CEO brought a credit counseling program to their workplace, which was welcomed and used by employees.
Survey
When you release the survey, make sure your employees know that you are not trying to get their personal information and will not be asking for names. If employees know that you are administering a survey to get a general sense of what financial wellness program might be helpful — and not to gather any personal information — chances are they will feel motivated to fill it out.
We have prepared a survey and results guide that is ready to go. It asks questions that assess financial needs as well as desires in a financial wellness program. Note: You might consider copying the survey into a web tool such as SurveyMonkey, which can administer it and store your results. You might also consider partnering with a local community organization on the survey.
After you have conducted the survey, analyze your results. The results guide we have prepared will take you through the survey, step-by-step, and help you interpret the responses and figure out what type of financial wellness program might work for your employees.
In addition to surveying employees directly, you can also talk to your frontline managers and HR department to gain insight into employees’ financial needs. As the main points of contact with frontline workers, they have day-to-day knowledge that you would not otherwise have.
What you’ll have in the end:
- A clear summary of employees’ financial wellness needs
- The confidence of your employees that you are invested in making their financial lives better