Guide to Employee Financial Wellness
Plan for Launch
Before you launch your new program(s), create a communication plan. This will guide how and when you will get information to employees and frontline managers. Every organization is different but consider the full range of options. Perhaps it is the all-hands meeting, a monthly newsletter, or weekly huddles. Is email a good communication channel at your organization, or do employees read table tents placed in the breakroom? And do not forget about communicating to managers at all levels, including senior managers. Everyone can benefit from knowing what resources are available to employees and knowing that the organization cares about their financial well-being.
Communications planning should be long-term. You may need to integrate your financial wellness program into your usual benefits onboarding procedures and remind employees of it during specific times of the year, such as open enrollment. Consider periodically reminding managers about the program, too, so they can recommend it.
Measure Success
One last step before you introduce your new financial wellness programs — think about how you will measure success. Taking time to consider success measures before you launch your program will pay off later when you are trying to decide if they’re “working.”
These questions may help you figure out how to measure success:
If your financial wellness programs worked out exactly as you hoped, what would you see among your employees? How would you observe that?
Maybe your managers had been fielding frequent requests for paycheck advances before your new short-term loan program was introduced. If you checked in with managers a few months after the program launched, you might expect to find that fewer employees were asking for pay advances. If not, what might be going on? Was the program communicated well and to employees who need it the most? Was the program in line with the feedback you got from employees about their financial needs?
Credit Counseling for Happier Holidays
Celia is an HR manager at small manufacturer. Each December, employees ask her ask about pay advances to buy holiday presents. This past September, her company began a new credit counseling program. When December came, fewer employees asked her for pay advances. Based on a satisfaction survey, Celia found out that some employees were able to get credit cards with favorable rates after meeting with a credit counselor and used their new cards to buy presents.
How does program utilization look?
Your financial wellness providers should be tracking utilization and be able to give you some aggregate numbers. What were your expectations about utilization? How do they compare to what you are seeing? Using the example above, you may not have expected most employees to take short-term loans, but you hoped those who needed them most would benefit from having them. In other words, high utilization is not always a sign of program success — figure out if your program is serving the employees you were hoping to support.
How does your organization get feedback from employees?
If you routinely conduct employee engagement or benefits satisfaction surveys, consider adding questions about your new financial wellness programs. Decide what you most want to know — is satisfaction with the programs themselves most important? What about how employees feel about the fact that the programs are offered? Go back to your original expectations about what you hoped your program would accomplish. Remembering your goals will help you figure out the right questions to ask.
DATA SPOTLIGHT: FINANCIAL STRESS10% 10% of employees say that financial stress has impacted their attendance. |
How can managers and HR professionals help you measure success?
Frontline managers and HR professionals often know a lot about what is going on in employees’ financial lives. Consider enlisting them to gather informal feedback from employees about your new program.
What’s Behind Employee Behaviors?
Chassa is the operations manager at a long-term care facility. Recently she has noticed that tardiness is becoming a problem. Workers who can’t leave their shifts until their replacements arrive are not attending to patients as well as they should. Chassa asked supervisors what they thought was going on. After that, she followed up with a quick paper survey that she left on tables in the break room. She learned that workers were stressed about a big increase in city bus fares that made it harder for them to make ends meet. Some had to find other ways to get to work that made it harder to be on time. Some had taken second jobs and had to leave work immediately so they wouldn’t be late, so they were distracted when their replacements didn’t show on time.
Chassa brought the problem to the management team and convinced them to offer a small transportation benefit that would defray the cost of the bus fare increase. She is keeping a close eye on tardiness and standards of care at the end of shifts over the next several months to confirm whether the transportation benefit is helping.
What you’ll have in the end:
- A framework for evaluating success for your financial wellness programs
- Feedback from employees about the programs
- Measures of success that are unique to your company and program pairing