The Wellness Crew alongside our sister company Employee Financial Wellness delivers programmes that are designed to educate, empower, and improve the financial wellbeing of your employees.
We do this through a 3 pillared approach to improving the financial health of employees in workplaces big and small.
1.Measurement
The measure of a workforce is fundamental to the success of an Employee Financial Wellness intervention. We must understand the attitudes, opinions, trends, and existing financial literacy levels of any given workforce.
Attitude and Trends Survey
This measurement is taken at the outset of a programme to gain an understanding of the base level of a workforce. This is our line in the sand survey. This will allow us to not only gain an insight into the demographics, financial lifecycle stage and topics of most concern to a workforce but will also allow us to measure the success of our programme and prove your return on investment.
This survey is taken at the outset and at the end of an Employee Financial Wellness intervention.
Engagement Surveys
Feedback and engagement surveys are used following on from each tier of the programme. This measurement allows us to determine the popularity of various topics and will also allow us to establish the retention levels of employees through the various stages of the intervention.
Individual Surveys
These surveys look to garner feedback from individuals who have engaged with our webinars/seminars and our clinics. This is designed to determine the effect the programme has on the financial literacy and their sense of increased comfort employees have with their financial wellbeing.
New Starter Surveys
Given new starters have very little experience of the culture of your organisation, these surveys provide an excellent opportunity for us to gain an understanding of their concerns, needs and wants.
New starters are going through a significant change in circumstance so often leave important financial decisions on the long finger. These surveys allow us to determine the base level of new employees and can also be used to compare financial literacy levels of employees outside your organisation when compared against your existing employees.
Step 2 in the Employee Financial Wellness 3 pillared approach is Education.
2. Education
At the very core of our approach is our education pillar. This pillar is designed to deliver behavioural change to your employees through an educational programme built to help employees understand their financial goals through 4 tiers of delivery.
We believe in a “No Surprises” approach to empowering employees to target future financial events to ensure that each employee fully understands the various elements that make up their financial worlds. These tiers are built bespoke to your organisations and can be used in isolation or all together.
Our 4 Tiers of Delivery
Webinars and Seminars
We don’t teach our kids how to manage their money in our schools, and as a result a huge number of us end up progressing through our careers without fully understanding “what a tracker mortgage is”.
The first tier of Employee Financial Wellness looks to deliver group learning webinars/seminars that focus on the various financial life cycle stages of your workforce. We focus our group sessions on different demographics within an organisation including New Starters, Early -Mid-career employees, late-career employees, and redundancy sessions.
These sessions are designed to teach the theory of Employee Financial Wellness and financial planning to the masses and will look to empower employees to understand their short, medium and long term goals and learn how to target their own future financial events.
Masterclasses
Our specialist masterclasses look to target the individuals’ elements with an employee’s lives. While our seminars/webinars teach financial planning fundamentals, our masterclasses educate your employees on the individual topics with their financial setup.
Masterclasses include Mortgages Uncovered, Beat the Taxman (legally), Savings and Investments, Budgeting, Retire Well and Redundancy Decisions to name just a few.
Clinics
Our individual clinics are also hosted both virtually or in-person and are a crucial piece of the Employee Financial Wellness jigsaw. Individual employee clinics are always extremely popular in that they afford your employees the opportunity to have an individualised financial roadmap built specifically for their situation.
Each employee is unique and has their own set of circumstances so our clinics allow employees to ask the question that is relevant to them and have items they never thought to consider highlighted to ensure that employees are set on the right path to achieving their life goals and dreams.
They are 30 minutes long and the employee will leave with some high-level direction and goals to work towards.
Solutions
Employees will be provided with the opportunity to connect with real functioning solutions from regulated and qualified experts. One of the biggest obstacles to improved financial wellness is inaction.
Employees often engage with health promotion support but without any action or change to their behaviour, they simply fall back into their old bad habits.
Employee Financial Wellness will ensure that employees are informed of the mechanics of how to make changes to their financial set up which will, in turn, ensure that they arrive at their future financial events fully prepared for the associated cost.
The final step in the Employee Financial Wellness 3 pillared approach is Communication.
3. Communication
Being one of the newest members of the corporate wellbeing family, Employee Financial Wellness is designed to be fun, engaging, and interactive to ensure excellent engagement levels. Being financial experts, we are tasked with changing how financial education is delivered in that finances are often considered stuffy and uninspiring.
Employee Financial Wellness is further complicated by the fact that we deliver a preventive health promotion programme in that it is designed to prevent financial unwellness. Employees are sometimes unaware they need financial planning assistance so ensuring they engage is paramount to the success of the programme.
We have used a fun & fresh approach to our brand which grabs the attention of employees and looks anything but corporate and stuffy!
We engage employees through a number of communication methods.
Consistency
Communication theory has shown us that to build engagement we must have several points of contact with employees. Employee Financial Wellness uses a communication approach that ensures that employees are regularly reminded of the programme delivery methods and schedule of events, the central topics of the programme and the outcomes for those who engage in the programme.
Furthermore, testimonials from employees are used so employees can see their colleagues speak about their experience with the programme to build trust, engagement, and improved financial wellness
Fun Brand
We use a cartoon-based brand to enhance our engagement percentages as we know that the most successful financial wellness programmes globally are attractive, eye-catching, entertaining, interesting, and stimulating.
This approach has proved to be very popular with employers and it is consistent with the positive, fun, happy message employers want to deliver as part of their wellbeing initiatives.
Pointed Employee Communications.
Employees will not read anything of length and as such initial communication must be pointed and succinct. We highlight the issues that are most likely to grab attention and ensure that all communications have a snappy call to action.
Employees are much less likely to attend a “Tax” webinar and much more likely to engage with a “How to beat the Taxman.. legally!” webinar.
Outcomes-Based Communication
Given that Employee Financial Wellness is a preventative health promotion activity in that we want to change behaviours now to prevent future financial difficulties, we must focus part of our communications strategy on the outcome’s employees get from engaging with the programme.
Communicating positive results will increase the initial engagement and retention of employees through the tiers of the programme itself.
If you have any queries don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
About the author : Aine Ryan
