How to Market Your Financial Wellness Program So It Becomes A Highly Valued Employee Benefit

October 19, 2016

While some employers do take a tool-based or program-based approach to financial wellness in order to address niche needs of specific employee demographics, the marketing of those programs is by nature, much more narrow and limited in scope. There’s typically a launch to the target population, and periodic reminders at benefits fairs and the like. With everything employers have to communicate to employees, large scale marketing campaigns around a single tool, perk, or program distract from larger more important goals and can leave employees with information overload and decision-fatigue. You need the important information to stand out, and each time you send any additional communication to an employee, you take their attention away from the core messages you want to send.

With that in mind, this post is intended for those employers who specifically are focused on offering financial wellness as an employee benefit.

Let me clarify what I mean by offering financial wellness as an employee benefit. A financial wellness benefit is not a tool, app, niche service, program for a specific population group, a perk, or bullet 178 on the list of things you do to make your company a great place to work. On the contrary, it is an additional employee benefit, subsidized by you, the employer, to provide every single employee with access to employee unlimited personalized financial coaching to help them maximize their pay and benefits— free of any conflicts of interests or sales pitches. When you offer employees a true financial wellness benefit, you are making a commitment to their financial security by providing a resource they can turn to at any time, for any financial need, and know that the guidance they get is solely in their best interest, designed around their specific financial priorities, goals, and circumstances.

Accordingly, you need to market your financial wellness benefit the way you would any core benefit.

This starts by always calling it a benefit— not a program, service, platform, tool, resource, app— but an additional employee benefit that you are offering to all employees as part of their overall benefits package.

It also means leveraging all the traditional methods you use to communicate important benefits, including:

Your benefits handbook
The summary of benefits you provide to employees you are recruiting
Your web site in the career section
New employee orientation workshops and materials
Your benefits portal, in a prominent position as one of your core benefits but also throughout as a resource they can use to better understand the other benefits you offer
All your benefits statements in all forms (electronic, print, through apps your vendors provides) since your financial wellness benefit is a resource for employees to better understand and manage all their other benefits
All benefits communications where the financial wellness benefit
All information regarding changes you are making to benefits
All open enrollment materials since your financial wellness

This strategy accomplishes several important objectives:

It positions you as your partner in your employees’ financial security. Some companies are even beginning to rebrand their entire benefits offering as “Employee Financial Wellness”, with the idea that each and every benefit drives this over-arching goal. If this is too radical a departure from what you are currently doing or not a fit for your culture, then you can simply brand the financial wellness program as its own benefit, consolidating all services from different vendors that provide education and guidance around key financial issues so employees perceive it as a singular benefit designed to help them become more financially secure.
It provides them a sense of relief knowing they have a benefit that can help them make the right decisions about all their benefits— so that as they go through the benefits portal, handbook, new orientation paperwork, they always know they have can get guidance on any of the decisions they have to make.
It drives both awareness and utilization of the benefit. Every single employee should be aware that you are investing in a benefit that supports their financial security— because you care about this aspect of their lives and want them to be as financially healthy as possible. Utilization is also higher when you classify financial wellness as an employee benefit. Doing so signals that this is something employees should take advantage of— no one likes the notion of leaving employee benefits on the table. Also, by integrating financial wellness into all benefits communications, you end up leveraging the infrastructure you already have in place to promote the benefit at a time when employees are actually reviewing their other benefits and most likely to reach out for help.

The HR Benefit Manager’s Guide to Implementing Financial Wellness

May 12, 2016

Interest in financial wellness is exploding, and many companies have questions about what a financial wellness program is and how to implement one. Corporate benefit managers seeking financial wellness solutions are asking themselves, “Is this a wellness initiative? A benefits initiative? Both? How do I find the solution that best fits our company?”

Five Common Mistakes Employees Make in Benefits Planning

March 17, 2016

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “start off on the right foot.” It’s a guideline that can be applied to everything in life, from starting a new career to getting married. But a lot of times, we make initial mistakes that lead to others – we’re not only on the wrong foot; we’re wearing the wrong shoes.

You probably see this with employees in their benefits plans: They are using their benefits wrong from the get go. Instead of helping them reach financial milestones, like retirement or to pay for costly health care expenses, benefits end up costing employees more or become lost opportunities.

As workplace financial educators, we often see the mistakes employees make with their benefits after it’s too late. Mistakes are common because employees are either unaware of or misunderstand their benefits. Here are the five most common mistakes we see.

Going for the lowest premiums. Many employees think low-premium health care plans are best because they see an immediate savings. But, in reality, these plans can end up costing employees more later on if they have a major health issue and out-of-pocket expenses cost more.

Setting it and forgetting it. Auto-enrollment and auto-escalation in company-sponsored retirement plans are valuable features to both the company and their employees, but they often give employees the idea that everything in their plan is on autopilot; they forget to manage their own increases and other options.

Using target date funds with other investment options. Employees often misinterpret their allocation because they use target date funds as one investment option in their portfolio. But target date funds should be used alone or not at all. In this recent video, Target Date Fund Tips on Forbes.com, our planner Erik Carter shares tips on how to use them properly.

Buying and selling at wrong times. Employees who are actively managing their investments are often trying to time the market but end up losing value because they are buying at high points, rather than low ones. As much as we would like to “buy low,” active trading is a common mistake that often leaves employees short of retirement goals.

Unaware of the benefits they have. Probably one of the most detrimental mistakes employees make about their benefits is not knowing what they have. Many companies now have preventative health and financial wellness programs that offer incentives, such as tuition reimbursement and life insurance, which is often less expensive and easier to qualify for through an employer than individually.

Benefits, in the scheme of everyday life, can help employees not only meet milestones and pay expenses but also build wealth. If you’ve seen mistakes that cost employees, share them with us. As plan providers, you can educate them on common mistakes, so they can maximize their benefits. If you would like a worksheet you can share with your clients and their employees, e-mail us at [email protected].

“Bright Spots” in Benefits Communication and Education

March 17, 2016

We’ve all heard that we learn more from our failures than our successes.

But is that really true? Recent research demonstrates the opposite to be true—that there is actually a tremendous amount we can learn from our success. And, further, that leveraging our successes can create major, systemic change and transform cultures within organizations, often in relatively short amounts of time. In their best-selling book, Switch, Chip and Dan Health call these successes “bright spots” and draw upon large scale research studies to show the impact of studying and replicating success.

We’ve seen the same thing from a benefits communication and education perspective: Most employers have experienced major successes in their benefits communication. Maybe not consistently, but if they go back over the last few years they can identify campaigns that really engaged employees, significantly increased participation in benefit programs, and really helped employees better manage their benefits. In some cases, the campaigns may have been so successful they took on a life of their own—becoming viral and even institutionalizing themselves into a culture as an annual event or contest.

When we work with employers, we recommend they examine their best campaigns and initiatives—starting with benefits communication and planning but expanding into overall HR initiatives to determine what the successful programs have in common. In every case where our clients have gone through this exercise, they’ve been able to identify common themes. In some environments, a sense of community is extremely important. Therefore, creating a forum where employees actively participate in the dialogue and interact with each other is vitally important. For others, it’s about target marketing—getting the right groups the right information in the right way at the right time so the communication has a highly personal feel. In other cases, it’s about repetition and making it part of day to day communications and ultimately the culture of an employer group—or even making it part of employee identity. Of course there are always those environments that are all about fun—where employees work incredibly hard and can become burned out and immune to communications because they simply don’t have the energy or enthusiasm to look at one more thing. In these environments, it’s about creating special occasions and events that are fun and allow employees to get their minds completely off work and focused for a moment on themselves and what they need to do to maximize the benefits they have in order to achieve their most important life goals.

At the end of the day, every company is different, but you can almost always find a pattern in your success, and then use these patterns as your roadmap in developing new campaigns that will resonate with your employees. Over time, you’ll end up developing a brand and culture associated with your benefits communications that differentiates your company as an employer of choice and creates a more cohesive (and ideally a more fun) working environment.

Does Financial Wellness At Work Really Work?

January 28, 2016

What exactly is an unbiased workplace financial wellness program? Companies interested in providing one need to understand the essential components of this new workplace benefit. Behavioral finance expert Dr. Scott Spann explains how using the right success metrics, services, and customization can result in both financially healthier employees and an increase to the companies’ bottom line.

The Unlikely Place Where Women Are Finding Relief from Financial Stress

January 21, 2016

Can you guess which employees are the most financially stressed? Research shows that 55% of lower to middle income mothers have “high” or “overwhelming” levels of financial stress. Thankfully, many of them are turning to their workplace financial wellness programs to help reduce their level of financial stress. Learn more about how these valuable initiatives are helping female employees thrive.