The last 15 months have been a challenging time for retirement savers. Many have seen their savings shrink, while their stress levels have risen.
Employers know financial stress can creep into the workplace—creating distraction, raising doubts and lowering morale and productivity.
April is National Financial Capability Month, and employers can take this moment to help their employees become more confident in their finances and take steps toward a better and stronger financial future.
One key to energizing more employees to get their finances on track is making financial wellness a central element in workplace retirement plans.
We see financial wellness as a feeling of confidence and strength that employees can have in their finances today and for the future. It can serve as an antidote to today’s uncertain and stressful time.
In this article, I outline three steps we are taking with plan sponsors to help improve financial wellness—understanding, engaging and taking action.
Understanding
First, we must understand the financial journey for each employee. General demographic information isn’t enough. Every employee is unique—with their own goals and aspirations, as well as their own emotions, preferences and behaviors.
We are working with many employers to help them understand what their employees want and need from financial wellness programming. The focus for a young, newly hired employee can start with plan enrollment, but student loan debt, budgeting and goal-planning could also be important topics. For a pre-retiree, engagement around retirement milestones is a natural framework, but there is opportunity to build in communications about catch-up contributions and retirement income.
Today, nearly everyone has become accustomed to, and even expects, personalized experiences. Information can play a role in providing plan sponsors with the understanding they need to create content and programs that best match the needs of their employees. Financial wellness programs are often most effective when they emphasize personalization.
Engaging
The next contributor to a successful financial wellness program is how we are engaging with employees.
Like every other industry in the digital age, we must engage our customers whenever and wherever they prefer. Multi-channel delivery is essential—mobile apps, webinars, workshops, emails, texts and on-demand content.
The resources provided by employers can span the full spectrum of the personal finance journey. For some employees, the priority might be budgeting and savings; for others it could be income planning.
Design is a key contributor as well, and financial wellness programs should be intuitive and interactive. Ideally, the experiences include digestible content and make it easy for the participant to engage. Tone can sometimes be as important as content, and we have found that our most successful programs are encouraging and upbeat.
