Let’s face it. Rising interest rates and stubbornly high inflation are causing financial stress among those who previously felt financially secure. One can therefore appreciate how this one-two punch is now overwhelming anyone who wasn’t already in a decent financial position before these two economic conditions took hold. 

It’s well documented that concerns over money and financial security are now contributing to declines in mental wellness. At present, 19.86% of American adults, equivalent to nearly 50 million people, are experiencing a mental illness of some sort.

Well-constructed and employer-led financial wellness programs can help alleviate some of this pressure, leading to greater happiness and workplace productivity. Financial wellness now plays an essential role in ensuring what we like to call a Quality Employee Experience or QEX for short.

WHAT IS QEX?

QEX is an approach to personalizing employee benefits in such a way that they elevate the quality of an employee experience. At HUB we use a proprietary data-driven methodology to help employers better understand their workforce and their evolving needs. QEX helps employers create an easy-to-manage, highly personalized, and affordable benefits program.

In many ways, compensation and financial security are at the center of QEX. It’s not just the fact that employees need to feel financially secure through adequate compensation. They often need help with financial matters that go far beyond wages and health benefits. 

A QEX approach entails fashioning a more holistic experience for employees when it comes to all things financially related - and recognizing that those needs can be quite different for each individual at the company.

THE NEED FOR FINANCIAL WELLNESS

Stress brought on by financial concerns comes in many forms: unpaid credit card balances; variable interest rate mortgages; unexpected medical expenses; unplanned home and car repairs; taking care of older family members; student loan debt; and so much more. 

Concerns about less immediate financial obstacles also weigh heavily on people. These include the failure to save for a home, education, or retirement. Funerals, divorces, tax bills, accidents, and other unplanned events can also magnify already tense situations. 

Employer-sponsored financial wellness programs are key to a QEX approach. However, even though more than 80% of workers say they’ve had a positive experience with financial wellness programs through their employer, only one-quarter of workers have access to them.

BEST PRACTICES FOR FINANCIAL WELLNESS PROGRAMS

• There’s no silver bullet. A financial wellness strategy should be built atop multiple layers of solutions. What employees want are solutions that will help them achieve a greater sense of financial security. Understanding individuals’ needs, through tools like HUB’s Workforce Persona Analysis, will enable organizations to assemble a set of financial wellness solutions for a diverse workforce population.

• Evaluate current financial solutions. This evaluation should measure an employer’s usage of, and a workforce’s engagement with, current financially-oriented benefits. For instance, when it comes to a 401(k) plan, is the employer using auto-enrollment and auto-escalation features to optimize employee participation and triggering of the employer match? Is the employer using easy-to-understand decision tools to help guide employees to select the most financially attractive medical plan? Is the employer offering HSA, FSA, and other tax-advantaged savings programs? Is the employer leveraging cognitive biases and behavioral economics to nudge their workforce into making more financially astute decisions?

• Customization counts. The goals, motivations, abilities, and resources of each individual will be different, making the success of financial wellness programs highly dependent on customization. Using tools such as HUB’s Workforce Persona Analysis can identify micro-segments, such as single parents with college-age children, or young employees with student loan debt, or older employees who haven’t saved enough for retirement, allowing employers to customize financial benefits to create a quality experience.

• Let employees know about financial wellness. Engagement with benefits highly correlates with the quality of an employer’s marketing and communications efforts. Employees need both launch and ongoing education regarding how financial wellness programs work and how they will benefit them. And by tailoring messaging, timing, and delivery channels to individual employees, engagement with benefits will increase — as will the quality of experiences employees have with the organization.

IN CLOSING

Understanding your Workforce Persona is a critical first step to building a financial wellness solution that feeds into a QEX. Our Employee Benefits Strategists here at HUB International are ready to help. Contact us now to learn more.