Why making assumptions about your employee’s wellness needs is a mistake

What is amazing to me, having been in the financial services industry for over 14 years, are the assumptions leadership has over who has a financial wellness need, and whose responsibility it is to help when talking about the issue of employee financial health.

High income earners and technical staff don’t need help

To the first point, who has a financial wellness need.

There is a perception that high income earners don’t have money problems. We all know that to be untrue and we don’t need research to prove it – but the statistics are there to prove the point if you like numbers.

Gallagher’s Financial Confidence Survey (2020) revealed that 20% of employees with a household income above $150,000 and 21% of managers and directors are spending up to 2 hours or more per week on personal finance concerns at work as well.

Sometimes the assumption is based on the service industry.

For example, I often hear Accounting service firms say their employees are ‘across numbers’ and aren’t in need of financial wellness services. Or that IT service firms & their staff are ‘techy’ and ‘analytical’ and therefore are ‘across’ their personal finances too.

These assumptions are dangerously simplistic and imply that reaching your financial goals, staying out of debt, navigating life’s big moments like purchasing a home, getting married and having a baby all rest on your ability to crunch some numbers.

When we know that mastering personal financial management has very little to do with math and analytics and much more to do with behavioural economics and soft money management skills.

It’s not my place to get involved

To the second point, some employers don’t want to get involved, maybe they don’t feel it’s their place, they don’t know how, or they simply don’t want to – it’s murky talking to staff about their personal finances (or lack thereof).

This perception needs to be challenged and re framed where it exists. Here’s why.

Let me ask you this; do you feel the same way about providing mental health assistance to employees who might be silently struggling and in need of support?

Or about providing nutritional seminars, gym membership discounts or fresh fruit bowls to encourage movement and healthy eating habits amongst staff?

Or even targeted professional development training courses where you recognise a need or lacking in skill to help that employee grow, develop and excel in their role?

I’m going to assume you answered no on all accounts.  

So why then is there a different attitude when it comes to an employee’s financial health needs?

After all, mindfulness is a skill to be learned.

Creating healthy habits is a skill to be learned.

And our job requires a set of skills to be learned.

Personal financial management…. you guessed it – also a set of skills to be learned.

Yet recognising those other needs in our staff and matching those needs with benefits doesn’t seem to have the same stigma that (some) leaders still have for providing financial help.

One important distinction must be made here; your employees don’t want YOUR personal help; they want professional help.

No one wants their boss or their manager to sit them down in the break room and ask them how their budgeting is going. Or their credit card debt. No one expects or wants that to be the solution.

Employees are looking to you to source that help; not be that help.

They have a trusted relationship with you as their employer and are turning to you for access to trusted resources through your network to help them find the help they need and better yet, know that it is there when they need it – even if that time is not right now.  

Whether providing financial wellness services to employees is an employer’s responsibility is ultimately a matter of opinion, but it certainly is an outstanding opportunity to add enormous value to the employer / employee relationship when done right.

So how do you identify wellness needs?

Here are my top 3 tips for stepping out of assumption-based decision making around wellness needs in your business and into strategic decision making.

Make use of available research

There is a lot of qualify research available in the financial wellness space. Some of it is US based research however we have some great Australian based research papers available nowadays too.

Use the research to discover key trends and build a barometer for the issues (and their severity) that you may be facing at an employee level within your business.

For example – in Gallaghers Financial Confidence Survey (2020), 7 out of 10 employees admit to spending between 2 and 4 hours a week dealing with their personal finances and up to 2.4 more days sick leave per year.

That can translate to a significant loss in productivity when extrapolated out against your entire workforce leading to business efficiencies  and ultimately a hit to your bottom line.

You need to work out what statistics are relevant to your organisation and what the possible or probably impact is on your business to identify wellness needs in your workforce.

Survey your staff

Once you’ve uncovered some of the metrics used to identify wellness issues from the research, depending on the size of your organisation you may want to survey your staff.

The effectiveness of this step will depend a lot upon the engagement of your employees – quality data in produces quality data out. So, engagement with the survey is key to utilising this step as part of wellness strategy creation.

Sometimes utilising professional services or assistance here can be the best way to ensure you’re asking the right questions and are therefore setting out down the right path.

Read the room

Workplace culture is also very indicative sometimes of the underlying wellness culture at the organisation.

If you are struggling with employee productivity and engagement, then there’ every chance the wellness strategies are ineffective and not producing the motivation required to drive output.

Where there are retention issues, the question must be asked as to whether the organisations wellness culture (or lack thereof) is to blame.

And your employees are also highly attuned now to what is basically window dressing in the benefits space versus what is truly valuable and beneficial to them.

They are really evaluating what they want out of life and looking at the role their work plays in helping them achieve that.

Looking within at the initiatives employed by the business in this space is a great way to move away from assumption-based needs assessment and to a more strategic decision based on data and insight.