5 Financial Wellness New Year's Resolutions HR Leaders Should Make

Solutions with substance, content, and context

It’s safe to say that 2020 was an extraordinary year - and most people are happy it’s over. But just because the year has turned doesn’t mean HR leaders shouldn’t be looking forward. 

One of the hangovers of 2020 is that workforce financial wellness took a beating. More than half of American households lost income in 2020, either through a job loss, reduction in hours, forced furlough, or pay cut. What made it bearable for most was extraordinary government support in the way of cash payments, extra unemployment assistance, and student debt and mortgage forbearance programs.

Traveling the world virtually (thank you, Zoom!), I spoke with hundreds of C-Suite executives, many of whom didn’t understand how deep the economic pain went and how much the forbearance programs helped. 

“But our employees still have their jobs,” they’d tell me. True. But it’s likely that their spouse or partners didn’t enjoy their full hours and income for at least part of the year, especially for employees in the bottom half of the salary curve.

Workforce financial wellness doesn’t just stop at the employees’ desks. It filters out to their spouses, partners, and children. It helps employees meet their financial needs and employers who provide a full suite of financial wellness services see higher job retention, productivity, and satisfaction with lower turnover, rates of addiction, workplace accidents, and healthcare costs.

Most employers think that if they provide a 401(k), healthcare and perhaps a few voluntary benefits like a student debt refinancing program, they’re offering financial wellness. 

Actually, no. Financial wellness requires analyzing how you can help your employees, and then choosing best-in-class solutions that not only provide options, but help employees sort through them, understand their power, and use them to the best of their abilities. 

Here are my 5 Financial Wellness New Year’s Resolutions I hope everyone in HR (and the C-Suite) will make in 2021:

1. Measure Your Employees’ Level of Financial Stress

Don’t just ask them how they’re feeling. Best Money Moves breaks out financial stress into 15 categories, so our customers know whether their employees’ financial stress is caused by student loan debt, general debt, identity theft or elder care issues. If you don’t measure, everything else is fluff and instinct.

2. Provide Solutions With Substance, Content, and Context

In a lot of ways, money is a tough subject for many because it’s tinged with echoes of the past. Research shows that how we’re raised has a lot to do with how we deal with money in our lives. The solutions you provide need to be comprehensive in reach, providing deep, expansive content that helps explain more about the problems employees are having and how they can solve them. Trust me: if you provide deep content that is easily digestible and available when needed, your employees will access it.

3. Understand Your Employees’ Need for Benefit Personalization

One of the biggest changes in benefit design is the recognition that employers and employees want benefits to be customized and personalized. It isn’t enough to just offer one thing to everyone. There are five active generations in today’s workforce, and financial issues don’t belong to a single generation. For example, student loan debt affects Gen-Z and Millennials, but it also affects Gen-X and Baby Boomers. Each generation reacts to their debt in a different way. Ideally, your benefits need to be customizable by workforce group or category and personalized to each individual.

4. Engage a Platform That Will Bring It All Together for Every Employee, at All Salary Levels

Artificial intelligence means you no longer have to put 50 benefits in a single file on your intranet and hope someone finds it. Best Money Moves ingests your benefits (voluntary and corporate-paid) and then uses AI to push the right benefit to the right employee at the right point in time using specially-designed triggers. It personalizes benefits seamlessly, while customizing the platform for each employer.

5. Work Harder to Convince the CFO to Say Yes

Financial wellness doesn’t have to break the bank. And, in fact, it won’t. There are free (to the employer) versions of great products that allow employees to pay for what they need. The bigger point is this: workforce financial wellness pays for itself many times over. Now that 2020 is over, resolve to tackle the CFO and get a comprehensive financial wellness system in place for your employees this month.