Open enrollment shouldn’t be the only time you engage your employees. Continued engagement can maximize your wellness programs.
Financial wellness programs can help reduce employee stress and keep them focused. Some employees spend between 3–5 hours per week worrying about their finances.
You can save hundreds of dollars per year, per employee, with continued engagement.
Participation Rewards
For starters, talk to your program provider about ways to incentivize employees. During rollout, offer incentives to sign up. It can help to promote the launch and keep it top of mind year round.
Platforms like Edukate give employers contest and engagement tools. These incentives can be financial rewards or gift cards that can help employees kickstart a wellness journey. Just like a fitness program, your rewards can be awarded to employees who earn points or make progress.
Engagement Campaigns
Next, find three or four key areas you’d like to highlight throughout the year. Tax season, open enrollment, and upcoming summer vacations are great times to talk to employees about their finances.
Talk to your provider about ways you can engage employees during these times. Send emails with relevant tips and strategies to manage spending. Similarly, you cab encourage employees to use their financial wellness benefits to learn about topics of interest. Or have conversations with employees about what they’re doing to prepare for these times of the year.
Aim to communicate at least once per quarter with your employees. Keeping finances top-of-mind will help long-term and into financially-stressful times of the year.
Consistent Communication
Finally, you should continually grow your program’s educational resources. With new videos, articles, contests, reminders, and product updates, you can create content to message your employees about.
In addition to quarterly campaigns, try to message employees monthly. Send personal financial reminders or even interesting articles. This can go a long way to change spending and saving habits.
Using Data
As your financial wellness program grows and employees engage, you’ll learn about their habits and learning preferences. Use this data to find even better ways to engage with them.
For example, if you see that many of your employees are focused on learning about how to reduce their personal debts, you can find resources for the office on that particular topic.
If your employees are sending lots of questions to your HR department about how open enrollment works with your retirement plan offerings, you can create articles and resources for your intranet to provide answers to frequently asked questions.
Every employee’s goals are unique.
Continually adapt your communications to help employees in targeted ways to see the biggest impact.
Also, work with your financial wellness program provider to find ways to help employees in the areas they need most and use data to expand your offerings throughout the year.
Continually engaging your employees with their finances is the best way to have a big impact!