8 Things to Know About the State of Financial Wellness

For all the buzz around financial wellness, a new survey suggests there is a long way to go.

These days there’s not much argument against the premise behind pursuing financial wellness. The notion is that bad financial health contributes to (and/or causes) a bevy of workplace woes: stress, which can lead to things like lower productivity; bad health and higher absenteeism; and even a greater inclination toward workplace theft, not to mention deferred retirements by workers who tend to be higher paid and have higher health care costs.

But if there is little argument that financial wellness is a worthwhile goal for workers – and one worth supporting by employers – the recent Financial Wellbeing Employer Survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) suggests that we have a ways to go.

Here are some key takeaways from that survey of 250 employers:

1. HR is leading the charge.

The most commonly cited primary champion for financial wellness was Human Resources (55%), followed (distantly) by a senior executive (21%). Human Resources was also cited as the most common secondary champion of these initiatives (26%). Fittingly, then, “communication from HR” was the most commonly cited means of encouraging employees to use financial wellness initiatives (39%), more than double the next highest (monetary incentives, at 19%).

2. The need tends to be gauged by traditional measures.

The most common approach reported in evaluating a need for financial wellness was examining existing employee benefit/retirement plan data such as deferral rates, average balances and loan frequency/amount. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) had taken this step; a distant (48%) second was surveying workers.

Dead last? Creating a financial well-being score or metric (14%).

3. Motivations vary by employer size.

Midsized employers – those with 2,500 to 9,999 employees – were most likely to say they offer these initiatives to improve their workers’ overall satisfaction (67%).

However, the largest employers (>10,000 employees) were most likely to cite increased employee productivity (37%) – and being a differentiator from their competitors (27%).

Size also matters in availability; three-quarters of firms with 10,000 or more employees offered financial wellness initiatives at the time, compared with (just) 49% of smaller firms.

4. Measures of success are varied – and (still) somewhat subjective.

Improved overall worker satisfaction scored as the top measure of financial wellness initiatives (39%), (very) closely followed by reduced employee financial stress (38%). Worker satisfaction with the financial wellness initiatives and improved employee retention tied for third place (33% each).

However, “improved workforce management for retirement” – cited frequently as a key ROI attribute – was mentioned by a mere 10%.

5. Cost is a key consideration.

Cost was the top consideration (50%) cited by employers in determining whether to offer financial wellness benefits – though a close second was interest among employees (46%).

Little wonder that cost loomed large since more than two-thirds (68%) of respondents stated that current or prospective financial wellness initiatives are or would be employer-paid – a figure that increased to 85% among those with a high level of concern about the financial wellness of their workforce.

6. Most employers are not (yet) spending a lot.

While there was a wide range in cost cited for financial wellness initiatives (bear in mind, there was also a wide range in the definition of what constituted a financial wellness initiative), 43% reported the annual cost per employee of current financial wellness initiatives as $50 or less – and a full quarter (26%) did not know the cost.

On the other hand, the one in five firms that defined their financial wellness programs as “holistic” cited an average cost of more than $500 per employee.

7. But then, the programs’ scope is (still) pretty modest.

Only about 1 in 10 of those surveyed offer emergency savings vehicles or accounts, debt management services, or student loan repayment subsidies or consolidation/refinancing services.

Employee discount programs were the most common financial wellness benefit offered. These include cell phones, travel and entertainment; tuition reimbursement; and financial planning education, seminars and webinars.

8. We’ve only just begun.

Despite all the “buzz” around the topic, a majority of the employers surveyed characterized their programs as pilot programs (38%) or periodic or ad hoc programs (32%).

Even among employers with a high level of concern about the financial wellness of their workforce, only about a quarter (27%) characterized their financial wellness initiatives as “holistic.”

A long way to go, indeed.

- Nevin E. Adams, JD
 
See also: “What Plan Sponsors Want to Know About Financial Wellness” and “Building a Bottom Line on Financial Wellness.”

4 Reasons Why Plan Sponsors Should Care About Outcomes

It’s obvious why participants have a vested interest (literally) in the retirement income — the outcome, really — of their retirement savings plans. Here are four reasons why plan sponsors should care about outcomes.

You want your employees to appreciate your benefit plan(s).

If you’re responsible for benefit plans in your organization, you have a very real interest in how your workforce (and management team) view those benefits. Plan sponsors have long used participation rate as the plan success metric — after all, what better measure of success in plan design, education and communication than the objective data as to how many employees have chosen to participate.

But in a time when a growing number of plans have adopted automatic enrollment — well, while credit is certainly due plan sponsors who have taken that step, the resulting bump in participation rates owe more to the inertia of human behavior than innovative plan design.

There is, however, little question that the better your plan performs on an individual basis — positive growth in account balances, a resulting more robust projection of retirement income — the better workers will feel about the benefit plans that helped provide that result.

You don’t want your employees worrying about their finances at work.

Any number of workplace surveys bear out the impact that external concerns — particularly external financial concerns — have on morale and productivity at work (see “Finance Distractions Take Toll on Productivity, Benefit Satisfaction”) and “Study Finds Link Between Financial and Physical Wellness.”) Those concerns don’t even touch on the vulnerability to theft and/or misuse of organizational resources that can tempt financially vulnerable workers.

A robust retirement savings balance at work isn’t a cure for all financial ills, of course, but it can be a source of solace, as well as a resource in time of true financial need.

You want your employees to retire on time.

Workers who think they can’t afford to retire are likely to try and extend their working career — potentially complicating succession planning and your ability to attract (and/or retain) new talent. Data from benefits consultant Mercer notes that each delay in retirement can block 5+ jobs, and that if 4% of your population is retirement eligible and half of those people choose to delay retirement, 10% of your employee population would experience promotion blockage.

As an employer, those trends can also result in higher labor costs, and safety and productive concerns (see “Plan Sponsors Waking up to Costs of Older Workers who Can’t Retire.”)

You want your plan to ‘work.’

There are employers who only offer a workplace retirement plan because everybody else does, who are willing to just “set it and forget it,” who, hearing that workers aren’t taking advantage of the benefit they worked so hard to set up, shrug and say “it’s up to them.”

But that’s not you. Is it?

- Nevin E. Adams, JD

Note: You can find some interesting perspectives on various aspects of plan and participant outcomes at our Participant Outcomes resource page.

"Keep" Sakes

Ask any benefits manager why their organization offers benefits to their workers, and my experience suggests that the reliably consistent answer is “to attract and retain the best workers.”

Indeed, as the 2013 Health and Voluntary Workplace Benefits Survey (WBS)¹ bears out, the benefits package that an employer offers prospective employees is an important factor in their decision to accept or reject a job. In fact, a full third of employees say the benefits package is extremely important, and another 45 percent say it is very important. Moreover, a quarter of employees report they have accepted, quit, or changed jobs because of the benefits—other than salary or wage level—that an employer offered or failed to offer.²

However, the WBS also found that many workers are not especially satisfied with the benefits package offered by their employer: 31 percent are only somewhat satisfied, and one-quarter are not too satisfied (12 percent) or not at all satisfied (14 percent).

It is, of course, entirely possible that these workers are genuinely dissatisfied with the options provided by their employer. On the other hand, the WBS found that a substantial minority of employees may be confused about the benefits their employer offers and who pays for them—a level of ignorance that belies the time and expense often undertaken by employers in making those offerings available.

Employers increasingly look not only to attracting and retaining a qualified workforce, but (at an appropriate time and place), to helping an aging workforce migrate into retirement—a process that can be assisted by a well-crafted benefit program. And it’s not surprising that workers see value in offering additional voluntary benefits to those nearing retirement age.

In fact, the WBS finds that large majorities of workers say they think the following products and services would be extremely or very valuable to workers nearing retirement age:

• An annuity product that makes guaranteed monthly lifetime payments (83 percent).
• Life insurance that pays benefits to the surviving spouse, helping to replace income from Social Security or other sources that is discontinued when a worker dies (77 percent).
• Retirement planning that includes assistance with deciding when to retire, when to claim Social Security benefits, what Medicare option to choose, and how to set up a stream of income for retirement (76 percent).
• Long-term care insurance (71 percent).

During my working life, there have been times when I didn’t care much about certain aspects of the benefits package. As a young, single individual, I focused primarily on salary and vacation—cared less about health care insurance than I should have, while retirement benefits, even for someone who worked with them every day, were distant prospects. As my family grew, my priorities (and those that I assigned to various benefits) shifted. It was still presented as a package, of course, but the various components mattered more or less depending on my personal situation.

Ultimately, employers looking to keep the best workers committed and engaged know that benefits, like workers, have a life cycle, and that programs designed to keep the best workers are not only well-designed for those various life stages, but (as the WBS reinforces) are well-communicated and reinforced throughout a worker’s career.

Nevin E. Adams, JD

¹ The 2013 Health and Voluntary Workplace Benefits Survey (WBS) was conducted by EBRI and Greenwald & Associates. Additional information can be found online here.  If you’d like to become an underwriter of this important survey, please contact Nevin Adams at nadams@ebri.org, or Paul Fronstin at fronstin@ebri.org

² “Views on the Value of Voluntary Workplace Benefits: Findings from the 2013 Health and Voluntary Workplace Benefits Survey,”, can be found in the November 2013 EBRI Notes article online here.