Help your clients be heroes
With your guidance, your clients can step up to meet the real needs of their employees.
Sixty-three percent of employees say that their financial stress has increased since the start of the pandemic, rising to 72% for millennials who represent 35% of the American workforce. With pay satisfaction across all generations at only 60%, the Great Resignation is real. The pandemic coupled with the remote work shift has changed the way many Americans view their work/life balance, their priorities and their new job requirements. The turnover rate for the millennial generation alone costs US businesses $30.5 billion per year, and that’s only 35% percent of the workforce.
Employees are looking for a complete benefits package that gives them more than competitive pay and the standard traditional benefits – these are just table stakes. Organizations need to be creative, innovative, and progressive if they intend to attract and retain top talent. They need to identify which employee needs are not being met and seek to provide a remedy.
One such remedy? Financial wellness benefits. It may surprise you that 72% of employees would move to another company that cares more about financial well-being than their current employer. Financial wellness is the biggest trending employee benefit for 2022.
Here’s how you can add value for your clients (and yourself) and solidify your position as their most trusted advisor – educate your clients on financial wellness benefit solutions. Many organizations are still unsure of what an effective financial wellness benefit looks like for both the employee and organizational ROI. If you aren’t seeing a lot of engagement or interest from your clients in the financial wellness benefit you represent, it might simply be that your audience is unaware of its power to stand up against the Great Resignation, increasing both retention (upwards of 25%) and dollars added back to the bottom line (nearly $2MM annually per 1,000 employees).
Communicate to your clients that an effective financial wellness benefit will alleviate employee financial stress. Staggering statistics from the 2021 PwC Employee Financial Wellness Survey illustrate how important it is for employees to have appropriate financial education resources, confidential access to advice from an expert, practical resources to establish emergency savings and access to affordable financial services regardless of their current financial position or credit standing.
Employees whose financial stress has increased due to the pandemic are:
- Four times as likely to have experienced a decrease in overall household income and now find it difficult to meet household expenses on time each month
- Twice as likely to have used a payday loan or withdrawn from a retirement account
How is this increased financial stress contributing to the Great Resignation?
Simply stated, employees are sick and stressed out.
- 57% of employees avoided addressing a medical health issue because they couldn’t afford it
- 45% of employees admitted that their financial struggles have been a distraction at work
- 50% of employees are embarrassed to ask for help with their finances
Employees are looking for, and will move to, the employer who can help them improve their quality of life.
With your guidance, your clients can step up to meet the real needs of their employees by offering a financial wellness benefit that includes a range of solutions from budgeting and online money management tools, emergency savings accounts, financial counseling, personalized assessments and recommendations, smart insights and alerts to track spending, access to their earned wages early to help manage cashflow, and accessible financial resources to immediately alleviate financial stress.
David Kilby has been President/CEO of FinFit since its founding in 2008. He has grown the company from a single idea into the nation’s largest, most comprehensive Financial Wellness Benefit platform. Chosen as one of the top 100 companies to work for three years in a row (2014-16), FinFit pursues a mission of changing employees lives one employee at a time. Prior to FinFit, David led a multi-million-dollar financial institution holding company, where he was inspired to find a way to help employees get more financially fit. At KPMG Peat Marwick, Norfolk, Virginia, he worked with a variety of public and private organizations in a variety of industries including automotive, chemical manufacturing, consumer finance, managed health care, retail, real estate and wholesale organizations.