Providing Financial Well-being for Workers at All Income Levels

BY Emily Nonko | December 22, 2021

When it comes to statistics about American workers and financial well-being, the numbers are striking: 63% of employees surveyed say their financial stress increased since the start of the pandemic, while 72% of millennials and 68% of Generation Z workers are more stressed than their older counterparts about money, according to a 2021 survey by the professional services firm PwC. Employees whose financial stress has increased during the pandemic are four times more likely to find it hard to meet monthly expenses on time and two times more likely to borrow savings from retirement, the poll showed.

However, despite the obvious need for support in financial well-being, 90% of Americans don’t have access to professional financial guidance because they don’t meet the asset minimum typically required by advisory services, according to research by the financial well-being platform LearnLux.

The urgent issue was the topic of discussion at a recent From Day One webinar titled, “Financial Well-being Solutions for Employees of All Income Levels: Hourly Workers, Executives, and Everyone in Between,” moderated by Fast Company staff editor Lydia Dishman. The lack of support, said Rebecca Liebman, co-founder and CEO of LearnLux, “has been a systemic problem for a long time, but Covid really magnified everyone’s financial insecurities and employers see that it’s the biggest burden people are carrying with them to work.”

Recognizing the need, employers are increasingly bringing financial wellness into the overall benefits picture. “When we think about well-being, we think about financial well-being as a pillar of our overall focus. Whether it’s physical, emotional, social, and financial, it’s all very much connected,” said Kelley Elliott, VP of total rewards at Delta Air Lines. “We’ve been on a journey to really understand where can we have the biggest impact on supporting our employees. In an industry like the airline industry that has experienced more than 20 months of massive ups and downs, helping our employees recover from a financial and health perspective is where all of our focus is going right now.”

One of the pandemic’s most stressful aspects for most employees has been the uncertainty. “For me, the last couple of years has highlighted something that many of us already know–mainly, that we have to plan for both the known and the unknown. And that financial wellness in particular really needs to have a focus of its own,” said Stephanie Mapp, manager of benefits and total rewards for Atlanta-based Aaron’s, a rent-to-own retailer.

The conversation on financial well-being, top row from left: Martina Poet of Messer Construction Co. and Stephanie Mapp of Aaron's. Bottom row, from left: Rebecca Liebman of LearnLux, Kelley Elliott of Delta Air Lines, and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company (Image by From Day One)

Financial hardship struck in myriad ways during the pandemic, even for workers who kept their jobs. “Being in construction, we didn't stop working during the pandemic. So that's a benefit to our employees,” said Martina Poet, benefits administrator for Cincinnati-based Messer Construction Co. “However, many of our employees’ spouses experienced layoffs or they had to stay home to care for the children. There was a great impact on our employees.”

So how can companies address the issue and offer more holistic financial well-being support, beyond paying competitive wages? Mapp said that “a cookie-cutter solution was not meeting our needs,” so Aaron's decided to bring on LearnLux to customize its financial well-being program, separate it from other wellness programs, and provide a more personalized approach.

LearnLux's Liebman stressed the need to “level the playing field” when it comes to introducing employees to financial well-being, given that such resources had been traditionally reserved for top-earners. “At LearnLux, we pride ourselves on being the most accessible and equitable financial well-being program, and that means meeting people where they are,” she said.

At Messer Construction, Poet said, the workforce ranges from entry-level workers, many of them carrying student loans, to employees nearing retirement. “We have executives, we have mid-careers, we have a whole host of different generations of employees in our company, not to mention we’re spanning multiple regions. Everybody's needs are so different.”

In the case of Delta, financial well-being support extended to the voluntary layoffs the company did during the first year of Covid-19. “We had people who decided to voluntarily retire and leave the organization, and we partnered with Fidelity to do one-on-one coaching sessions to support the individual with this massive life decision,” Elliott said. The company is now developing a framework focused on financial literacy, financial stability, and financial freedom. “We’re building out the strategy of what it would take to move people through all those phases–some of it is coaching, support and education, some of it might look like new programs,” Elliott said.

The panelists discussed the importance of fair pay and addressed the ever-growing wealth gap. At Messer, the company heard from employee feedback that compensation was a concern and has begun looking into pay gaps and inequities. “The company found some [gaps] and has started to address those,” Poet said.

At Delta, the company had a part-time group of employees who were not receiving benefits “and we have since brought them into the fold,” said Elliott. “That was a really big action we took, because we didn’t feel it was the right treatment from a benefit-equity perspective.”

Mapp stressed the importance of transparency about pay. “Many of the policies around pay are known; there are no secrets between different groups,” she said. Transparency extends to benefits, Mapp added, with her company creating a benefits hub that’s easily accessible.

As Dishman pointed out, the increased interest in financial well-being has coincided not only with the pandemic but also the increasing competition for workers as the economy has rebounded. As a result, it can be a mutually beneficial offering as employers recruit new workers and seek to retain the ones already on board. “We take a very, very close look at how we compare to the industry,” Delta’s Kelley said. “We typically focus more on the airline industry, but right now, with this war for talent, we really had to focus much more broadly.”

Added Liebman: “So many of our financial decisions are tied to our employer. In offering financial well-being resources, she said, “I’ve seen it help both the employer and employee and create systemic change across companies.”

Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

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