6 Tips to Improve Your Financial Wellness Program in 2021

As an employer, you want your employees to be healthy and well; not to mention that wellness helps boost morale and productivity. Taking preventive steps for a healthy lifestyle is key. Like your doctor always says: Eat vegetables. Drink water. Make sure to exercise.

Financial wellness programs are more critical than ever. But many of these programs overlook one of the most immediate threats to employees’ financial and emotional wellness: protection against identity theft and fraud.​ That’s a significant omission since a recent PwC survey revealed that 20% of employees say they’ve been a victim of identity theft. Phishing attempts have increased 350 percent during the COVID crisis, according to a report from Google. And in today’s working from home environment, employees’ working habits are putting businesses at a higher risk of cyber-attacks, according to a CyberArk study. It revealed that 77% of remote workers regularly engage in practices including using unmanaged, unsecured BYOD devices to access corporate systems. 66% of employees have adopted communication and collaboration tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which have recently reported security vulnerabilities.

“It’s up to organizations to ensure that they have the right tools in place to prevent incidents before they happen,” Tony Pepper, CEO of Egress emphasizes in a Security Magazine article covering the 2020 Outbound Email Data Breach Report. Financial Wellness Plays a Key Role in Holistic Wellness

Elizabeth Bille with Human Resources Today suggests that many employers are turning toward a more holistic view of employee wellness. Holistic wellness is all about adopting preventive, positive lifestyles and behaviors in life, to achieve overall well-being.

Here are 6 financial wellness tips to help enhance your employees’ holistic wellness:

1. Actionable Help. Employees want their employers to take action, especially with pandemic concerns. Trendzer suggests “integrating your financial wellness approach into mental and physical programs…try touching on [employees’] overall well-being.”
2. Hassle-Free Solutions. With so much going on, employees and employers want the benefits of financial wellness without the hassle. This is where IDX Employee Benefits fits in, with the ability to safeguard your employees’ personal data from all types of identity theft, with only a simple sign-up process needed.
3. Personalization. Employees are looking for programs that are tailored to them. It’s important to understand your multi-generation workforce is facing the same risks—identity theft and privacy compromises. By offering IDX identity and privacy protection, your employees will know you value their overall well-being and they will appreciate the peace of mind that complete identity and privacy protection provides.
4. Financial education. Financial education, especially from leadership, has many proven benefits “in preparing people to face economic challenges, how it increases confidence to manage money during a crisis, and how it can lead to recovery as quickly as possible,” voices Billy J. Hensley, Ph.D., president and CEO of the National Endowment for Financial Education, a nonprofit foundation that champions effective financial education.
5. Focus on employee well-being. To support your employees’ well-being, Human Resources Today advocates, “reviewing policies, practices, and benefits; training managers on handling workplace accommodation requests; and providing employee education on health, safety, and wellness.”
6. Indirect compensation. Protection programs — such as privacy and identity theft protection — fall under indirect compensation. As an employer, consider offering compensation that your employees will value. Protecting your employees' identity and keeping their consumer data privacy safe will likely be a winning proposition, especially as financial stress remains high for many Americans, according to the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE). In its recent survey, it found that roughly 84 percent of Americans said the pandemic is causing stress on their personal finances.

As an employer, you can have a holistic impact on minimizing your employees’ stress and maximizing their overall wellness. Linde Murphy, CRCP, managing director for Argent Retirement Plan Advisors, offers reassurance in a BenefitsPRO article, “When implemented now, a remote financial wellness program will help your workers survive the current challenges and position them to thrive in 2021 and beyond.”

Download your free report: Financial Wellness + Identity & Privacy Protection: A Winning Formula