Fidelity Tool Helps Drive Total Employee Well-Being

Fidelity Investments announced the availability of the Fidelity Total Well-Being solution, a tool that allows employers to optimize their benefits platform by providing a detailed analysis of employee benefit needs across the four domains of well-being: health, money, work and life.

While other solutions focus on diagnostics and recommendations to address individual silos such as financial wellness or physical and emotional wellness, Fidelity says its holistic approach provides employers with a deeper understanding of the needs and challenges facing their workers in all aspects of their lives.

Pearce Weaver, senior vice president with Fidelity Workplace Consulting, tells PLANSPONSOR, “One of the biggest drivers for creating this tool have been meetings with some of our larger clients, initially discussing financial wellness. But, clients kept saying, ‘That’s great but we’ve been collecting all these programs and point solutions and resources to cover a much broader array of wellness.’” Weaver says clients were struggling to connect employees with different resources in a way that is timely and relevant to them. Clients told Fidelity if it could measure overall well-being of employees it would help to direct employees to more relevant resources.

According to Weaver, though the solution tends to fit larger employers with more complex benefits programs, the Total Well-Being solution is available to clients of any size.

The new solution enables employers to tailor a workplace benefits and communications strategy that will have the greatest impact to employees, contribute to increased benefits engagement and support desired business objectives. The solution helps employers in three critical benefits management activities:

• Quantify employee well-being and identify and prioritize opportunities to improve;
• Evaluate the impact and potential of specific benefit plans and programs; and
• Connect employees with employer-provided benefits that can best improve their well-being.

The Total Well-Being solution consists of three key components:

• Employee Total Well-Being Assessment: Consists of a 10- to 15-minute survey for employees that provides insight to factors that contribute to, or detract from, their well-being. Developed with leading academic institutions, the assessment can help determine where an employee’s benefits needs may be unmet.
• Personalized Employee Action Plan: Provides each employee with real-time individual Total Well-Being scores along with suggested benefits to consider that may help to improve their well-being. Weaver explains that when Fidelity fully customizes the personal scorecard it is to each employer’s benefit program. The suggestions are to a specific set of resources the employer provides.
• Employer Analytics Dashboard: Enables employers to drill into the data to answer critical benefits strategy questions and build business cases for changes. Employers can also compare their results against Fidelity’s national data benchmark.

According to Weaver, the Dashboard was built to be very flexible so whatever type of indicative HR data the employer wants to provide Fidelity can use to give different cuts of data. At a high level, data can be sorted by gender, generation, marital status, whether the employee has children or job class, among others.

As an example of a cohort analysis, he says employers may see that Millennials in a particular income range that have student debt have lower financial wellness scores. That could be a business case for offering student loan help.

However, Weaver points out that there is an interconnectedness of domains. “We’ve found that being unwell in one area—say financial wellness—can impact other areas, such as physical wellness or life wellness,” he says. “If an employer only focuses on one domain, it could be missing information about wellness in other areas.”

Weaver says it seems like a universal area in which employers are struggling—they’ve made investments in lots of resources and have challenges in driving employees to those resources. “Anything employers can do to differentiate themselves, will help attract, engage and retain employees,” he notes.

The Total Well-Being solution was developed by Fidelity’s behavioral scientists and leading academic psychologists as well as feedback from Fidelity clients. The Fidelity Total Well-Being offering is currently available to employers in the U.S. with availability for additional countries in 2020.  For more information, current Fidelity clients can contact their Managing Director, while non-Fidelity clients are welcome to contact Fidelity Workplace Consulting at FidelityWorkplaceConsulting@fmr.com for more information.