PSNC 2024: Secrets of Award-Winning Plan Sponsors

When addressing issues of financial wellness, communication and education, plan sponsors take varying approaches depending on the size of their plan and the resources available. 

Four award-winning plan sponsors at the PLANSPONSOR National Conference in Chicago last week shared how they have improved their plans by offering programs that serve their specific populations. 

Amy DeWallace, HR business partner at David Evans and Associates—an engineering consultant firm—said offering an Employee Stock Ownership Plan has not only enabled the company to transition ownership, but it also serves as a way to provide money directly to employees to help them better prepare for retirement. 

DeWallace explained that the David Evans plan operates under five pillars—one of them being financial health.  

“We really believe that [financial health] is very connected to your mental health, your physical health, your connection to your community and how you’re doing in your career,” DeWallace said. “We really try to embed our financial education into all of the things that we do when we talk about wellness.” 

She added that simply educating people through word of mouth is an effective way to communicate with participants. For example, DeWallace said supervisors at the company are given a script, which informs them on how to communicate with participants about the company’s defined contribution plan match formula, the ESOP and other benefit offerings. 

Josh Jessup, general management for global retirement and financial wellness at Delta Air Lines, said financial wellness is a foundational piece of the work he does at Delta. This is seen with last year’s launch of Delta’s emergency savings program, which includes up to a $1,000 incentive for employees to join the program. 

All U.S. Delta employees below the director level, including pilots, are eligible to participate in the program. Like retirement plan contributions, workers automatically contribute a portion of their paycheck and deposit it into a separate account. This is done on an after-tax basis. 

Along with the emergency savings program, Delta created an education coaching path, utilizing their already existing financial coaches, to help incentive people to participate in the emergency savings program. If employees complete the financial education and coaching, Delta automatically contributes $750 to their emergency savings account, and then once a participate contributes $250 to the account, Delta will match the amount, totaling $1,000 in employer dollars. 

“We’re about a year and a half into the program, and one of the biggest challenges I think we had was just the incredible response and the volume we had,” Jessup said. “And as you can imagine, there were a lot of people interested in taking advantage of this.” 

Jessup said around 100,000 employees are eligible for the program and of them, 30,000 have already opened emergency savings accounts and earned the $1,000 incentive.  

Lindsay Madaras, senior manager and associate of well-being at Bread Financial, a financial services firm, said her company monitors the stress levels of their associates by conducting surveys. This year, Madaras said 40% of employees expressed that they were either very or extremely stressed on a typical day, citing inflation, lack of emergency savings and debt as the reasons why they were feeling stressed. 

Madaras said Bread Financial offers a wellness program called Living Well, which allows employees to speak to someone about any financial questions they have. 

“Financial wellness is incredibly personal,” Madaras said. “It’s an individual experience for everyone. I think our role as an employer in this space is really to meet people where they are [and] cast a wide net of different resources so that when someone needs a particular benefit, or support, we’re stepping up to help them in that moment, and making sure that they don’t feel any judgment or shame.” 

Elizabeth Haynie, health and wellness benefits manager at The Beck Group—a provider of architecture, construction, sustainability, virtual building and technology services—said last year the company made the retirement plan available to its craft employees to better support their financial well-being. The craft employees are laborers and workers doing hands-on projects every day.  

“It was really eye opening, because we were so excited to roll out this benefit to be able to support that population in saving for retirement and be more financially secure,” Haynie said. “But we very quickly realized that a lot of the things, communication and education-wise that we had relied on and that were working with our salaried population [and] office folks, were not going to work for this group [of employees].” 

Haynie explained that the craft workers do not have company emails and they are on job sites working, so they cannot easily step away for a webinar in the middle of the day. There were also many technology barriers, she said, as many of these workers use flip phones. In addition, many of workers’ primary language is Spanish.  

Haynie said she worked closely with the payroll team and the managers on site to ensure that they were collecting personal emails and phone numbers for these employees. As the plan also utilizes automatic enrollment, Haynie said her team is working on educating employees about this benefit, as well as communicating about the education and unlimited free financial consultants that are available to them. 

She found that using some old-school communications, like sending postcards home have been effective, as well as leveraging QR codes that scan to flyers in both English and Spanish for employees that do have smartphones.  

“I would love to say that we’ve overcome this challenge, but this is very much a work in progress,” Haynie said. “We’re chipping away at it, and we’re working hard.”