With an abundance of financial wellness programs on offer today, plan sponsors are tasked with figuring out which benefits make the most sense for their populations, as well as measuring how effective these programs are.

In a PLANSPONSOR webinar on Thursday, plan sponsors, advisers and policy experts discussed how they address the issue of financial wellness and the various strategies they use to increase employee confidence.

Understanding Needs

Pam Hess, executive director of research at the Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association, said with so many programs to navigate, there is not one offering that will meet the needs of every employer.

“There’s no formula,” Hess said. “It’s a process of identifying what’s important to an individual workforce and what tools or services could meet those needs, while balancing, right on the other side, what resources the employer has to dedicate to it, because it is a big undertaking. … It’s only good if folks use it.”

Hess said the first step for plan sponsors who want to offer some sort of financial wellness program is to assess their workforce, including demographics, retirement data and health data. She suggested communicating with workers through surveys, employee resource groups, focus groups and one-on-one interviews to understand the benefits people are looking for.

When surveying, Rob Massa, managing director and Houston operations retirement practice leader at Prime Capital Investment Advisors, said it is important to “ask the harder questions.” For example, he said he has worked with employers who ask participants whether they have had a bankruptcy in the last year.

“Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions to find out about your population, but also make sure the information is protected,” Massa said. “You should have a layer between you and the survey so you don’t know who answered these questions. You want to keep it private, but you want to get that aggregate data, so you know what the problems are and [can] then scan your demographics.”

Value in Individual Meetings

Karen Bartley, executive vice president of Ohio Gratings Inc., a manufacturing business in Canton, Ohio, said by working closely with Bruton Chisnell Advisors, Ohio Gratings has been able to understand the needs of its employees. When an employee reaches 90 days at the company, they are scheduled to meet in-person, one-on-one, with an adviser on-site during paid work hours.

“We think that is very important,” Bartley said. Today, we’re kind of losing that one-on-one, face-to-face [connection], and we feel like that’s critical.”

She added that in feedback gained from those meetings, the company identified that its employees are looking for assistance with debt management, estate planning and beneficiary information, among other things.

“We’ve seen some upticks on … people wanting to take loans out of their plans, but we’ve been able to, through the one-on-one meetings, sit directly with them and offer other things they can do prior to taking a loan out,” Bartley said.

Thea Ammon, a senior benefits and wellness administrator at OneAZ Credit Union, said the company takes a “holistic” approach to wellness and that educating employees is the most challenging, yet the most important, aspect of their financial wellness offerings.

Working with ADP, Ammon said OneAZ provides QR codes on bulletin boards where employees clock in and clock out each day. These serve up catchphrases to help employees think about retirement savings or other financial milestones.

“My little widget has 15 seconds to capture attention, so that means I need an important graphic and a catchphrase,” Ammon said. “I [need to] catch them when they’re ready to be caught.”

In order to measure the effectiveness of the wellness programs OneAZ offers, such as one-on-one financial coaching, Ammon said she looks at enrollment percentages, deferral levels, number of plan loans, number of hardship withdrawals and reasons for hardships. She has also been focused on ensuring that participants have a beneficiary on file with their retirement plan and said calling participants directly who have not done so has been an effective strategy in getting 100% participation.

Creativity Is Key

Both Ammon and Bartley spoke about creative ways to interact with participants and encourage them to become more engaged with their retirement savings and overall financial wellness.

For example, Bartley said the company recently provided a 3.5% discretionary contribution to employees. In order to “keep it fun,” the company purchased Hershey chocolate bars and gave one to each employee as their “Willy Wonka golden ticket,” which reminded them to check their T. Rowe Price account and see the contribution they received. She said the company has received a lot of positive feedback on this campaign.

“I can’t stress enough [to] just communicate, communicate, communicate,” Bartley said.

Under the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, Massa reminded plan sponsors that they can contribution a one-time cash incentive of up to $250 per person to incentivize participants to contribute to their plan. He has found that contests and incentivization, such as providing gift cards to workers when they attend education sessions, tends to work when seeking to drive engagement and participation.

A full recording of the webinar can be viewed on PLANSPONSOR’s website.