How I Work with Your Employees

When you bring someone in to talk with your employees about money, your name goes on that decision. Money is personal, and your people will remember who brought that person in, whether it goes well or not. The person they remember is you. That’s why making sure you have the right facilitator in the room from the beginning matters more than anything else.

 

When the room begins to discuss a difficult topic, like the tipping point to start budgeting or feeling hopeless when trying to tackle debt, I put myself in the spotlight first. I share my own challenges, wins, and overall experiences.

 

Money can be a difficult topic for people to talk about. Your employees are no exception. When things get heavy, people react; they shut down or quietly tear up. Once these strong emotions show up, I take the focus off them and draw the room’s attention to me. I remember a time I was facilitating a workshop on mindfulness and money for an employer, and one woman in particular was having a challenging time with the material. She was making comments about how difficult these changes can be and began tearing up. I brought the attention to me to give her time to compose herself if she wanted to. I emphasized the fact that none of us are the only ones experiencing these feelings. They’re common to everyone.

 

For those who are struggling in a session, I quietly approach them afterwards, usually after others have left the room. I give them the opportunity to talk privately or schedule a time to dive deeper into their situation to get them connected to the relief and resources they need.

 

Not everyone takes me up on that, and I understand why. Most people expect a financial professional to try to sell them something. I saw it all the time when I was working in the banking and credit union industries. People would avoid talking to me because they thought I would try to sell them a new account, to get them to switch their bank, or to get a loan they didn’t feel they needed. I’m not a financial advisor, banker, or insurance professional.

 

I have nothing to sell to your employees, so the only thing that matters to me is their success.

 

Being sold to is one worry. The other is who finds out what they shared. That’s why I have guardrails in place for what HR and others know and don’t know when employees work with me.

 

Workshops: I share how many people were in the room and the topic we covered. I do not share names. If I am tracking engagement across the workforce, I keep my own attendance records, and that information stays with me.

 

Coaching: I only share how many sessions or hours have been used and an aggregate of topics I have covered across all sessions. When a group is small enough that a topic could point back to someone, I leave it out or fold it into a broader category. I do not name whom I’ve met with one-on-one, or when.

 

Employees want to know that I can be trusted, and so I strictly hold that confidentiality to keep that trust. That privacy is also why people are honest with me, and honest answers are the only ones worth reporting. Your leadership will still want to know whether it’s working.

 

The metrics that I track depend entirely on the company and their “why” for offering the program. Many of the companies I work with bring financial wellness in because employees asked for it or because they truly want to help, and they don’t need heavy reporting. Others need numbers to take to leadership. Either way, we agree on what to track at the start.

 

When I first begin working with a company, I try to understand a number of things:

• Why now? What prompted pursuing financial wellness now rather than sooner?

• How has the company handled wellness initiatives or programs before?

• Looking back a year from now, what would make this worth doing?

• Who will you share results with, and what will they want to see?

 

Metrics can be split between what I see in engagements and data a company may have access to or be able to track on their own. On my side, that includes attendance, how many employees the program reached, and self-reported changes across the group in savings, debt, credit, and FinHealth Score® results, always shared in aggregate. On the company’s side, it might be productivity, absenteeism, turnover, 401(k) participation, 401(k) loans, garnishments, and more, tracked in your own records.

 

In my experience, a workforce’s FinHealth Score results usually don’t change much until a program has been running for about two years. In the first year, what you’ll see is people taking action, and how many depends on overall engagement and culture. That action can be as small as raising a 401(k) contribution or as big as a full financial makeover.

 

No one should be surprised a year in. That’s why we set those expectations together from the beginning, using the questions above. If you’re weighing whether this fits your organization, the next step is a 45-minute strategy session. Before I talk about what I’d recommend, I want to understand what’s going on for you, because what fits one organization looks nothing like what fits another. You can book a time directly on my calendar.

 

If you found this page looking for help with your own money, individual coaching starts with a free 30-minute call. You can schedule time directly on my calendar.