Talking about employee financial wellbeing can feel daunting – we get it.
But with over half (52%) of all UK employees admitting that cost-of-living pressures are influencing how they are feeling and performing at work – it’s something organisational leaders must gain the confidence to start working on.
Financial wellness is too important to ignore.
In this article we’ll show you how pulse surveys – that ask the right employee financial wellbeing questions – can be a simple way to improve the financial wellness support you’re providing your employees.
Financial wellness is a key driver of overall wellbeing and mental health.
At a glance, these statistics from the Money & Pensions Service show just how many UK adults are being affected by money worries and low financial wellbeing.
Employee pulse surveys are short, quick surveys that are sent to employees on a regular basis – this could be weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or quarterly.
Generally, they are much shorter than annual or employee lifecycle surveys, using between 1 – 10 questions which means they are much quicker for employees to complete than more traditional surveys.
Financial wellness pulse surveys simply focus on the financial wellbeing of employees.
You wouldn’t check your bank account just once a year, so why are you happy only checking in on employees with surveys just once a year?
Employee pulse surveys are so important for providing data on factors that may be influencing how your employees are thinking and feeling – including financial wellness.
Pulse surveys are simple, flexible, and adaptable which means that they are easy to create and send to employees more regularly than in-depth annual surveys.
This gives you the ability to have your finger on the pulse of things that are impacting your employees’ engagement before it’s too late.
The feedback from employee financial wellness pulse surveys will help you decide what money worries or challenges are affecting your team most, and how you can support them through ongoing cost-of-living pressures and economic uncertainties.
Supporting employee financial wellbeing isn’t just a moral responsibility, it’s necessary for successful business and a healthy workforce. 
There is no ‘one size fits all’ rule for pulse surveys, every organisation is different and will benefit from a different cadence.
Most organisations run pulse surveys monthly or quarterly, but what we’ve found works best is that your pulse survey frequency should be in line with how quickly you can communicate the results and create change based on employees’ feedback.
Doing this will help build confidence and engagement in the surveys which will serve you well for the future.
For example, aligning your employee pulse surveys to your management or board meetings will ensure that results can be discussed and actions agreed in a timely manner so that you can feed back to employees quickly after the survey ends.
Measuring financial wellbeing isn’t an exact science, but there are many indicators that can help you build a picture of how your employees are doing.
For example, monitoring changes in productivity and performance, and absenteeism and satisfaction will help you understand how employees are feeling about their financial wellbeing.
The way employees engage with financial wellness programmes and benefits such as your company’s EAP also change as employee wellbeing changes too, including these usage stats in your monthly reporting will give you great insights into any changes within your employees.
Here is our recommended list of financial wellness metrics to track and measure:
Catch-up on Stribe’s webinar featuring personal finance expert Abby Birch from My Money Explained.
Together, we explore how to ease financial stress at work, share tips for comfortable money conversations with employees, and discuss how external economic impacts can affect your team.
Measuring and supporting employee financial wellbeing can feel daunting.
The best place to start is by adding questions to your employee pulse survey that will give you data to help you build (or adapt!) your strategy.
To help you get started, here are seven of our favourite financial wellbeing questions that you can incorporate into your next employee pulse survey.
These questions will give you the insights you need to build a financial wellbeing plan that really supports your employees.
Free text follow-up question: Which element of your finances impacts your mental wellbeing the most?
Free text follow-up question: Please share detail to expand on why you scored this way
Follow-up question: Please share more detail
Follow-up question: What types of support would help you?
Follow-up question: What else could we do to support you?
Follow-up question: Please share detail to help us understand your answer
Follow-up question: Please share more thoughts and ideas
By using these financial wellness survey questions – and being smart about the tools you use to collect your insights – you will ensure that the financial support you put in place for your employees is tailored and relevant to their needs.
At Stribe, we give you the flexibility to ask the right questions for your organisation, and will work with you to make sure they give you the insights to create real change.
The right software can make or break your pulse survey strategy, using a tool that gives you true flexibility – and is powerful enough to give you confidence in your results – is key.
Find out more about how the team at Stribe can help you get your financial wellbeing strategy right.
About the author
Lucy Harvey, COO at Stribe, has 11+ years’ experience in purpose-driven leadership roles across health, wellbeing, internal communications, employee engagement, and marketing. She is passionate about creating workplaces where people are happy, fulfilled, and feel comfortable and safe to talk.
