Employee financial wellness

As employers across Canada evaluate their workforce priorities, employee financial wellness is increasing in importance. Empowering employees to build their financial confidence starts with providing the necessary tools and resources.

Support employee financial confidence

Employees are overwhelmed by managing the volatility of their savings while desperately trying to balance their day-to-day priorities. With retirement feeling further away than expected, they need tools and resources to regain control. Now is the time to expand your organization’s well-being strategy. In doing so, you’ll give them a pathway to build financial confidence and engage with their finances before retirement.
With more than 20 years of global financial wellness research as its foundation, our digital platform is designed to complement your organization’s total rewards objectives. This financial wellness digital platform is continuously updated with resources to empower your employees to meet their savings goals.  

The platform includes three main pillars:

  1. Curated financial wellness education
    Employees can access trusted, timely information organized by significant life events, offering personalized and inclusive solutions to their current needs.
  2. Tools and resources to promote learning and confidence
    From budgeting tools and games to calculators and videos, your employees get access to and extensive set of solutions.
  3. One-on-one support for those who need it most
    Giving employees direct access to trusted, unbiased vendors. All vendors are vetted to ensure they focus on fulfilling the needs of employees before, at and beyond retirement.
Discover how easy it is to expand your total rewards with a financial wellness strategy.

Your employee roadmap to financial wellness

Your employee financial wellness journey begins with learning. We offer three learning videos, segmented into easy-to-follow themes:

  • The first video focuses on the reaction of capital markets to the pandemic. Highlighting financial market challenges and opportunities, the video underscores the need for interventions to manage market volatility.
  • The second video looks at some of the ways markets are responding to volatility as the economy emerges from the pandemic. We emphasize the importance of understanding the relationships between both stocks and inflation and bonds and interest rates. The video gives an overview of how these relationships may have been impacted by the pandemic.
  • The third video focuses on the importance of personal engagement through the development of financial habits that improve well-being. We outline simple steps that can be used to manage financial wellness and engage with financial goals.

If you’re ready to enhance the financial wellness of your employees, please contact your Mercer consultant today to learn more about our video series.

The link between financial wellness and business

Improving employee financial wellness today — and tomorrow

Mercer’s Financial Wellness Index helps you gain deeper insights into how to improve the financial wellness of your employees. The index benchmarks a broad range of factors, including financial stress, indebtedness, savings and retirement readiness. Equipped with this robust information, we can help you develop a comprehensive financial security strategy that supports your employees — and your organization.

The gradual shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) retirement savings programs has prompted employers to take a closer look at how well they prepare employees for retirement. However, many employers lack the specific metrics and benchmarks they need to measure the success of their HR strategies, employee outreach plans and the governance of non-investment-related plans.

Take a research based approach to support employee financial wellness

The first of its kind, the Mercer Financial Wellness Index provides a baseline analysis of employee financial wellness. With this tool, employers can now assess their employees against the broader Canadian workforce and evaluate gaps, challenges and opportunities.

By utilizing this robust benchmarking data, we can help you:

  • Evaluate the financial wellness trends, gaps and opportunities of your employees compared to the Canadian market.
  • Develop a targeted strategic roadmap that identifies financial wellness goals and appropriate interventions to improve your employees’ financial and physical health.
  • Improve how financial wellness programs are governed — including implementing metrics to track and measure workplace savings and your employees’ financial security.
  • Increase employee engagement in financial wellness programs using innovative approaches that target different demographics.
  • Align your financial wellness programs with your broader HR or employee engagement strategies.

How Mercer can help

In a recent Mercer survey, when employees aren’t worried about their finances, they are more productive and engaged at work. We offer numerous solutions to help you improve employee engagement and wellness.

After reviewing benchmarking data, we work with employers to improve their employees’ financial wellness. We do this by establishing key metrics, developing communication and education initiatives, and identifying other effective management tools.

By using our Financial Wellness Index in combination with our retirement readiness analytics tool, you’ll gain unprecedented access to quantitative and qualitative data to help enhance your employee retirement strategy.

Mercer can help you improve the overall well-being of your employees by combining your financial wellness strategy with your broader wellness initiatives. Using this holistic approach, you can refine your entire employee benefits experience, from onboarding to retirement.

By working with Mercer, you can better understand your workforce metrics and identify areas for improvement. Together, we can implement a customized financial wellness plan that will support employees today, and take your employee value proposition to the next level.

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