You’ve invested in a comprehensive financial wellbeing programme. You’ve researched your workforce’s needs, sourced quality financial education, and lined up generous benefits. Everything’s in place. But when you check the numbers, engagement is disappointingly low.
It’s a common story. Financial stress costs UK businesses over £10 billion annually, yet the tools to tackle it often sit untouched. The gap isn’t the offering. It’s engagement. So here’s how to close it.
Why engagement is the game-changer
Understanding your workforce’s needs and providing quality financial education for employees are essential foundations, but engagement is where the magic happens. It’s the bridge between knowledge and action, between having benefits and actually using them.
CASE STUDY: From 13% to 80% engagement
Take HR leader Natalie Quilter, who transformed engagement in her organisation from 13% to 80% in just 18 months. Absences dropped and turnover fell but the programme itself hadn’t changed. What changed was that employees finally knew what was available, understood their options, and felt confident enough to act. That’s the power of engagement done well, and it’s why this stage deserves as much focus and energy as anything else you do.
So how do you actually lift engagement? Four moves make the biggest difference.
1. Meet employees where they are
Every workforce is a mix of working patterns, preferences and communication styles. Some people live in their inbox, others rarely open one, some are on shift, on the road, or working from home. A single email or lunchtime webinar simply can’t reach them all.
Effective financial wellbeing in the workplace depends on multiple touchpoints, woven together so that no one slips through the net:
- Pairing a workplace seminar with text message reminders, or posters with QR codes linking to digital resources, helps catch people during the working day.
- Round-the-clock online access matters too, because financial questions rarely arrive between 9 and 5. We consistently see a significant proportion of learning happen outside office hours, which proves just how much flexibility matters.
In practice: You don’t have to build all of this from scratch. Your benefit providers want their products used, so make them part of your engagement plan rather than going it alone.
2. Break down the stigma
Money remains one of the great taboos, and many employees worry that engaging with financial wellbeing support for employees somehow signals failure. That stigma is costing them the very help they need, and employers the return on every pound spent on benefits.
Breaking it down takes more than good communication. It takes a culture where asking for help feels normal. Jargon-free content helps, as does flexible, private access that respects people’s dignity. But nothing shifts attitudes faster than hearing from a colleague who’ll say:
“I watched the pension videos and it changed how I think about retirement.”
“The budgeting tools helped me get on top of my outgoings and to go on holiday for the first time in years.”
Those everyday stories give others permission to engage. When the message comes from someone in the same uniform, on the same shift, or sitting at the next desk, it lands differently, and with credibility.
In practice: Encourage an open environment with peer conversations and shared stories. It’s, quite simply, one of the most powerful engagement tools you have.
3. Keep showing up, long after launch
It’s tempting to treat engagement as a one-off launch or a few dates through the year. The bunting goes up, the emails go out, and there’s a real buzz in those first few weeks. That energy matters, but it’s only the start. Life doesn’t stand still, and neither do financial questions. People have babies, buy houses, lose loved ones, change jobs, and want to retire. Each of those moments is a new opportunity for your programme to add value, which means continuous visibility:
- Regular updates.
- Themed awareness tied to real-life moments (tax year-end, back-to-school, the festive squeeze).
- Interactive resources employees can return to whenever they need them.
In practice: Banging the drum doesn’t stop, it becomes part of the rhythm of working life.
4. Measure the right things
Measuring the true impact of a financial wellbeing programme is genuinely difficult, just as it is with mental wellbeing strategies. Pulse surveys and feedback tracked over time can help build a picture, but they rarely capture the full reality of what’s happening in people’s lives.
Engagement metrics often get used as a proxy for impact, and on the surface that makes sense. The instinct is to celebrate high usage: lots of logins, lots of app activity, lots of clicks. But take a step back and the picture is more complicated. If someone is constantly using a stress-management tool or repeatedly searching for ways to consolidate debt and switch credit cards, that’s unlikely to be a sign of healthy engagement, there’s a deeper concern there.
With financial and mental wellbeing tools, the goal isn’t constant, heavy use. The goal is always-on availability, ready for the moment an employee needs to check their credit score, find a calming exercise, or get clarity on their pension. One HR leader summed it up perfectly in a recent conversation:
“It’s like an insurance policy. You don’t measure its value by how often you claim on it, but by knowing it’s there the moment you need it.”
In practice: Engagement, properly understood, isn’t about everyone using everything all the time. It’s about keeping awareness high, normalising access and conversations, and making sure every employee knows how to engage when they need to.
Building a culture of financial confidence
When employees understand the financial wellbeing benefits on offer, feel comfortable accessing them, and start to see real value, everything else follows. Stress falls, mental health strengthens, productivity rises, and retention improves.
This is the pay-off of getting all three stages right: connect with your workforce to understand their needs, educate them with quality, jargon-free content, and engage them so the support actually gets used. As Natalie puts it, many employers spend significant sums with benefit providers but often miss the education piece, so they can’t support employees with a full 360 approach. Education is a fundamental part of engagement, and engagement is what unlocks the value of your benefits.
At WellFi, we help UK employers turn financial wellbeing programmes into engaged, active communities. Through targeted communications, bite-sized financial education for employees, and ongoing support, we help you reach people where they are and keep them coming back.
✅ Boost engagement with your benefits
✅ Transform awareness into action
✅ Build lasting financial confidence
Ready to see what real engagement looks like? Book a Demo
