Financial services consulting firm EY has rolled out an online advice tool to address the financial wellbeing of more than 5500 of its staff in Australia and New Zealand, and take-up of the service is running at almost double the expected level since its launch.
EY made the online advice platform Map My Plan available to staff in early June as part of a broader approach to addressing employee wellbeing, which also involves health, family and community, values and the working environment.
The managing partner, financial services, for EY Oceania, Rowan Macdonald, says use of the advice service has “exceeded our expectations significantly”.
“In terms of unique visitors, it’s double where we thought it would be,” Macdonald says. “And about half the people who have visited the site have gone through the process and created a financial plan.”
Macdonald says EY’s workforce is “a pretty representative demographic” of the broader population, and a financial wellbeing solution across such a large firm had to be adaptable enough to cater to a range of needs and levels of financial knowledge and understanding.
It was also critical that the service not align with a product manufacturer. Macdonald says EY, as a service provider and a participant in the financial system, needed a solution that was independent and was not seen as endorsing any client or organisation over others.
“Map My Plan is online, self-service, independent from our financial services clients, and it allows our people to use it without the data being transmitted to EY,” he says. “It was safe. We don’t know who’s accessed it. We don’t know what the plans are that are generated by the tool.
“We’ll get some data, which will be around the total number of users, what staff levels they were, and demographic information. But we won’t get any financial information. And that was very important, because we wanted the use of it to be maximised without people fearing their data would be transmitted back to EY.”
He says addressing financial wellbeing is “not about the quantum of financial resources at your disposal, it’s about the ability to arrange and order your financial affairs so you’re making rational, sensible decisions that fit with the available resources”.
“Financial fitness is about controlling the factors that have an impact on your financial health. And it might be at different stages of your life,” he says.
Macdonald himself, as well as other senior leaders within the firm, promoted the financial wellbeing tool actively, but its longer-term success will eventually depend on trust and word-of-mouth referrals.
“We have a very active program of email, intranet blogs, etc, to bring it to the attention of people. And within the firm, we had a number of very senior people constantly mentioning it and talking to their teams and saying if you haven’t had a look at this you should do yourself a favour and have a look,” Macdonald says. “It’s something the firm has made an investment in, and we had enough lead time, and enough people socialised on the importance of the issue, that we’ve had a very successful launch.”
Macdonald says financial wellbeing is a critical aspect of an employee’s broader wellbeing, and the five pillars of the EY program are all inter-related.
“In the context of financial health, our survey revealed – and I think there’s other research to support it – that if someone is under financial stress, from the point of view of not having a clear picture of their finances, it can have an impact on their mental state; it can cause tension in relationships, which impacts on family and community; it impacts productivity; and it impacts on satisfaction at work. It can even ultimately affect physical health as well,” he says.
Macdonald says that over the past 12 months EY has expanded the range of self-help tools it offers to staff to address each of the five pillars and the firm has a full-time executive dedicated to the issue. He says it is not yet clear if the firm will introduce other tools to address staff financial wellbeing.
“We will continue to make Map My Plan available but I think when we get some of the data back, if it identifies particular cohorts of our staff where there is a concentration of usage, I think then we might start to investigate what we can do to help those people,” he says. “Whilst there may be an assumption that a large part of EY’s workforce is already financially literate, there is the risk that some elements of our workforce can be overlooked as a consequence.
“Like any business, there will be functions where people are not finance people. Particularly as our service offerings are much broader than the traditional areas of an accounting firm, there will be pockets of our business where this may be a bigger issue than others.”
