UK DIY retailer Wickes offers a range of financial wellbeing support to its employees throughout the year to ease any worries.
The organisation, which has more than 7,500 employees, works to ensure the support it offers is linked to its wellbeing culture. At the start of the year, its wellbeing network and benefits team agrees on a financial wellbeing calendar and aligns its support and benefits that it promotes to key times during the year.
Leading up to Christmas, it provides bespoke communications about responsible spending and to help employees make greater savings with their Christmas shopping. In January, it then focuses more on debt support.
During the school holidays, the organisation runs bespoke campaigns about where employees can go for discounted meals for children. and which benefits and discounts are most appropriate for them.
Neil Goodwin, head of reward at Wickes, explains that the organisation makes a point of listening to its employees through different channels, keeping communication open with them.
“We also use our cost-of-living working group that we set up previously for this,” he says. ”We try to bespoke what we offer employees based on feedback and are always keen to keep staff opinion at the forefront when we shape our strategy.”
Wickes has 560 mental health first aiders who are trained to help with financial stress. Two years ago, it introduced a financial wellbeing platform after receiving feedback from its cost-of-living working group. Through the platform, employees can access short- and long-term loans, an earned wage access scheme, and a facility where they can make savings each month through payroll via an external provider, helping them to be self-sufficient and build up a savings fund.
This is all part of its focus on helping to prevent employees from getting into financial difficulty, rather than just providing support that addresses those experiencing issues.
Also available is an internal cost-of-living toolkit, an employee assistance programme that specifically can support employees in debt, and pensions and budgeting webinars that offer information on savings. Wickes also enhances its staff discount a few times a year and has external links on budgeting support.
As an organisation, Wickes is mindful of the impact financial wellbeing pressure and stresses, as well as financial illiteracy, can have on employees, both personally and at work, explains Goodwin.
“We believe we have a role to play to help employees with this, partly because it makes good business sense, from a commercial perspective, but also because we want to support our staff. We want them to feel at home when they work for us, so part of that is doing the right thing, which is listening to employees and supporting them where we can,” he says.
