Financial education at work: link it to social identity

Financial education is often the first step in a financial wellbeing strategy – it’s important, but it is not sufficient to achieve genuine behaviour change and improved financial wellbeing.

Mindset and attitude are intrinsically linked with our ability to manage money. This is partly because educational content with the aim of transferring knowledge is rarely effective by itself.

Social identity is an important dimension – how we react to, perceive, make sense of and understand the world around us. This is often relational: it is influenced by historic and current relationships.

Your partner may be a big spender with a dismissive attitude towards saving for the long-term – this will affect how you ‘value’ money, how you budget and plan.

Surrounding employees with people, ideas and messages that reflect positive, progressive approaches to financial wellbeing is a good way drive behavioural change.

We pay attention to those around us, particularly those that mirror how we view ourselves – this makes financial wellbeing champions drawn from different cohorts very important at encouraging positive behavioural change.

New fathers are more likely to be influenced by other new fathers who have taken steps they themselves may be considering, for example.

By hearing from people that are like us and seeing they have made positive behavioural change within a framework or situation similar to our own, we gradually gain the confidence necessary to do the same.

This article explores one slice of our full, free report, ‘The truth about financial education at work‘. Download it below.