Financial education at work: reform your definition of education

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.

Financial education is about much more than workshops and static content like articles.

In fact, you need to think of education as a series of ‘touchpoints’ that communicate a similar message in a variety of formats over time.

These could include bite-sized content such as text messages, peer-driven content like ‘wellbeing champion’ briefings, formal letters, post-it notes, messages on the notice board and more.

Education should be less about top-down information transfer and more about providing triggers and useful insight to encourage self-reflection and action.

The more bespoke and targeted education is, the more likely it will have an impact. This can be hard to do at scale or when you have very different cohort groups in the workplace, for example because they are going through different life stages.

That’s why employee champions are a good idea, who can ‘educate’ through their own experiences. Or consider financial coaching, which provides both personalised insight and content with accountability to encourage behavioural change – financial coaching can be delivered cost-effectively through technology for a fraction of the price of traditional coaching.

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