No matter your age or status, employees can probably agree on at least one thing: they could use more money.
Whether it's to
"What has become incredibly clear is that a one-size-fits-all approach really doesn't fit anymore, since the needs of different parts of your employee base will vary pretty wildly," says Edward Gottfried, director of product at Betterment at Work. "The different kinds of financial balancing acts weigh heavily on different segments of your employee base, and your package should really be responsive to those."
Currently, the workforce is made up of four generations:
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Finding that common through line among these age groups has taken on increasing importance, especially amid high inflation, layoffs and other disruptions that are impacting an employee's personal bottom line.
"Employees are faced with the same questions: Am I building the right financial habits? Am I doing the right things with money? Am I helping to take control of this part of my life that's causing me anxiety?" Gottfried says. "It's the anxiety that's the most important thing for employers to keep in mind as they're trying to help their employees."
Traditionally, financial benefits started and stopped with the 401(k). Currently, 67% of private sector employees have
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This points to an evolving shift in what financial wellness truly means to employees today, and it's more than just building up a robust retirement account. However, more nuanced and varied financial benefits are still limited: only a quarter of employers offer emergency savings benefits, according to research from Bank of America, and just 17% offer
"Broad-based financial wellness should be a core component of your well-being strategies," says Lauren Uranker, managing director of corporate relationship management at Goldman Sachs Ayco. "Your well-being strategies need to help everyone — from your youngest employees who need money management around paying off loans and setting up a budget, to the person who is maybe a few months away from retirement and is asking how to decumulate those assets the right way."
At Goldman Sachs Ayco, the company provides coaching and financial planning benefits for the entire workplace spectrum. Acknowledging that employees have diverse financial needs can help employers tailor their benefits and communications to each group effectively.
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"What we offer here at Goldman Sachs Ayco is three tiers of services that cover the same holistic disciplines of financial planning," Uranker says. "But we deliver it in slightly different ways to match the specific needs of the clients that we're serving within an organization."
Those delivery strategies may also need to be approached from an age-specific lens, says Nathan Voris, director of investments, insights and consultant services for Schwab Retirement Plan Services. For example, a survey by Forbes Advisor found that 79% of Gen Z and millennials get their
"It's clear that Gen Z's want personalized advice, so it's not just about the benefit, but how it's delivered," Voris says. "But I will say, we see plenty of 60-year-olds that are very technologically savvy and are engaging in ways that we would assume a Gen Z person would engage in. So while generational analysis is important, it's not universal. Those lines are blurry."
That blurriness is putting added pressure on employers — 97% of leaders say they feel responsible for their employees' financial well-being, according to data from Bank of America. And employees themselves are willing to walk away from organizations that don't support their financial needs. If employers want to stay ahead of any
"There is an expectation that having a compelling set of benefits that addresses their financial needs ties into employee loyalty," Gottfried says. "There's an expectation that their employer should pay to play a role in helping them."
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To do so, employers need to acknowledge that every generation has a unique set of financial circumstances, and that those will only get more complex as they age. While employees begin their career with student loans and in need of basic financial education, millennials and Gen X may still be shouldering those debt burdens on top of
"It's the flexibility of acknowledging that some goals are big, and some goals are really small, but that they're both equally important," Voris says. "And as you age, sometimes issues get more complex. So the next question is, do we have the solutions to meet the challenges of those complex situations?"
As employees get closer to leaving the workforce, goals will shift to not just accumulating those dollars for retirement, but
"As we've historically focused on that accumulation phase, it's very, very important for the retiree to have those resources available to them," Voris says. "One of our key industry trends is to think about how your plan is built for the pre-retiree, and then keeping that retiree in the plan. Have that education content and services and solutions for that."
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Employers can offload some of this responsibility to their benefit providers and plan sponsors. Access to financial advisers and professionals is increasingly valued among all employee age groups, relieving employers from the burden of navigating these challenging conversations with their benefits alone.
Employers should prepare themselves for a decades-long conversation about financial wellness — it's not just what you're offering for employees today, but how they can use those lessons no matter the circumstance.
"That's an interesting thing for employers to be considering is, how do I help build strong financial habits with my employees and help them understand the lifelong journey that they are on that includes competing priorities," Gottfried says. "There's been a pretty robust expansion of having different areas where you can go to help your employees get support. But now it's about thinking, how do I bring these together in one place? No part of financial life should exist in a vacuum."
