It is a sad truth that the majority of people are financially illiterate; just consider those who pay £1.50 charge to withdraw £10 once a week from a cash machine when they could withdraw the same amount for free from the correct ATM. Or those who borrow money from payday loan companies because it’s money in their pockets but don’t appreciate the huge amount they will have to pay back.
Part of the reason for the last recession was the bad debt collected by a large chunk of the American population because they didn’t understand what they would have to pay when agreeing mortgage terms.
Every decision that a member of your team makes will impact on your financial performance. Training your staff to be more financially literate could save you significant amounts of money.
And while you are not responsible for your employee’s personal decisions, being in debt or financial difficulty is stressful and will impact on their performance at work. So it makes absolute sense to offer some form of financial literacy training.
What Is Financial Education In The Workplace?
The first step in your educational training is to assess the needs of your employees and your business. By aligning and teaching valuable goals to your staff, both you and they can win but only if the lessons have meaning to them. For instance, it is no good suggesting to your staff that they should contribute to a pension when they feel they don’t have enough spare cash to pay the repayments on that car they have just bought.
Instead, a focus should be on budgeting and cost control. Both of these can free up financial capital and allow for those pension savings.
These lessons can then more readily be applied in the workplace. How can the team reduce their spending so more money is available for equipment or supplies that will make their lives easier? And it really helps if you can bring this to life by making crystal clear the benefits … to them. Most of us assume that any training provided is to benefit the organisation – and not us personally. This will lower our acceptance of the lessons and reduce the likelihood of us applying our new knowledge in office and home life. Instead you need to concentrate on what training can offer them.
This means that you need to focus your efforts on presenting benefits to the employee. For instance:
- More financial responsibility
- Better standard of living
- Less stress making ends meet
Then you need to look at what is the best approach to teach your employees. You could do this in-house or alternatively bring in an experienced financial organisation (like The Tectona Partnership) to provide training for you.
The advantage of the latter is that it is more neutral for your employees so they’ll be more likely to open up and discuss problems. Our financial experts will also be more efficient delivering the message to your staff and will free you up to do what you do best – managing your business.
What is very important at this stage is choosing a presenter and training provider who will connect with your staff; someone they will able to identify with and learn to trust. This will increase the chance that the message will be received, understood and adopted by your staff. For this you might want to consider a few providers, but generally speaking, a brand that you already know is the best option.
The Testing Stages
The next stage is then to test your training on a pilot group of employees. This is to assess how your chosen provider interacts with your staff and what the results you are getting. By all means, sit in on the trial courses and monitor the results for a couple of weeks afterwards. It is always best to ask for feedback from your staff at least twice; initially straight after the training and another time a couple of weeks later. If their feelings have changed or something hasn’t worked out, you’ll be able to find out in the later survey – look for differences between the two.
Then if everything has worked out, you can roll out the training across your organisation.
Conclusion
You want your staff to make the right financial decisions both at work and home; financial education is a very important consideration to achieve this. It will help your employees to be happier, less stressed and enhance their careers. It isn’t difficult to arrange financial training, so contact a member of our team today to find out more.