How to Turbo Charge Employee Financial Wellness Engagement with Gamification

You’ve seen the statistics: 77% of employees are financially stressed¹, 69% would struggle to pay bills if they missed one paycheck², and one in four Americans have no retirement savings.³

More and more employers are adding financial wellness programs to help educate employees about financial matters, but they often aren’t experiencing high engagement in this valuable benefit. 

Increasing Employee Engagement

You’ll have more engagement if your financial wellness platform offers the information your employees are looking for.

The 2019 Workplace Benefits report⁴ found that employers want their financial wellness program to cover budgeting, company benefits plans, and healthcare coverage. However, employees want financial assessments, professional advice, personalization, tips on how to save, insight into the “next step” on the path to financial freedom, and the ability to track and measure progress.

Of course, the best way to discover what your employees want is to ask them. You can conduct a survey to determine the needs of your unique workforce.

Keep Reading: How to Create an Employee Financial Wellness Survey

Even if your financial wellness program offers what your employees want, not all financial wellness platforms are the same.

According to financial wellness best practices, you are likely to have better engagement when your program includes such elements as:

• Interactive courses and tools
• Personalization 
• Customization
• Integration with other employee benefits
• Employee financial assessments
• Quality content
• Gamification

What is Gamification?

Gamification occurs when you add game-like features to activities that are not games, like financial wellness information.

Why is gamification important? Because games are motivating, especially for activities that are not very interesting, take time to complete, and are complex.

Imagine having to choose between a dry lecture on interest rates or playing an interactive game that taught you the same skills? Most people would choose the game-like activity.

One study⁵ found that half of consumers pay attention to everyday activities more when they have been gamified. Additionally, engagement in activities increases by 100% or more when gamification is added. 

Gamification also:

• Builds motivation⁶
• Boosts memory⁷
• Encourages better performance
• Gives a sense of achievement
• Makes learning more engaging⁸

Here are three gamification elements that can help increase employee financial wellness engagement.

Leaderboard

Leaderboards encourage your employees to continue learning, helping them assimilate financial knowledge that might otherwise seem uninteresting.

Providing a leaderboard also keeps employees from starting a course but never completing it. 

Employees can earn points toward their rank each time they complete a:

• Course
• Assessment
• Plan
• Quiz
• Step

As the employer, you determine what milestones you want your employees to achieve and in what time frame.

As employees complete these milestones, they can see where they rank on the company leaderboard. They can also have the option to share their rank on social media or within your company’s network. 

The Gamification at Work Survey⁹ found that 60 percent of employees were motivated by leaderboards and other competitive gamification elements.

Points

Similar to a leaderboard, offering points to your employees for completing certain aspects of the financial wellness program is a gamification element that keeps employees motivated.

The difference between points and a leaderboard is that rather than just a ranking, points can be cashed in once employees reach a certain level.  

Points can be cashed in for:

• Monetary gift cards
• Predetermined prizes
• Time-off
• Discount from a local vendor
• Company swag
• Coffee and donuts
• An "Employee of the Day" parking spot

The sky's the limit.

When offering points for completing specified actions, you encourage employees to learn the skills that meet your company goals. For example, learning about your company’s retirement program can lead to achieving a higher retirement program participation rate. 

Badges

A financial wellness program that offers badges helps keep employees on track and motivates them to put forth their best effort. To achieve true financial wellness, employees will need to continuously learn about financial topics. 

With badges, employees feel encouraged to participate in financial wellness activities more often, especially if the badges earned have a schedule element.

Employees can earn badges for things like:

• Passing a quiz
• Finishing a series of courses related to a specific topic
• Sharing your success
• Spending a specific amount of time on financial wellness
• Completing personalized goals

The Enrich Platform

The Enrich platform provides gamification to employees based on participation and activity levels.

Our platform contains an integrated Rewards API, which allows employers to determine which exercises and assessments (as well as what scores) can earn awards.

Enrich also offers monthly challenges, points, leaderboards, and more.

Gamifying financial wellness goals help employees learn the information and skills needed to create better financial habits and make better financial choices. 

1 - https://www.capitalone.com/about/newsroom/mind-over-money-survey/

2 - https://www.nationalpayrollweek.com/npw-survey/

3 - https://www.yahoo.com/now/retirement-savings-us-193226292.html

4 - https://www.benefitplans.baml.com/publish/content/application/pdf/GWMOL/2019WorkplaceBenefitsReport.pdf

5 - http://www.snipp.com/blog/2017-06-21/the-power-of-gamification-participation-engagement-loyalty/

6 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08832323.2018.1490687?journalCode=vjeb20&

7 - https://anadea.info/blog/gamification-in-e-learning

8 - https://www.elearninglearning.com/gamification/statistics/?open-article-id=10681320

9 - https://www.talentlms.com/blog/gamification-survey-results/