Episode 55 · 7 September 2023 · 1:26:56
How to Protect Financial Well-being During the Cost of Living Crisis, featuring Professor Sir Carey Cooper
Featuring Sir Carey Cooper
How to Protect Financial Well-being During the Cost of Living Crisis, featuring Professor Sir Carey Cooper
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Cost of living crisis and why we're revisiting financial wellbeing
interview#cost of living#financial wellbeing#financial stress
Meet the guests: Professor Sir Carey Cooper, Khushboo Patel & Ryan Briggs
Why financial wellbeing is a business issue
interview#financial wellbeing#business issue#employee wellbeing
Red flag 1: You don't have the data
interview#data#financial wellbeing#red flag
Red flag 2: No one is talking about it
Training managers to have money conversations
interview#manager training#financial conversations#financial wellbeing
Red flag 3: Treating symptoms, not the problem
Red flag 4: Poorly communicating benefits
interview#benefits communication#financial wellbeing#employee benefits
Red flag 5: Not linking to learning and development
interview#learning and development#financial wellbeing#red flag
The five red flags summarised and parting wisdom from Professor Sir Carey Cooper
interview#summary#red flags#carey cooper
Show notes
How to Protect Financial Well-being During the Cost of Living Crisis — with Professor Sir Carey Cooper
Guest: Professor Sir Carey Cooper — world-leading expert on wellbeing at work, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Alliance Manchester Business School, and co-author of the 2023 Financial Wellbeing Guide.
Money worries don't clock out at 5pm. And when your people are struggling financially, it shows up in your business — in absence, in presenteeism, in stress-related sickness, and in the quiet erosion of engagement.
Professor Sir Carey Cooper joins Al and Leanne — alongside Khushboo Patel (Head of Engagement & Inclusion at Metro Bank) and Ryan Briggs (co-founder of Finwell) — to break down the five red flags that signal your employees are facing financial challenges. From the data you're not collecting to the benefits you're not communicating, this episode is a practical masterclass in protecting financial wellbeing when budgets are tight.
Top 3 Takeaways
Financial wellbeing is a legal and moral duty — and a business no-brainer. Employers have a duty of care that extends to financial health. Less financial stress means less sickness absence, less presenteeism, and more productive, engaged teams.
Data first, solutions second. You can't fix what you can't see. Ask employees what they actually need before rolling out benefits — otherwise you risk wasting time and money on support nobody uses.
Line managers are the gateway. The secret of culture is allowing open conversations with managers who care. Train your managers to spot the signs, ask the questions, and signpost support without judgment.
🔥 The Five Red Flags
1. You don't have the data. Without accurate, up-to-date information on your employees' financial wellbeing, meaningful action is guesswork. Employee insights are only as good as the questions you ask.
2. No one is talking about it. Financial struggles thrive in silence. Smashing the stigma and creating safe spaces for money conversations is the first step to real support.
3. Treating symptoms, not the problem. Quick fixes and one-off payments don't solve underlying financial stress. Address root causes — education, career progression, and long-term resilience.
4. Poorly communicating benefits. If your people don't know what support exists, it might as well not exist. Ask yourself: can you list all your benefits right now?
5. Not linking to learning and development. Career growth, psychological rewards, and financial confidence are deeply connected. L&D isn't separate from financial wellbeing — it's part of the solution.
📚 Resources
- 2023 Financial Wellbeing Guide (Alliance Manchester Business School / National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work): Download the guide
- The MAD World Summit — October 12th 2023, the UK's premier event for mental health & wellbeing leaders: madworldsummit.com
More From Our Guests
Professor Sir Carey Cooper
Khushboo Patel
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/khushboo--patel
Ryan Briggs
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryandbriggs
More From Truth, Lies & Work
- Is WFH Dead? — Financial wellbeing special
- The Secret to Leading Gen Z and Millennials
- The Watercooler Conference Podcast
Connect With Us
Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect
Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14
Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Full transcript
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Al ElliottThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.
Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.
Al ElliottNice. Check out hopspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
Carey CooperSay I would have taken the job at this place, but ended up ending up with 4 kids, probably would have stayed with 2 at the time. But say I would have— that would have been— that would have cost me, caused me a lot of problems.
Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to the Truth, Lies and Workplace Culture podcast, brought to you by, of course, the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I am a business psychologist.
Al ElliottAnd my name is Al, and I am a business owner.
Leanne ElliottWe are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace cultures.
Al ElliottYep. So welcome back to yet another episode, another week. I can't believe this week's gone by. I mean, we said that, uh, we said that August lasted forever, but September seems to be going super quick just to make up. So what are we talking about today, Lee?
Leanne ElliottYeah, it really is second week of September. I think what freaks me out about September is it's October next month, and then that feels like countdown to Christmas, which is just like, I'm sure it was like June last week.
Al ElliottYeah, yeah, this, it does go fast this time of year. We are going to be talking today about, well, we're referring back to one of the first episodes we did, maybe the 12th, 14th episode we did. It's called Work from Home, and it was the impact of the cost of living crisis. It is, I think, still today one of the most downloaded episodes that we've had. And so we thought, well, let's revisit that. And we've now obviously met up with a few more experts around that, around financial well-being. Around whose job it is, which the leaders, the personal, the company, whatever. Um, and so Leanne said, why don't we do an entire episode on this?
Leanne ElliottYeah, so we, we initially talked about this, I think it was actually last October, so almost 12 months ago. We talked about, is work from home dead? The impact of the cost of living crisis. And the cost of living crisis continues. People in the UK, people around the world are really struggling with decreases in disposable incomes. And, and for some, that does mean that people are being pushed into debt and in some cases poverty. So, as a business, you know, it's important to, to be mindful of what does that mean to you? What impact does financial wellbeing have on your people, on their performance, on the culture of your business, even your bottom line? Why should you, as a leader, care about financial wellbeing?
Al ElliottYeah, and this is gonna be a slightly heavier episode, uh, than some of the August ones. The August ones, we kept them light because you're probably on vacation/holidays. Uh, you don't wanna be listening to anything too deep in, in, uh, in August. So, but we are gonna dive a little bit deeper into this because financial wellbeing is probably gonna continue to be an issue for the next few years. I don't think it's any secret that it looks like most, most of the major countries are going into recession, or if not recession, at least flat growth. Um, energy prices are high, rents are high. You see, if you go on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or anything like that, you'll see people complaining about their rents, about just struggling to make ends meet. So So we are joined by an amazing guest, Professor Sir Carey Cooper. Now there's a story which I'll, Leanne will probably tell you at some point around this, uh, but he is the 50th Anniversary Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Alliance Manchester Business School. What a title. And Leanne went to Alliance Manchester Business School, didn't you, to do your MSc?
Leanne ElliottI did. I often forget that I went to business school. It's kind of cool, isn't it? But yeah, no, no, Professor Sir Carey Cooper, huge icon in the psychology world. Can't quite believe he agreed so quickly to be on the podcast. Um, sadly, he, he left Manchester Business School the year I joined. So while he was one of the reasons I decided to study there, I didn't have the, the privilege, privilege of studying under him. Um, so yeah, so I was very excited for this interview, and then I got food poisoning and I was really, really ill. Um, so I couldn't— so Al had to do it. So I still have yet to meet Professor Sir Carey Cooper, but I am very happy that he is on the podcast.
Al ElliottYeah, and he did say at the very end of the interview, don't worry, Leanne, we will make it happen. So that will happen at some point soon.
Leanne ElliottSo yeah, unbelievable that we have, uh, Professor Sir Carey Cooper on the show, but we are also joined by 2 other incredible guests. We are joined by Kushboo Patel, who is Head of Engagement and Inclusion at Metro Bank, and Ryan Briggs, who is the Founder and Financial Education and Wellbeing Lead at Finwell.
Al ElliottYep. So we're meeting our guests very, very shortly, but first, it's our favourite time of the week. It's the news roundup.
Leanne ElliottCue the jingle.
Al ElliottOkay, Leanne, what have we got?
Leanne ElliottKeeping it short this week, we've got a lot of cool stuff to get through, but I do have a word of the week.
Al ElliottWord of the week alert!
Leanne ElliottSo I do have to, uh, thank Alexis Zahner for this. Um, on— we connect on LinkedIn. Uh, she's, she's very cool. She's a leadership and culture expert. She's a co-director of Human Leaders. She is the business partner of Sally, who we had back in our burnout episode.
Al ElliottWe like Sally.
Leanne ElliottWe do. Um, and she's also a top 20 Voice of LinkedIn 2022.
Al ElliottNice.
Leanne ElliottSo a bit of a tease. So I saw her post this and I was like, um, Alexis, can I have that for the word of the week please? And she was like, sure. Um, so this is, this is thanks to Alexis. I think you'll like this one, Al. Are you ready?
Carey CooperYes.
Leanne ElliottThe word is spuddle.
Al ElliottI like that. I like words that like sound like tabard and porcupine. Say it again.
Leanne ElliottSpuddle.
Al ElliottAs in, and if we were Southern, we'd say spuddle.
Leanne ElliottSpuddle.
Al ElliottAnd if we're American, we say— I'm not gonna try and attempt that accent. So what the hell does spuddle mean?
Leanne ElliottSo spuddle was coined in the 17th century. It means to work ineffectively, to be extremely busy whilst achieving absolutely nothing.
Al ElliottI think we all know someone like that.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Al ElliottI'm not looking at you. I'm just— I think, I think everyone knows someone who's like, oh my God, I'm my— oh, I'm so busy. Just wanna make One of my pet hates, pet hates, pet peeves, pet heaves, um, is when you say to someone, how's things? They go, oh, I'm so busy, I'm so busy. It's like, oh, shut up, man, you're just being, you're just being a dick now.
Leanne ElliottAnd I do struggle when people, and also when people go, are you busy? I'm like, no, no, like, I'm being kept, I'm being kept busy enough, but am I rushed off my feet? No, that is a choice I've intentionally made.
Al ElliottExactly, exactly. It's almost like, oh no, I'm so busy and therefore I'm so important. I see quite a few people on Twitter who say, oh, one of the biggest problems I've got is that I've got so many ideas and just not enough time to implement them.
Leanne ElliottOh, ideas are cheap, friend.
Al ElliottExactly. Ideas are cheap. Anyway, sorry, back to spuddle.
Leanne ElliottSo yes, thank you to Alexis for that one. Do go and follow her on LinkedIn. I will leave a link in the show notes and you'll be able to see her original post as well, um, which is, is quite an interesting take on, on the term Spuddle. One to look out for, but a nice, a nice word. Um, a, a perhaps troubling definition, Al, but a very enjoyable word to say. Spuddle.
Al ElliottYes, we like that. We like that.
Leanne ElliottSpuddle. Sorry.
Al ElliottWhat else we got, Lees?
Leanne ElliottUh, well, I have a little announcement. We have a little announcement now, don't we?
Al ElliottWe do.
Leanne ElliottSo Truth, Lies and Workplace Culture has been invited to the 6th Annual MAD World Summit happening October 12th In London, UK.
Al ElliottYep, we went to the sister show, The Water Cooler. If you've listened to any one of our podcasts over the last 6 months, you'll hear probably a guest from The Water Cooler. What we basically did was put ourselves, we, well, there was a lovely guy called Gary from Obo Life who provided us with a little booth and we set it up as a podcast studio at onsite, which we're gonna be doing again this time.
Leanne ElliottWe are. If you haven't heard of the Mad World Summit, it basically exists to shift the whole conversation around mental health in the workplace from stigma to solutions. So very much a focus on fresh thinking, drawing in new professionals into the field whilst also building their capability and empowering those who are already here to find more effective solutions for employee mental health, well-being, and culture. The event is really full-packed. It's just a one-day event, but my goodness, they have packed it in. There are real-life case studies, uh, there's a whole— all the talks are going to focus on an understanding of best practice and work and worst practice, and also lots of insights into strategies that are actually delivering tangible benefits, which is all going to be about— very much like the water cooler— all about those tangible results. We're actually having an impact on employee well-being. So we, as Al said, will be partnering again with our friends at Oboe to record the Truth, Lies and Workplace Culture podcast from the event itself, and we will try and bring you some exclusive content from the speakers. And what a lineup, Al, have you seen?
Al ElliottI have. What have we got? Heathrow Airport, L'Oréal, Warner Brothers. Yeah, uh, Lloyds, HSBC Bank, Lloyds of London.
Leanne ElliottYeah, absolutely. There are so many people. To name a few, Dr. Sarah Hughes from Mind, uh, Javier, Javier Acave, who's a CFO at Heathrow Airport, Malcolm Staves, who's a global VP of Health and safety at L'Oréal. And of course, we'll be reconnecting with some of our favourite Truth and Lies alumni, including Karen Sanctor from Microsoft, Ryan Hopkins from Deloitte, and Khushboo Patel, who is our guest this episode.
Al ElliottWe love Khushboo. She's so— such a lovely lady, but so knowledgeable. And she's, she's really cool. You're gonna love it. So if you do want to go, which, by the way, you do, if you're in the UK— we're not in the UK and we're flying back for it. Um, so if we're coming back from, from, from Bosnia, you can come from Stevenage or Glasgow or wherever you are. So I think the, uh, the employer passes are, I think they're just about £200.
Leanne ElliottYeah, yeah, £195 plus VAT, but that includes access to all the entire summit. So you're talking the keynotes, the roundtables, the workshops, the exhibition, uh, plus refreshments, lunch and drinks. So it's a bit of a bargain actually. We'll leave a link where you can book your— oh, and us!
Al ElliottAnd us.
Carey CooperAnd us.
Al ElliottYou're gonna meet us as well. So that's, that's like £190 worth of ticket there.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Al ElliottSo yeah, you'll meet us.
Leanne ElliottOur meet and greets are like £300 per person.
Al ElliottOh, easy, easy, easy. It's extra if you want us to wear headwear. Anyway, where, if people are interested, I don't know, I just thought hats would be good.
Leanne ElliottLike headwear or?
Al ElliottNo, it'd just be quite cool to wear a hat. Anyway, so if people are interested, where do they, where do they go?
Leanne ElliottI'll leave a link. I can't remember. Google, Google Mad World Summit. It will come up. I will leave a link in the show notes and yeah, hopefully we will see you there.
Al ElliottOkay, so let's go meet our guests. Lee, who have we got first?
Leanne ElliottWe have— very excited— we have Professor Sir Carey Cooper. He is recognized as a world-leading expert on well-being and the media's first choice for comment on any workplace issue, having written more than 250 books on workplace well-being. He is, as Al said, the 50th Anniversary Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at the Alliance Manchester Business School. He's also co-founder of Robertson Cooper, a pioneering wellbeing consultancy. Fun fact, I applied for a job there and I got rejected. And the co-chair of National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work, who have recently published the 2023 Financial Wellbeing Guide, which we will be focusing on today. Let's go meet Carey.
Carey CooperAs you can tell from my accent, I come from Hollywood. I'm a professor of organisational psychology and health at the Manchester Business School, the Alliance Manchester Business School, as it's called. And I guess I'm fairly well known for stress and well-being in the workplace. I've been doing research on that topic for decades, uh, and, uh, well-being is extremely topical at the moment for most organizations.
Al ElliottSo our next guest is Khushboo Patel. Khushboo is Head of Engagement Inclusion at Metro Bank, um, a challenger bank in the UK. I don't know whether they're in the US just yet, but I think I'm sure they've got plans to. Uh, she spearheads the strategy on culture, colleague engagement, diversity, inclusion, well-being. She's a very busy lady. She built a successful Career in the financial services with names such as HM Treasury. Mm, had some dealings with them recently. Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, and she's basically created this amazing award-winning culture at Metro Bank, which has now been named as one of UK's most loved workplaces in 2022. Let's go and meet Khushboo and hear more about Metro Bank.
Leanne ElliottYou've rightly mentioned fairly new bank. Um, so we started in 2010, um, in, uh, central London, and since then we've grown arms and legs. So, you know, one store, um, And I'll come on to why stores, not branches, in a second. But one store, and we've grown to just under 4,500 colleagues now and over 70 stores across the UK, um, England and Wales. And I must say the Wales part— I'm Welsh. I bought Metro Bank into Wales. I'm very proud of that part. Our final guest is Ryan Briggs. Ryan is the founder of Finwell, an ambitious company dedicated to helping employees improve financial well-being and empower healthier relationships with money. Their clients include Sky, BrewDog, and the CIPD, to name just a few. And in 2023, they won the Inside Out Award for Best Financial Wellness Initiative for their work with Haze. Let's meet Ryan.
Al ElliottWho am I? I'm Ryan. Uh, what do I do? Um, I'm passionate about helping people understand, measure, and improve their financial well-being. So we do that with lots of companies. Um, what am I famous for? I, I wouldn't say I'm famous for it, but, um, I was given a very big opportunity back in the day to become a professional football player. Um, but also, um, that was taken away from me as well by the same person. And that was, that was the King of the Jungle. If anybody remembers I'm a Celebrity, that was Harry Redknapp. So, um, yeah, I watched that show with, uh, mixed emotions, should we say.
Carey CooperYeah.
Al ElliottYeah, my wife was not voting for him. So there's a lot to cover here. So what we're going to do, we've kind of broken it down into, uh, what it is, what is financial well-being, why we should care, and then Leanne identified 5 red flags. So if you, if you, if these sound familiar, then there's some trouble potentially brewing in your organisation. Shall we start, Leanne, with what is financial well-being and why should we care? So rather than try and answer this question ourselves. Why not ask Professor Sir Carey Cooper?
Leanne ElliottOkay.
Carey CooperBasically, when you're looking at the field of wellbeing more generally, there are lots of sources of stress on people in the workplace. They could be your relationship with your boss. It could be about your career. It's about long working hours, about being overloaded, but it's also partly about your financial circumstances and how that affects your health and wellbeing, productivity and the like. So financial wellbeing is just another source of stress for an individual in the workplace. It's become more significant. It started becoming significant in 2008 to 2015 during the financial crisis. Lots of people lost their job. Job insecurity was rife. People were out of jobs for quite a long time, lost their jobs in the finance sector. Something like 35 to 40% of people lost their jobs in that 6, 7-year financial crisis we were in. The major, I call that the depression rather than the recession. I'd call it depression too. Now we're in a recession. Many countries, Germany, Britain is bubble bouncing along the bottom. It really is in recession. In effect, financial well-being is all about the problems that your finances are having on you and how it's affecting you at work, in your family, and elsewhere.
Leanne ElliottSo Carey mentioned the global financial crisis there, which we do, we do talk about quite a bit. And our younger listeners might be, you know, might be wondering what the big deal is. But Carey did say that 35 to 40% of people lost their jobs during the global financial crisis. So it was huge. And yes, while redundancy is a leading cause of a personal financial crisis, there are also many other life events that could put our financial well-being at risk. And these, these could be things that your employees are well experiencing— things like divorce, a new baby, carer responsibilities, moving house, health problems, a bereavement, addiction. And of course, more recently, we've also all been experiencing the impacts of the cost of living crisis. So the 2022 CIP PD Good Work Index found that employees are really feeling the impacts of the growing financial crisis. 29% have said they are occasionally struggling to keep up with bills and financial commitments, and 90% of those earning £20,000 per year are finding it a constant struggle.
Al ElliottYeah, and I think that most of us at some point in our life have had some kind of financial hardship. I know that I very famously went bankrupt for about £103,000 about God, 15 years ago, maybe, maybe getting up for 20 years ago now. Um, and that was just a horrible, horrible time. So it's likely that we can empathise a little bit with employees who are experiencing these sort of difficulties around finances. But beyond that, as leaders, should we actually care? Is it even our responsibility? Well, Carey Cooper explains that the wellbeing of our employees has this direct impact on our business, and therefore we need to be thinking about their financial wellbeing too?
Carey CooperWell, number one, the organization has a legal— in almost all developed countries, certainly in the EU and beyond, they have a legal responsibility for the health and wellbeing of their employees. That's legal. Okay, so that's one thing. Why they should be concerned about it is why, why are they concerned about people's mental health? Because it adversely affects their productivity. And performance. Also, they're off ill with it. If people are off ill with stress, it's something like 2 or 3 times longer than if you have cancer. If you have severe depression, severe anxiety, you're off a hell of a long time, much more than any other illness. So if people get very low and depressed by their financial circumstances, And by the way, financial circumstances is quite a broad construct. That is your own financial situation, but it could be your feeling of job insecurity. If you're in an organization where people have been made redundant and you're a survivor of that redundancy, that's a part of financial insecurity. I'm worried I'm going to lose my job. I have commitments, I have a mortgage, this, that, and the other. So why they should be interested and why they should be concerned about it is like they are about the mental health of people. If you want to be really crude about it, you know, if their mindset is that we want this person performing, we don't want 'em off ill for a long period of time, therefore let's deal with their psychological state, their financial circumstance, any way we can help and support them. is part of our duty of care. So that's why they should be concerned about it. But to be honest with you, more and more organizations now are concerned about people's mental wellbeing. Financial insecurity, financial difficulties are a driver.
Leanne ElliottSo yeah, as Carey said there, you know, there is an impact on our business, but fundamentally we're also breaking the law if we're not taking some kind of care for our employee Well-being. Um, so yeah, a word of caution there. So Ryan, as we've said, is a founder and financial education and well-being lead at Finwell. He agrees that more and more businesses are starting to take responsibility for employee well-being, including financial well-being, and cites another important commercial argument: businesses that care about well-being attract and retain talent.
Al ElliottBecause, because companies didn't think it was their responsibility I think with any, anything that happens in their employees' life now is maybe not their responsibility, but is of interest to a company because, you know, the mixture now of hybrid working and mental health and everything else, you know, there is no work life, home life so much anymore. And it's all about performance and being the best that we can be in all areas of wellbeing. So.
Carey CooperYeah.
Al ElliottIt makes sense. It's the right thing to do for one, from a company's point of view, but it makes business sense as well. You know, if companies want to be seen as leading companies and want to get the most out of their people and have good cultures and, you know, recruit the best talent and retain the best talent, they need to look at all aspects of this. And if we, you know, we talk about sport quite a lot and marginal gains, if You know, having something like financial wellbeing in place could really help their people, and it could be the difference between recruiting the best people and keeping the best people. So it's something that companies, I don't think, can ignore anymore. But it does open up a lot of, you know, discussion and challenges for companies as well as to who to use, what to use, what works, what doesn't. Yeah, which isn't easy, I know.
Leanne ElliottThere is an increasing amount of research being done into financial wellbeing and its relationship with financial stress and workplace performance. These are things that you would have heard us talk about before in terms of general wellbeing or psychological wellbeing. Financial stress is linked to absenteeism, people being off work sick. It's linked to presenteeism, when people show up at work but they're not performing at their best. It has an impact on organisational commitment. People who lack organisational commitment tend to leave their jobs. So yeah, more people are off work, more people are underperforming, more people are leaving your business. Issues that cost the UK billions and billions of pounds each year. But let's put that in numbers that actually mean something to us, or a bit more tangible. The latest CIPD reward management survey found that 28% of respondents reported that money worries negatively affect their work performance. So a third of people are aware that their financial challenges are affecting their performance at work. 10% found it impacted their ability to make decisions at work, and 10% said they'd actually taken time off work to deal with money problems. So the people impacted by this tended to earn either less than £20,000 per year, or perhaps surprisingly, £60,000 a year or more. Financial well-being is not just about supporting those on lower incomes.
Al ElliottSo I think that even at this early stage, we can say that there is clearly a case for prioritising financial wellbeing and within an org— and the impact it would have on the organisation detrimentally if someone was struggling a little bit. So is the answer that we need to pay everyone more? Of course, as business leaders, we don't really want to hear that because currently things are a bit tight as they are in most industries. Now, with the larger businesses, that seems to have been the sort of Knee-jerk reaction is to pay people more. Almost half of all private organisations have increased pay over the last 12 months, and 16% are offering bonuses or allowances to cover this cost of living crisis. But what if you don't have this budget as a business owner? What if you can't afford to pay for these wage increases? Well, we asked Carey.
Carey CooperBut I, I— people are not likely to be asking necessarily for more money. They need help. They may be in real turmoil and they need support. There are so many organizations out there that are providing this support to businesses. You know, like you seek support for counseling from EAPs, or you seek support for mental health first aid from organizations out there that help train your mental health first aiders. The same thing would apply to this. I don't think it's a, it's not complicated. Yeah, that might be the case that they feel they need a wage increase as one vehicle, but most of the time it's people have just got overwhelmed with their finances. They may be really good at their job, but when it comes to their own personal finance, they got themselves in trouble. They just need some support to get through it. And The payoffs will be great because number one, the more you provide this, there's lots of companies like Close Brothers is one of them that comes in and does training, helps people with their own personal financial positions. There's a whole number of these kinds of companies. They're very good. And what they do, they help them sort out their problem. This problem will trans— the lack of this problem will translate into higher Better performance, higher productivity. In the end, it'll pay for itself, just like EAPs pay for themselves. I did a major study on all the EAPs in the UK years and years ago, and we looked at it and saw the cost-benefit— looked at the cost-benefit analysis of buying in an EAP. And if you help people with their personal problems, how that was going to reflect itself in increased performance.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Carey CooperLess sickness absence days and the like. It's a no-brainer.
Al ElliottFinancial well-being isn't necessarily just throwing money at the problem and paying people more. It's about supporting people through a financial crisis. As Leanne's pointed out, people between £20,000 and £60,000 tend to have fewer financial problems. So that means over £60,000, you could potentially have more financial problems. So what's even better is that if you work hard and put things in place, you can have mechanisms already in place that'll prevent employees from falling into these kind of problems?
Leanne ElliottYeah, it sounds cheesy, doesn't it? But I guess it's that old proverb of, you know, you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime. It's, you know, as leaders, we're not expected to be the bank of mum and dad. We're not expected to bail out employees that are in a financial crisis, but we can provide them the support they need in that moment and empower them to improve their financial well-being long-term.
Al ElliottAnd I think that the global financial crisis of 2007 and '08 proved that bailing people out doesn't affect their behavior. I mean, the bankers and all these back to their old tricks by all accounts. So I was really curious. I wanted to know, how would I know that I have members of my team who are struggling, that have got some kind of financial difficulties? Are there any kind of red flags we should be looking out for?
Leanne ElliottAs I mentioned, the financial Wellbeing Guide 2023 was recently published and is a phenomenal free resource. It will discuss exactly this. I was very sweet to say that I came up with the 5 red flags. I didn't, this report did. What we have done is we're breaking it down even more for you with the help of our guests so we can explore these warning signs and some potential solutions for you as well, all with the aim of improving the financial wellbeing of our employees.
Al ElliottSo the first red flag is that you don't have the data. If you listen to any single one of these episodes of the last 54, 55 episodes, you will hear Leanne tell you that it's all about data. So this is the insights that you need to be collecting. If you use something like our RX7, which is our proprietary way for measuring workplace culture, then you will know that we provide an awful lot of data for you to use. But a lot of the new tools don't necessarily cover financial wellbeing. As Carey said, a lack of evidence is not necessarily a lack of problem. It all starts with the data. Ryan totally agrees. It all starts with data if possible as well, um, and working out what the need is. Definitely, you know, discussion and, and looking at what data might be available, maybe gathering more data. We've just introduced the new service that can help do that and kind of measure the financial wellbeing of an entire workforce and establish their areas of focus and then start to drill down. Well, what kind of support might be needed? Is it access to content? Do people just want to learn more and understand more and build their confidence in their own time and at their own pace, possibly? Do they want to engage with interactive group workshops, be it face-to-face or online, possibly. Do they need one-to-one support? You know, do they need that additional human interaction to speak to someone that's going to be kind and empathetic and knowledgeable to help them understand where they're at and what they need to do to move things forward? Possibly that as well. So there's lots of different things that are available to them, whether that's through our company or others. But it all starts with that data piece and knowing What is needed. Lots of times we've worked with companies and they've said to us, oh, we really want to do a session on, I don't know, pensions. And we say, great, yeah, we can definitely do that, maybe as part of a package or whatever it might be, part of an ongoing programme. But we'll always ask, why? Can we just ask, why do you want to do that? And they kind of say, well, because, you know, a few people have said they're really interested in that. And that's absolutely fine, but—
Carey CooperYeah.
Al ElliottThat could be some money and time wasted if they don't know how many people actually want that. So with that particular company, we did a bit of research. We'd done some polls on some other sessions, and it turns out that pensions, albeit very important, wasn't the biggest thing for their people. You know, they wanted to focus on money management and budgeting and the property ladder and protecting their families, whatever it might be.
Leanne ElliottSo definitely asking what people want and need in Employee insights really is all about asking people what they need. It's as simple as that, and that's what employee insights are. And yet only 10% of employees in the UK have said that their employer has ever asked them about their financial well-being or the support that they might need. There is a gap here. We need to be gathering the data. Ryan also raised a really good point here in terms of taking a narrow approach to employee insights.
Carey CooperYeah.
Leanne ElliottApproach to, to measurement or a narrow approach to, uh, benefits. Yes, pension support is hugely important, but if you have a digital agency where the majority of your people are under 30, thinking about their pension— well, they'll be pleased one is in place, it's probably not going to be as important to them as other things like savings schemes or pay advances or hardship loans. As Ryan explains, even by just Considering the demographics of your workforce, that can be an excellent starting point in terms of data.
Al ElliottI think just the mindset. If you look at different age demographics, I read a massively interesting book that I would highly recommend to all your listeners called The Psychology of Money, just to get an understanding of people's relationship with money. We talk a lot about that with our work because it's not just about facts and educational stuff. There's also a whole other side to this, which is about psychology of money and emotional finance and behavioural finance. And dependent on your age will kind of mean that you've experienced life in a certain way. You know, if we're looking at it now, we're, you know, we've in the last few years come out of a very low interest rate environment that people have had for years.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Al ElliottYou know, other people that might be a bit older, Remember when interest rates was actually really high and people were giving keys back to, you know, for their property. So it really depends on your experience of how old you are and what you've lived through. That will dictate maybe your attitudes towards money and that then dictates, you know, the choices that you make as well. So we, we, it's really fascinating. It's a fascinating part of our work to try and work with different age demographics. You also have to change Language and tone and, you know, the ways that maybe you talk about money and trying to make it engaging and fun, especially for the younger generations. But even their appetite to save and invest for their future and take control actually is quite encouraging, we found, for younger generations. So yeah, there's definitely not, you know, again, you know, one way of looking at this. So the solution to not having enough data is to get some. And I think that, um, if, if you do have some way of monitoring or surveying or speaking to your, uh, to your employees at the moment, then ensure it does cover financial— the financial wellness side of it. If it doesn't, there's no need necessarily to go out there and buy a tool that does, because the CIPD offers this set of validated, reliable measures I'm reading what Leanne wrote here of financial well-being, but they can be actually used in your employee surveys. So, Carey shared this great example of how not asking your employees what they want could end up costing you your business.
Carey CooperNo, it could be part of the way to the solution, but it depends on whether you, as the owner of that business or the CEO, made the decision to do that without talking to your employees. I'll never forget once I was a non-executive director of a small company made up of about 40 employees. They were really nice guys. They went to Cambridge together, 3 of them. They founded this business and they wanted— they were guys who had this philosophy. It was a small company. It was quite successful, and they wanted to give their employees part the business. They wanted to give them shares. So they brought me in only for that purpose. So an advisor, but I was sitting as a non-exec director on the board to do this because they thought this was a big deal. 40, 50 employees. So I said, that's— they said, what do you think of this? I said, in principle, it's a great idea. You know, you're giving them a part of the business, but don't you think it'd be a good idea? I said, to go talk to the employees. that I should go talk to them. You don't have to do this. I, that's my job. I'll do that. You're bringing me in to do this. All right. And I'll go talk to the employees and find out, is this something they want? Because in the end, if you think about, you want to change an organization, you want to make a difference, you ask the employees. They are the guys and gals at the coalface. They're the ones who live this job day in and day out, Monday to Friday. All hours, et cetera. So I went to the shop floor and I started to talk to all of them one at a time, had lunch, coffee. I go back to the board meeting. I said, they don't want that. So they said, what? I said, but everybody's talking about share ownership with your employees. I said, quite a lot of them would want it. This particular group don't particularly want it. I tend to believe, by the way, in share ownership. For employee share ownership. I think it's a great construct because they feel part of the business. John Lewis Partnership's a perfect example of it. They were very successful during the pandemic. They were probably the only company that was making money during the pandemic.
Al ElliottAnd Zoom.
Carey CooperYeah. And Zoom for sure. Zoom. Okay. So they said, well, what do they want? I said, you won't believe what they want. See, I didn't know until I started talking to them. What they wanted was healthcare coverage, private healthcare coverage in case they got ill or their families got ill. That's what they wanted.
Leanne ElliottSo the second red flag is that nobody's talking about it. Nobody's talking about financial wellbeing. Nobody is talking about any financial challenges they're experiencing. That's very common. 2/3 of employees in the UK have said that they would never talk to their employer about a financial crisis they're experiencing. So it is very common. There is a good chance that 2/3 of your workforce may well be experiencing poor financial well-being currently, and you have no idea. Let's hear more on that from Carey.
Carey CooperSince I focus in on the workplace, then my concern is about how do we get people to be open about their financial circumstances with their employer, because the employer wants to help. Many employers want to help, but if employees— a recent survey found a huge percentage of people, 2 out of 3, will not reveal to their employer that they're having any financial difficulty, yet it affects them at work, it affects them in their relationships, it affects them at home and their performance as well. So how do we get these people to actually talk about it, feel open to talk about it? How do we get the organization to train line managers to be able to broach this subject with their subordinates and their direct reports? And again, about a third of people, it is found, feel that their employer, you know, well, a lot of 'em feel their employer, number one, they don't want to talk about it with their boss. Number two, they don't think their boss would necessarily be open to talking about it. And many organizations are not really dealing with this as an issue. They feel that would be intrusive or it's not in their bailiwick. It's not what we should be doing things on. Although, EAPs, employee assistance programs, are available in bigger organizations, both in the public sector and the private sector. And an aspect of them is not just psychological counseling, but an aspect is about financial counseling as well. So we just need more openness about it because we're in a recession. Things aren't going to get good for a long time, particularly because we have Brexit. Brexit will keep having a negative impact on Britain, but the financial crisis— well, not the financial crisis, but the recession, the cost of living crisis, energy, all that kind of stuff is going to affect the whole of Europe for quite a long time, particularly as long as the Ukrainian war goes on.
Leanne ElliottRyan agrees that smashing the stigma is a first step. We need to get people talking about money.
Al ElliottAnd that's probably one of our biggest missions really from Finwell, that we want the first step for people to feel like they're comfortable talking about money. That's the big thing I think we need at the moment. Very similar to mental health and wellbeing, that's pretty much the first step to make, you know, smash the stigma and break the taboos, create psychologically safe spaces at companies and for employees. Where both employee teams and leadership teams can come together and talk about money. You know, because we feature a lot about, or talk a lot about, the fact that we're not actually all in the same boat. I don't know if you remember, everyone used to say, oh, COVID and the pandemic, we're all in the same boat. And we absolutely disagree with that. We're all maybe in the same storm is how we explain it. But it's absolutely Affecting people in different ways. Some of us are, you know, gonna just sail through it and that's fine, you know, not gonna affect us too much and that's okay. But for others, we need to work a bit harder. We might need to be out on our rowing boat and working a bit harder and looking at our money a bit more. And others are drowning, you know, others are really struggling. And I think the nice thing that's come out of the way our group workshops have developed is that culture piece and that Bringing a company together, um, to realize that we're all in the same storm and we need to get through it together and support each other, really. I love that idea of saying not necessarily we're in the same boat, we're in the same storm. I think that's so, so important. And it shows empathy without necessarily sort of just lying, because if you are on 250 grand a year and someone's on 25 grand a year and struggling, it's going to be difficult to show genuine Empathy. Well, not empathy, or genuine sympathy there, because you're not in the same situation. But this is where empathy really, really comes to the fore. Rewind to last week's episode, have a listen, because we talked all about the leadership and empathy in that episode. Kushboo, who's the Head of Engagement and Inclusion at Metro Bank, she stresses that good line management and wellbeing are correlated.
Leanne ElliottThe whole point of this is line managers are the gateway Into the colleague experience. So this panel was chaired by a gentleman, Andrew, from Mind, and Mind have just released a workplace wellbeing report, and there's lots of statistics in there that basically say the better your line manager is, the better your wellbeing is going to be, right? It's completely correlated. So we have to make sure that our line managers are properly equipped and confident to be able to support our colleagues. There's a difference between saying, ah, come to me if you need anything, or I see you're not yourself, I've put 15 minutes in the diary, let's chat. And then during that chat, to signpost to the right tools or the right areas. Because then the other part of this is you can have the most loveliest line managers giving you all the time in the world, but they themselves suffer because they take the burden of the whole thing on and they're not trained. You know, they're not psychotherapists, they're not counselors, bless them, they have to be able to signpost with confidence to the right areas or the right tools. And we as an organization, we have to be able to provide that. So providing line managers with skills, capability, and confidence, but then also providing those line managers and colleagues with the tools and environment to be able to support well-being. Kushboo was talking about Andrew Berry there from Mind, who was a previous guest on the show. Well worth checking out his episode as well on mental health. I will leave a link in the show notes. The impact of line managers really can't be underestimated. We've mentioned it before, we've talked about it before. If there is one thing you do as a business owner, train your line managers. Train them in empathy, train them emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, even listening. If you haven't done that, if you haven't trained your line manager— managers in these skills, that is a red flag. Let's hear more from Carey.
Carey CooperHere's where our problem is in the whole field of wellbeing. But let's look at financial wellbeing is only one aspect of it. The problem we have is to do with line managers. What we tend to do in developed countries is we recruit and promote people to managerial roles based on their technical skills, not their people skills. This is a very fundamental problem we have, which we haven't directly tackled. You know, we look at, we look at somebody who's a good marketeer and we say, that guy's great. He's, his sales are fantastic. Let's make him a marketing manager. That teacher in a classroom is outstanding. So let's make her a head teacher, you know, with minimal amount of training or even thinking about whether they're competent enough to do it. So these are, by the way, people who don't have much EQ, not much emotional intelligence. They're technically really good, great marketeer, great teacher, great social worker. Put them in a managerial role and they fail. And it's because they might not have the people skills to put people together. Now, what do people skills mean? Social interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence. Being able to empathize with your colleagues, understand, seeing their change of behavior, being socially sensitive. So you notice somebody's not the same. So, you know, I've noticed that, you know, Al usually is very ebullient. He's in a meeting, he's, you know, he's participating like everybody else. The last few weeks, he's just quiet. Totally withdrawn. And when he does come in, he's very angry, very aggressive. Now, a good line manager recognizes a change of behavior, and that's a line manager all the way from shop floor to top floor. This goes all the way up the system, anybody who's in a managerial role. So that person is more likely to be, to recognize symptoms in their subordinates and Saying, putting armor on shoulder, Al, I've noticed for the last few weeks, maybe month, maybe 2 months, you've been kind of withdrawing. Some— something's troubling you, isn't it? I just feel it. Is it? What's wrong? And because he's an open person, he or she is an open person, Al is more likely to respond and open up themselves. Because open people, open people who have these social skills are people who are prepared to admit their own vulnerabilities, which enables people they're working with to open up.
Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number one management podcast, that's us, by the way, and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?
Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work.
Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.
Al ElliottAnd 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good-looking. And you're not going to say which. Fel, host of Nudge, UK's number 1 marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s— the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Leanne ElliottThe audio destination for business professionals.
Carey CooperSeamless.
Leanne ElliottSeamless.
Al ElliottTell us about your latest episode, Phil. We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well.
Carey CooperIt is.
Leanne ElliottIt's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about How to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?
Carey CooperIt can.
Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?
Al ElliottI am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.
Leanne ElliottBut come back.
Al ElliottYeah, come back. Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this.
Carey CooperSo come back.
Al ElliottI'll cut that out. Keep that in.
Leanne ElliottSo the solution to red flag number 2, I think it's pretty obvious, Al. Train your managers. Again, if there's one thing you do as a business, train your managers. If you're not sure where to look for this type of line management training, get in touch with us. We have a phenomenal provider that we can put you in touch with. Just please train your managers. As you know, Kushboo is head of Engagement and Inclusion at Metro Bank. The challenger bank is only 13 years old, and already it has grown to 3,000 employees. Investing in managers was a fundamental part of this growth story, as Khushboo explains. So the— I guess the philosophy is, like I said, all about service, all about being different. Um, and we've evolved, you know, we've we've grown up from this small bank to a bigger bank, and we've got a different set of leaders in place which are leading the way forward and our ambition to be the UK's best community bank. Um, and I guess a key part of what, what you've just said is around what the leaders do and what the leaders say and what the tone from the top is. Um, and I guess at Metro Bank, maybe it's because it's a smaller organisation— we've got just under 4,500 colleagues But actually, our leaders are so open. They speak to our colleagues, they talk to our colleagues, they take ideas. But actually, when we're running with something, it's a joint effort. It's not being told, this is what we're doing, go and do it. It's, let's talk about it. This sounds like a good idea. Great, let's do it together. So, you're already bought into something when you're doing it. There is an ongoing debate as to whether leaders are born or made. I still see many posts about it on LinkedIn. And the truth is that believing that leaders are born Is a pretty outdated way of thinking. The majority of the research shows us now that management skills, these soft skills, can be trained. Your managers in your business can be trained. So rather than asking yourself if people are natural leaders, ask if they're trainable. Ask if they are coachable.
Carey CooperYou're right. If we have less EQ'd line managers, They're going to be reluctant to do this because they don't know how to handle people because they're not good at handling people, full stop. But we can train those 40% that are trainable into this and saying, look, being open means you're prepared, recognize the changes of behavior of your employees. If you see major changes in your behavior, provide opportunities for you to discuss it with them. What might be the drivers in this? What might be causing this problem and see if you get the social supports they need to deal with it. It could be a marital problem, it could be a financial problem. Who knows what it is? But you know, why not? They, they come into the workplace and they're not automatons. What's going on outside affects them inside. So you could just ignore it and say, it's not my problem. They have financial problems, they have mental health problems, they have relationship problems. Not my problem. It is your problem because they come in with those problems. And that's why the evidence on EAPs is that it works. It pays off to the bottom line.
Al ElliottCarey went on to explain that the secret of culture is allowing open conversations with managers who care. I couldn't really believe that it was that simple.
Carey CooperIt is that simple. I mean, it sounds silly. I mean, you think, oh no, that it can't be that. It is. That's what that— who's your culture as an employee? Your culture is your boss and your work colleagues that you see every week, right? That's your— it's not the chief exec. The chief exec has his or her own team. That's their culture. You know, they talk about a It's like the National Health Service in the UK. Everybody talks about it like we've got to do this with the NHS as if it's an oil tanker heading toward a port, right? And now we're going to do that and it's going to shift the whole— or they don't think about it as a flotilla of tons of little ships, i.e., Hospitals. And you say, if you're smart, you would say, if you were the head of the NHS, do you see that port over there? How you get to that port, I don't care, because you have different demographics than another boat in the flotilla. So you decide how you're going to get there. You determine your navigation toward that port given the context of your demographics, The problems you face and everything else. And that's what it's all about. So for me, in an organization, the culture that affects you the most are your work group, your team. Those are the ones who affect you and the line manager. And so the more we can get that good communication within everybody there who feels safe, and comfortable and talking about issues and problems, the better. And so it's not— I don't think it's that complicated. It's only complicated because we don't have enough of those people who are in managerial roles who have that competency.
Leanne ElliottAnd if you're, if you're having this thought, can I just stop you there, please, listener? If you are thinking, oh man, this sounds really woke, it sounds really like it's, you know, we're gonna have so much fun every day at work, aren't we, with all serious conversations knocking around. Conversations about money, about well-being, relationships, problems. Take a breath. I'll do it with you. Clear your mind, open your mind, and let's hear from Kushboo. Like, it is serious, and I think that every job is serious. You know, you guys are in the world of education, and educating people is serious. I think everything has a serious element. And it's so important for every single person to be doing something, no matter how serious it is, to take that lightened approach. I mean, we're talking about well-being everywhere we look today. Someone's mental health, someone's physical well-being, someone's social well-being, all of that is so important playing a part of where you spend the majority of your life, right, at work. And if you can't have a bit of fun, and by fun, you can't, it's not mutually exclusive. You don't have fun and then not be serious. You can absolutely be serious and have fun. I'm having fun now, but we're talking about, you know, serious things. And yes, money is serious, but do we want to make it serious so then it becomes inaccessible? Do we want to make it serious that it scares children that they can't talk in a bank? Do we want to make it so serious that there are certain groups of people, you know, maybe vulnerable adults or, um, you know, disabled people who find it Actually, this is too serious for me and I can't use it. I think we create barriers through our own version of seriousness or our own illusion of seriousness that we create. And so it's not mutually exclusive. We can be fun and be serious at the same time. We can have fun, especially if we know the signs that things are more serious. As an individual, your financial well-being may becoming a more serious issue if you are noticing things like you're being refused for credit, you're needing payday loans, you're constantly in your overdraft, you're finding your home expenses typically every month add up to more than you earn. These are signs that as an individual you may be heading for a financial crisis. As a leader or manager, the signs that an employee may be struggling financially can include so many different things, things like changes in behaviour or mood. You know, if somebody's typically very happy and then all of a sudden they're really grumpy, that is a, that is a red flag. If they're going off sick, if you're noticing lower productivity or lower quality of work, if maybe they're working more overtime or they're delaying their retirement plans. Being emotionally intelligent isn't about rejecting fun. It's about knowing when it's appropriate. And ultimately, great leaders know how to communicate with different people in different ways. Ryan started his career, very interestingly, in professional football under one of England's best-known managers, Harry Redknapp. We had to ask him about his experience. Does he rate Harry as a manager?
Al ElliottI was only a professional for, for a couple of years, um, and didn't play for the first team, um, travelled with the first team but didn't have, you know, loads of exposure to, to, to Harry. But I think he was just— the way he communicated, the way he made you feel, you know. I listened to other players I played with, like Joe Cole, Michael Carrick, and what they've said about Harry and what others have said about Harry Redknapp, and they all say the same thing, you know. The way that he would be able to communicate with different people in different ways, realizing that some people needed an arm around the shoulder. Some people needed some harsh words possibly said that would be a positive really to gee them up and make some impact. Um, but I think what most good leaders have, whether it's in, in sport or business, that they make their employees or their teams feel like they want to give 110% for that person. You know, if they don't We hear a lot that I don't want to let them down. I don't want to let my manager down, or, and if you've got that, you know, if you've got that genuine respect for your manager, again, whether it's sport or business, I think that's a great starting point. Okay. So red flag number 3 is that you are treating the symptoms, not the underlying problem. Most organisations have some kind of support in place related to financial wellbeing. Whether it's like your pension scheme or an EAP, or perhaps you help people who are struggling with finances and you have a dedicated person to do that. So, some of these might be really popular. For example, if someone, if employees are accessing like the equivalent of an early pay advance quite often, you might think, oh, well, there you go, that's helping. But that might just be solving the problem, not necessarily looking You can get a solution for it, the underlying issue. You need to ask yourself, what are your benefits actually focusing on? Is it cure or is it prevention? If you are seeing one particular type of your financial support being like a high take-up on it, then perhaps it does suggest there's some underlying training that you can do there. Maybe it's like focusing on budgeting or managing debt. Well, it's dedicated to financial education and wellbeing training and supports Employers of all kinds of sizes across all sectors across the UK. They offer more than 20 interactive group workshops online and in person, which cover the range of themes and topics which are related to financial wellbeing. Ryan explained this approach creates a psychologically safe space and also helps to bring employee and leadership teams together to talk about money. Let's hear more from Ryan. One of the really nice Kind of bonuses that we've seen from, from our group workshops that we did. And there's lots of companies that offer group workshops or presentations or webinars or seminars, whatever it might be. And we try to do things a little bit different. We try to make them as engaging as possible. We don't like talking at people for any length of time. So we really tried to start to make our sessions really engaging, really, um, Yeah. You know, giving people the chance to get involved with the session as much as they want. And what we found from that is that it became more of a culture piece rather— so it's an education piece. Obviously, we're trying to help educate and improve confidence and knowledge, but also using it as a way to talk about money.
Leanne ElliottMetro Bank is also an advocate for financial education from childhood to adulthood. I asked Kushboo about this important aspect of Metro Bank's work and not only how it impacted its customers, but how it impacted its employees. You know, our ambition is to be the UK's number one community bank, um, and it's really connecting with the people that we serve. And so, you know, our— um, I talked about the fact that we've got stores, not branches. So the memories of, um, or what comes to mind as a stereotype of a branch is you go in, if you've got kids, tell them to shut up, you better be dressed nicely, and it's all this Mary Poppins stuff about, you know, don't crack a joke because it's too serious in here. Metro Bank's not like that at all. So all of our stores are based on a retail environment and you walk in and you've got these bright colours. If it's half term, there's a kids' club going on. We're dog-friendly, a big, big draw-in for me because I love dogs. So, you know, you'll see a dog with doggy treats and we've got them on the counter.
Al ElliottYeah.
Leanne ElliottYou know, doggy bandanas, like I said, kids clubs and activities. We do free financial education for children, and part of that module, we have school trips come in. So it's a really lively atmosphere that fits into our community. Yes, we do all the serious stuff, you know, we do banking, we do mortgages, we do business banking, and we support our communities in the traditional banking way as well. But there's a whole host of other things that we do, and, you know, really, really proud of Kushboo went on to explain that Metro Bank's commitment to community also feeds into their talent strategies and education programmes. So, it's been quite a journey, and we've just come through the back end of what we've called our transformation period and sort of really regrouping quite a few things and business strategies. I've mentioned it a couple of times, you know, our connection to the community is really, really vital to us. And as we grow, it's looking at all these other nuances that come back to the heart of our strategy. So, at the heart of our strategy are people and our colleagues. So, our colleagues are at the centre of everything we do, hence why wellbeing is so important, hence why we're driving it forward. The journey onwards is keeping that connection to the community. So, again, through traditional banking mediums, but through things like our apprenticeship programme, where we're focusing socioeconomic diversity and making sure that we look at some of the most deprived areas in the UK and making sure that opportunities are offered to candidates in those areas, making sure that we expand financial education to not just children. We've looked at care leavers, we're looking at families, we're looking at armed forces. How can we spread our expertise and reach as many people as we can in our community and really making a difference to our community whilst also doing the day-to-day banking. You know, going back to what I was saying about supporting our communities and children from a young age, well, let's get them passionate about money. Let's get them passionate about education. You know, we're in a world right now where unfortunately money might not be a great thing to talk about, you know, at home life, and children feed off these things. So let's give them some positive on how money can be positive and how you can help yourself and how you can help yourself with money. And we're doing that With various other things. I think, you know, finance in general, and particularly with women, the stats are absolutely staggering of how women in finance— there's just not enough of them. At Metro Bank, we're massively, massively ahead of the curve, so we're almost at 50/50 male and female, which is brilliant as an organisation. And we're just trying to look up that level of representation and make sure that's reflected at senior levels. as well. But on the opposite end, we're actually building a programme right now with our technology team and looking at STEM for children. So going into classes with children, talking about technology, talking about finances, you know, not just leaving it as money, partnering with other firms who might have ideas around the technological side. And we've got a large technology team. Let's go out and share the expertise. So, you know, building that passion in others, just sees that passion filter on through, through life. And I think it's really important for children to learn that passion is important. It shouldn't die out when you're a grown-up.
Al ElliottSo the guide that Leanne mentioned above before, the 2023 guide that Carey and his team put together, stresses the importance of education. We need to ensure that we're offering employees sustainable solutions. They suggest that doing things like setting up financial wellbeing and literacy programmes alongside the practical guidelines and tools in the EAP, can help employees to develop the skills to manage their finances. So in short, we need to both address the short-term problems but also the underlying problems.
Leanne ElliottYeah, I think it really is a combination of, of providing solutions that support the immediate pain whilst also empowering people to experience more positive financial wellbeing in the long run. So our 4th red flag is your employees aren't accessing support. We hear a lot about this from organizations, leaders saying things like, I have all these benefits in place, but nobody seems to be using them. It is really, really common. And actually, research from CIPD in 2022 found actually only about 40% of organizations had communicated their full benefits package to their workers. That might sound a bit, you know, if you're an employee, you might be thinking that sounds kind of stupid. But actually, think about EAP programs. A lot of them will offer tens and tens and tens of benefits, everything from health to, to cashback to, you know, shopping savings schemes to online physio to gym passes. They really are comprehensive. So yeah, communicating the full package can be a challenge for organizations. We've spoken to several high-profile guests about benefits, about communicating benefits in the past, and they have all recommended the same thing. When it comes to benefits, don't worry about doing more, worry about doing better. And by being better, they mean better in communicating the benefits you have and engaging people in them. Karen Sankdo from Microsoft in our Corporate Giant episode talked about this a lot. lot and gave some awesome advice. So do go back and check that out. But of course, engagement isn't just reserved for the Fortune 500. Smaller businesses do need to invest in engagement too. Kushboo explains colleague engagement is an intentional thing at Metro Bank. So my role is a brand new role at Metro Bank. So I've been with Metro Bank for, uh, just under 5 years, um, and So, I started within the corporate and commercial side, and I bought Metro Bank into Wales. And so, this role came up 6 months ago, and I was like, me, pick me. So, it covers everything to do with our amazing culture, everything to do with colleague engagement, everything to do with D&I, and everything to do with wellbeing. All of these things have added on bit by bit, and I keep saying, you know, to our leaders who accept it and understand it, I feel like a startup business. Right? So it's a new role, and actually we thought it was this big, and by this big I mean small, but it's bigger and bigger and bigger, and the concept is bigger and bigger. And as an organisation that puts our colleagues at the heart of everything we do, we know it's bigger and bigger. So you know that's how well-being fits into it, and they're all interlinked. You know, well, I said something in my interview that without you let me think. of it a second, you can't have engagement, you can't have, you can't have a good culture without colleague engagement, and you can't have either without diversity and inclusion. And I think wellbeing just fits into all of that, um, badged up. And I think, you know, if you look after your colleagues, I read a really interesting article, if you look after your colleagues, everything that follows with the customer will just come.
Al ElliottSo communication is really important, obviously, but also It's really important to be able to signpost people, to be able to tell people what is available. So the key to that really is training your managers, your leaders, your wellbeing leads, um, in what actually is available within your company. In March 2020, Ryan started a nonprofit called Let's Improve Workplace Wellbeing, which was specifically to support HR and mental health practitioners with exactly this. So we, we started that in March 2020. 2020, um, myself and then, um, Nuz Shagan, who's here at the, um, the exhibition as well. And really it was just an idea to help some of our clients, some of the HR managers. There wasn't really so many wellbeing leads then, it was just kind of HR managers or PAs or whoever it might be at a company that was tasked to not only help everyone but sort wellbeing out as well, which was a very new area for some. Um, and they, they needed help. They didn't really know where to turn, what the elements might be, you know, mental health, financial wellbeing, physical, social, lots of different elements of wellbeing. Where do you go to learn all this stuff? It's a very new role. So the idea was just to try and bring people in that role together to help them share challenges and have a bit of a network, a peer support group to, um, to help them and to learn more and improve the wellbeing at their own organisation. So that was the idea. We had lots of online events back then. Lots of people gave up their time to speak and people came to them. And now it's an official not-for-profit, you know, community interest company, a CIC, that Nuz runs and I help with. And it's a holistic approach to wellbeing as well. Obviously, where that fits in with FinWell, we like to think we might be able to help on the financial side and support members, you know, whether they've got budget or not, you know, which can be the case now that companies are going through this cost of living crisis as well, not just employees. So just to try and be, you know, supportive and knowledgeable in that area, I suppose. So clearly it's not necessarily about offering more, it's ensuring that people are picking up and taking up what you're already offering. And of course, it's all the more important If you are taking some benefits away, like for example remote work. Lots of companies are pulling people back to work, which is seen as actually taking something away, a benefit away from the employee.
Leanne ElliottYeah, I mean, if you are interested in the cost breakdown of work from home versus work from the office, do head back to that episode that we mentioned, Is Work from Home Dead? The Impact of the Cost of Living Crisis, because there is an argument that calling people back into the office could add on financial pressures in terms of commuting costs or childcare. So if you switch from a fully remote to a hybrid policy or fully back-in-office policy in the last 12 months, have you had that conversation with your employees about how it's impacting them financially? I worry that a lot of small businesses are currently basing their hybrid or remote working policy based on all the big tech companies that have— we've seen a flurry of them over the last 6 months start to call people back into the office? Because typically, traditionally, the big tech firms have been known for best practice when it comes to culture. Well, as Carey explains, not anymore.
Carey CooperZoom has told their employees they have to be in a minimum of 3 days. Can you believe it? First of all, they thrive on the fact that people are working from home. Most of these companies thrive on it, yet they're doing that. Don't assume that the good people firms are the IT firms. They're not necessarily at all. So there are companies that really know how to deal with these kinds of issues, and we're getting more of them because more and more companies are thinking about wellbeing in a more strategic way. And so, I mean, we did some work, Robertson Cooper, my ex-Manchester University spinoff company, did work with Mace, the big construction builders. And we were going quarterly to the senior leadership team. That's the CEO and his team once a month talking, once a quarter talking about when we had a contract to do work with them on wellbeing, develop it strategically. And we said, okay, we've done employee wellbeing audits. We got the employee voice. Now we know that there's that problem in that part of the business and that problem in that part of business. We're going in and intervening. So we go in and intervene. We would then bring back the data on the before and after of the intervention. Sometimes it was successful. Sometimes it wasn't. When it wasn't, we'd say, we tried that, didn't work, but we know why it didn't work. So we're doing that. That's what it should be about. And you have a strategic plan, you're getting employee voice, you're finding out that they have financial— that people who are— a number of people have financial well-being issues. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to deal with that? And in, in the whole organization. So it— this is, this is doable, but you have to get open communications.
Leanne ElliottThe point is that every change you make in your business is essentially an intervention that will impact your people and culture, whether it's intentional or not. If you're collecting the data, if you're doing the work to get those insights, you'll know the impact of that change, you know the impact of that decision, you'll know if it's successful or not. My beef with remote work is that leaders are saying remote work isn't working, productivity is down, we need to bring people back into the office, and they're not actually recording that data. They don't have the proof Where is the data?
Al ElliottYeah, like we've said before, you wouldn't make marketing or sales decisions without looking at the analytics or the conversion rates. So you shouldn't really be making decisions about people without collecting data and analysing that data carefully. So that's red flag number 4, is that people aren't necessarily aware of what is available. I mean, if you are not, or you feel that if you are a leader and you're not sure everyone knows, or if you're an employee and you don't know, perhaps it's time to start communicating. Perhaps it's time to start training managers and ensuring that everyone knows exactly how to signpost.
Leanne ElliottI think that's actually a really good— they call it a litmus test. So when you do the little—
Al ElliottI think so, yeah, yeah.
Leanne ElliottIt's just if you're a leader, go, can I list all my benefits?
Al ElliottOh, that's a good one.
Leanne ElliottIf you can't, might be worth just, you know, having a little look.
Al ElliottSo red flag number 5 is ignoring links to learning and development.
Leanne ElliottYeah, so this might seem a bit, a bit out of place. You're like, What has L&D got to do with financial well-being? Well, when we think about it, learning and development is really enabling employees to progress in their careers, and that in turn is going to help them increase their earning potential. You know, we've heard a lot over the last 6 months, you know, the war for talent being won by these bidding wars in terms of salary, and that does seem to be slowing down. But even so, employees know that they're— that increasing their skills, enriching their experience does mean bigger paychecks down the line. If you don't offer employees access to opportunities, development training opportunities, this is a red flag. Ask yourself questions like, can employees easily access development and training resources? Can colleagues access information about job openings? Are employees encouraged to have regular development conversations with their line managers? If you answered no to any of those questions, enhancing your learning and development programs is a matter of priority. Let's hear more from Carey.
Carey CooperIt's about partly your career. It's about the rewards you get. By the way, there are psychological rewards as well as financial rewards, right? In other words, if you think about this, I might be asked to go somewhere. I might be recruited for a job. It's a job I actually would like to do, but they don't pay me half of what I currently get paid. So that's a career issue, but it's also a financial issue for me. I had that happen to me once where I got offered a job at a very prestigious university or, you know, much earlier in my, in my career and everything else, but it wasn't going to pay me very much. And I had 4 kids, or I can't remember at that time, maybe it was only 2. I can't remember. I just can't remember. It was ages and ages ago. Okay. So I decided to stay with the money, but I could do my own thing where I was anyway. So what do I need to, you know, those kinds of issues come up all the time and that determines That affects your financial circumstance. Say I would've taken the job at this place, but ended up ending up with 4 kids. Probably would've stayed with 2 at the time, but say I would've— that would've cost me, caused me a lot of problems. Maybe my wife, oh, my wife actually was working at the time anyway, but let's say she wasn't. She may then have to go to work. So All those kinds of issues about your career, your rewards. And there are a lot of rewards you get from a job which are not necessarily financial, and you might want to stick with the job, but it causes financial complications for you if you do. So a lot of people can say that I'd love to do that, but I can't do that because it doesn't pay me enough money. So I think all those 4 kind of constructs, you know, just are interactive, interdependent, and they affect your financial well-being.
Leanne ElliottAnd once we have these learning and development programs in place, it's also really important that we engage people in them, especially those from minority groups. Your L&D strategy should align with your EDI strategy. Let's hear more from Kushboo and the work she's doing at Metro Bank. Um, look, we've— we're at a great starting point. So we're 50/50, we're almost 50/50 as well with ethnicity diversity as well across our organisation. So again, that's another big plus. Um, what we did last year was introduce our first ever diversity and inclusion strategy, so formalising a little bit of what we're already doing. And now we're So, we're taking that a step further into, right, gender and ethnicity isn't all of D&I, right? It goes far further than that. So, we're looking at what other characteristics do we look at? And it becomes really interesting because quite often you'll be able to see sex, quite often you'll be able to see ethnicity, not all the time, but quite often. But then you come into the invisible characteristics, um, you know, you look at sexual orientation Or perhaps religion. And how do we, how do we learn about this representation and how do we make it more visible? And so the first step for me is across our organisation encouraging that visibility. And so having our senior leaders, having our executive teams talk about these things that aren't obvious. You know, I'm Khushboo, I've got an invisible disability, I'm on the senior leadership team, I'm telling you this because X, Y, and Z. And And helping our colleagues understand that inclusion is not just because we say it's inclusion. Inclusion is all around you, but let's talk about it and let's start the conversation. We've got employee resource groups. We've got 5 of them. So, we've got one that looks at females. We've got one that looks at wellbeing. We've got one that looks at ethnicity and culture. We've got one that supports our LGBTQ+ community. And who else? And Who diversity. have I missed? Who have I missed? My mind's gone blank. Who have I missed? Families. Families, that's who I've missed. And Families, that looks at different families. So all of these groups, you know, help, help around the education, around the support, about the visibility and bringing it to life at Metro Bank. Because again, it's not something that you can say and tick a box in. It's not a place of attainment. It's an ongoing thing. It's a way of life. It's a behavioral change, and it's here to, to stay. So it's no good saying we're inclusive. We've got to do the inclusive. Um, and you know, it's not a noun, it's a verb. I keep saying that with well-being, with diversity, with inclusion. It's not noun, it's a verb. And you've got to keep that doing and keep it going. And so there's lots of things that we're looking at. In particular, we're looking— so we've got this representation across our organisation. We want to make sure that's levelled up with senior leadership. And I think across lots of organisations, financial institutions in particular, when you look at the higher levels, that's when the representation and diversity drops. So how do we make that better? How do we talk about it better? How do we drop the barriers to allow all people from everywhere to get into these roles. So that is our 5th red flag, if you are not linking financial wellbeing to your learning and development programmes.
Al ElliottBrilliant. So should we just quickly go through those 5 red flags and, and summarise? So red flag number 1 is that you don't have the data, you're not collecting it. Red flag number 2 is that no one's talking about it. Red flag number 3 is that you're treating the symptoms, not the underlying problem. Red flag number 4 is that your employees just simply aren't accessing the support you're, you're making available. And red flag number 5 is you're ignoring learning and development training. Now, if you work through, work your way through all of these 5 flags, then you're going to end up with a really, really good financial wellbeing programme in place. But that takes time. What can you do right now? If you know that someone is struggling financially, you can ask them one simple question. Are you okay?
Carey CooperWell, number one sign is people are taking off more and more time, but they're taking off for stress more and more. The difficulty is maybe if they're not prepared to, if they're not open about, if they feel the organization's not open for them to talk about their financial circumstances, they're certainly not going to tell them why they're Off ill. Let's just say they're off ill more and more. They might not be saying they're off for stress, but they're off a lot. There's a whole load of signs. Their behavior changes over a period of time. So normally when they're very extrovert, they become more socially withdrawn. So there's behavioral changes which indicate to a manager, business owner, an SME owner, or any manager. They are behavioral changes. Somebody who usually is very humorous, affable, becomes more socially withdrawn. All those kind of subtle behavior changes, you see them. And the way you know as an individual you're behaving differently is when somebody says to you, you don't seem yourself You know, are you okay? Or you, somebody asks you, are you okay? And your response, your nonverbal response tells you the way you look at them, your body language, that they're not okay. Even though that what they may say is, yeah, I'm all right. I'm okay. I'm all right. How many times did people say that when they're asked that? They do. So looking at the nonverbal Verbal forms of communication, looking at change of behavior, looking at sickness absence rates, listening to what employees have to say about other people. And if you're a good manager and you're walking the talk, then you're going to hear all sorts of rumors, you know, chat. from employees about other employees. You know, Fred's a bit strange these days. He's not really part of the team, all of that. That's what you have to look for. But to do that, you have to be a socially sensitive person. You have to really be a manager. That's what a manager should be.
Leanne ElliottI would like to finish this episode with some parting words of wisdom from Professor Sir Carey Cooper for business leaders when it comes to managing the expectations of my favorite generation, the Gen Z. Some people say their views are unreasonable. Others say they're transformational. Here's Carey's take.
Carey CooperBut it all sparks from the passion, the commitment, you know, not looking after just yourself and I'm thinking, oh, I want to make sure my job's secure. I'm just thinking this is the right thing to do. If I fail, I fail. I don't— if I lose my job, I lose my job. And I believe in it. And I think that's what we need more of. And particularly in the context of the UK, for example, with Brexit, boy, do we need more of it. Brexit was the biggest mistake ever, ever in the UK.
Al ElliottYeah.
Carey CooperIt's been very, very damaging to business. So we need to reignite the passion and we have a lot of people who are very passionate about what they do, get it out there. But you know, the insecurity, the financial insecurity, the job insecurity is driving much more conservative behavior and we need to get rid of that and just let rip. Maybe the next generation will do it. In fact, I think so.
Al ElliottYeah.
Carey CooperThe Z generation, the young millennials are a different breed. First of all, they don't have mortgages, so there's no security to worry about. They don't have it. And they call them the snowflakes, that generation. And that's because they flip from one organization to another. You know why they do that? They saw what happened to their parents. Their parents were the 2008 to 2012 financial crisis. They saw how they were dumped by organizations. It was lack of loyalty. These people want good quality of working life, and they're not afraid to ask for it. And that's our future.
Leanne ElliottThank you so much to our 3 incredible guests today, to Professor Sir Carey Cooper, to Khushboo Patel, and to Ryan Briggs. What a phenomenal panel you were. Thank you for all your advice. We will leave the links to all of our guests in the show notes. We'll also leave a link to the Financial Wellbeing Report that we've mentioned and structured this episode on.
Carey CooperYep.
Al ElliottWe would love to continue the discussion on LinkedIn. Uh, just search for Truth, Lies and Work. You'll find us. Leanne's on there all the time. I'll occasionally pop up and say something salty and then disappear for another week. Uh, but yeah, no, we do, we, we really want to continue this conversation and, and we want to hear what you think of this. So if there's something we've missed out, let us No, talking of missing out, do not miss next week. I'm not going to tell you who it is, but it is a serial entrepreneur. He has got about 15,000 different businesses. He's been in New York Times. He's been all over the place. He is related to a previous guest we had or guests, so you may be able to work that out. But I love talking to him. It was a massive inspiration talking to him, and he is coming next week. So. Make sure you're subscribed. Make sure you don't miss it.
Leanne ElliottSee you next week.
Al ElliottBye-bye.