This week’s download is BELAY’s tip sheet on “How to Build an Irresistible Benefits Package.” It will give you the head start you need to attract and retain the best employees through your benefits.
Download NowWorking with an executive assistant isn’t a one size fits all experience. Each leader has their own communication style and management style and so does each EA. Being able to use your unique qualities to better work together as a team can be the catapult to your potential as a leader and your growth as an organization.
This week, we are continuing our conversation around how to help you better lead your organization by learning to leverage your executive assistant in more effective ways. Here to join us again for this conversation are our very own executive assistants, Kate Sawtelle and Melissa Lawrence. They are ready to jump in and help us discuss how leaders can best work with their executive assistant to build trust, effectively create expectations, and better communicate.
It’s not about providing 401Ks or loan calculators. True financial wellness looks at everything from healthcare costs, to how people are paying their debt, to identity theft protection and reputation management, to even relationship issues related to money. A good financial wellness program will truly help the root causes of employees’ money issues.
Let them sit down at the table when you are doing bills. Explain taxes. Talk to them about the process you use to make big purchases. All of this will give them context and help them understand how money works. Too many in older generations didn’t learn about money as kids and it cost them later.
Employees have more student loan and credit card debt than ever – leading to loads of financial stress. More and more employees want financial wellness as a benefit. Happy employees are more productive. Good leadership will be sensitive to this. If not, they will eventually leave for somewhere that is.
(01:42) Ilyce talks about where she discovered her love of writing.
(04:16) “Do what you love and the money will follow.”
(07:32) What role does benefits like financial wellness play into employee retention?
(13:13) Why didn’t we learn about handling money when we were kids?
(14:33) What financial wellness is not.
(17:48) What about the business leader or owners who might feel like this is too personal to deal with at work?
(21:02) What does a successful adoption of a financial wellness program look like?
(22:50) How can you connect with Ilyce and Smart Money Moves?
(24:07) This week’s download is BELAY’s tip sheet on “How to Build an Irresistible Benefits Package.” This has great information about how to really attract the best employees through your benefits.
Ilyce Glink:
If you’re looking for information on how to buy a car and how to finance that car, the last thing you need is somebody telling you how to get a better credit card.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Right.
Ilyce Glink:
Those two things don’t mean anything to each other.
Lisa Zeeveld:
No.
Ilyce Glink:
It’s not going to help you do either of the things you want to do better. What we’re trying to do is provide the context for making these better decisions, and then when you are ready to look for a loan, give you a place where you can get a best in class loan offer.
Speaker 3:
Welcome to One Next Step, the most practical business podcast in the world, helping you get more done, grow your business, and lead your team with confidence with tips and tools you didn’t get in business school. Here are your hosts, Trisha Sciortino and Lisa Zeeveld.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Welcome to One Next Step, the practical business podcast that helps you run your business so it stops running you. I’m Lisa. Today, we’re talking with Ilyce Glink about why it’s so important to build a financial wellness program for your team. Ilyce is the CEO of Best Money Moves, a company that works with employers to provide their employees information, tools, solutions, and products that help them live their best financial lives. Who doesn’t want that? She’ll be talking to us about financial wellness in the workplace, and why it matters so much. So, let’s get going. Hey Ilyce, so great to have you on the show.
Ilyce Glink:
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yes, yes. Well, I always like to break the ice a little bit, maybe give our listeners something that they haven’t heard about our guest before. I have a fun question. Would you mind playing along with me?
Ilyce Glink:
Go ahead.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Okay. Our fun question is, as a journalist, author, and marketeer, where did you discover your love for writing content?
Ilyce Glink:
Well, I’ve been writing for a very long time. I mean, with all the content I’ve written, maybe, yeah, I don’t know. It feels like a hundred years. Probably not that long, though. But, I started writing when I was really young. I wrote with my sisters, we did little plays for the people who lived in our apartment building. I wrote little newsletters as I got into high school, I was on the paper and I wrote for the yearbook, and then I became the yearbook, one of the editors. There’s just years and years and years of doing all different kinds of content. That kind of led me to doing my own thing when a company, this was way back a while ago, like 20 years ago, before we even knew to call it content, we were still calling it articles and writing and newsletters.
Ilyce Glink:
But, I was sitting around with the CMO of a huge mortgage company, and he asked me what he should do with his six million customers who never thought about him when they were going to refinance. I said, “Wait, I’ve got to wait for you to stay engaged with them.” That led into a seven year engagement with this company where we created all of this content, and it basically came together to produce a wildly successful lead generation program for them. That was really the beginning of my discovery about how content could be used in a way to not only engage people, but nurture them to making really smart decisions for themselves around money. That of course is what Best Money Moves is all about. My career kind of came full circle.
Lisa Zeeveld:
I love that. I love that you used to write plays. I am a thespian.
Ilyce Glink:
Screenplays, too.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Wow, that’s fantastic.
Ilyce Glink:
Yeah, I’ll be heading to Hollywood just as soon as I’m done.
Lisa Zeeveld:
I love that. Well, as a fellow thespian, I love hearing that you are a playwright. I mean, that’s just fantastic. I love hearing the full circle, because I think so often I have the opportunity, really the privilege, of mentoring young women, and they kind of get thrust into the business world, and then after a couple of years they’re not loving what they do. One of the questions I always ask them is, but what did you want to do when you were a small child? What did you have fun doing? I feel like I could have asked you that, and you’re doing exactly what you were doing when you were small and you love it. That’s why you’re so successful at what you’re doing today.
Ilyce Glink:
Well, definitely do what you love and the money will follow, which is something my father said to me on literally the very last night of his life, is exactly what I think everybody should be doing.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah, yeah, because the money will follow. I think that’s so true. I love that, and I love that you also found a way to give back to people. Not that writing fiction doesn’t give back, because I think that we all need a little bit of fiction in our life, but I love that you’re now writing content that really helps people understand financial wellness, because I think you say it best, is that there’s so many areas in our life that brings stress, but probably nothing more than money troubles.
Ilyce Glink:
Oh, that’s so true. Well, money, and we joke that money’s at the root of all evil, but when it comes to unhappiness with people, people think, “If I just had another $100,000, I’d be the happiest person in the world.”
Lisa Zeeveld:
Right.
Ilyce Glink:
But really, that isn’t what money confers. Money gives you options, but you have to be the one to make the most of the money that you have. You have to take care of yourself, because money doesn’t buy you health and it doesn’t really buy you happiness. It just gives you the chance to explore what your heart’s desire really is. That of course is on all of us. On the flip side of it, money is the thing that makes us the most miserable. It’s the number one cause of breakups in relationships. It’s the thing that people lie about. They lie about what they spend, they lie about what they make, they lie about what their credit score is. It’s very hard to be truthful about money. What I always say to people is, we live in this amazing country where everybody will talk about sex all day long, but when it comes to money, we’re all closed up. Nobody wants to talk about it or reveal anything.
Lisa Zeeveld:
I know, and I find it such a cultural thing, too. I think that as you start to broaden your friend base and broaden your peer network, and you hear that different cultures, it’s very much a part of who they are and what they do. They’ll actually sit down and say, “How much do you make?” Because, ultimately, they know that as a culture, as a community, they all benefit when they’re all making the most amount of money. I feel like here in the United States, it’s taboo. You don’t tell your neighbor how much you make. I mean, you barely tell them how much you bought your house for. I do feel like that’s a handicap for us.
Ilyce Glink:
You’re absolutely right. Of course, what’s in encouraging is that younger people, gen Z is much more open to having these discussions about money. They talk to their friends about what they’re making, and what jobs pay. When I look at young people that work for us or that I know, they are very open about salaries and benefits, and I think this can only benefit things. Really, it’s going to benefit the next generation of workers, the current generation of workers. I think it’s going to make things more equitable. For companies that are looking for a better DEI answer, diversity, equity, inclusion, this is going to help, even though it may feel awkward and painful for people who are in their late forties, fifties, and sixties to have those kinds of open money discussions. That’s just because culturally, to your point, everybody’s been so closed up, up until this point in time.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that’s a great segue into talking about the role that benefits play in employee retention. I love the idea of helping employees become more educated about their financials, their finances, and their financials. Everybody should have a set of financials, the CFO’s speaking in me. As much as 300% you say, so let’s dive deeper into that.
Ilyce Glink:
Sure. What’s really interesting about financial wellness is that you hear this phrase through and around. I’ve actually been talking about this for my whole career. I’ve been, as a financial journalist, writing columns about it, helping people make smarter decisions with their money. I’ve talked about financial wellbeing for a long time. But, you now hear companies throw it around, and it means different things in different contexts.
Ilyce Glink:
A company could be financial wellness, but what they really they mean is buy our annuities, which are expensive, or they could mean buy pet insurance, that’s financial wellness, or get help paying down student loan debt, or take a short term loan, or get early wage access. There’s just a lot of different pieces. What Best Money Moves does is, we have combed through all of the platforms that are out there, all of the products, all of the services, and we have chosen a group of best in class partners to come into the site. We have the platform, we provide almost a thousand pieces of originally written content, video, webinars, the interaction, the education, the content, right?
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah, right.
Ilyce Glink:
We do all of that, and what we do is use a layer of advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to help push the right piece of information to the right employee at the right point in time. That’s really what my mind financial wellness is all about, because if you’re looking for information on how to buy a car and how to finance that car, the last thing you need is somebody telling you how to get a better credit card.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Right.
Ilyce Glink:
Those two things don’t mean anything to each other.
Lisa Zeeveld:
No.
Ilyce Glink:
It’s not going to help you do either of the things you want to do better. What we’re trying to do is provide the context for making these better decisions, and then when you are ready to look for a loan, give you a place where you can get a best in class loan offer from all the different kinds of lenders. They’ll be bidding on your business, so you get a better product at a better price, right when you need it. That’s really what we’re trying to do. But, we also work with companies and we allow them to build in their own versions and their own benefits into our platform. When we talk about how financial wellness could really impact retention, which right now for companies with the great resignation, everybody wants to hold onto the employees they love. Right?
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yes, totally. Yes, yes.
Ilyce Glink:
If you have to replace them, it’s going to cost you, what, two times their salary?
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah.
Ilyce Glink:
Fair?
Lisa Zeeveld:
Fair.
Ilyce Glink:
It’s better and cheaper to just keep people on board, but different types of industries need different types of help for their employees. What we’re finding is that in retail and in fast fresh food industries, some of the other kinds of manufacturing industries, those employees need access to their paycheck a little bit sooner than it might come.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Sure.
Ilyce Glink:
If you could give them that, which is what earned wage access does, it will allow them to avoid things like payday lenders, which are six, 700% loans. Right?
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah.
Ilyce Glink:
What we’ve done is partner with a company called Instant Financial. They work with over 400 companies doing earned wage access for millions of workers, and their studies have found that if you offer this benefit, you could reduce retention or increase the amount of time people stay up to 300%.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Wow.
Ilyce Glink:
All of the different kinds of products that we offer, these financial wellness products, do different kinds of things for reducing turnover or increasing retention, right? Or it might help with absenteeism.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Sure.
Ilyce Glink:
There’s a big ROI in a number of different areas, and true financial wellbeing, employee financial wellbeing looks at everything from healthcare costs, to how people are paying their debt, to identity theft protection and reputation management, and even to the relationship issues that we kind of hinted at earlier, Lisa, where people don’t even like to talk about money with their spouse or their partner or the person they’re dating. We try to help on all of those fronts.
Trisha Sciortino:
If you are anything like me, then keeping up with the daily tasks of AR, AP, and account reconciliation are not your favorite things. But, you also know how necessary and important it is. The good news is it doesn’t have to be your thing anymore. BELAY can help.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Numbers are totally my thing, Tricia, and thankfully numbers are BELAY bookkeepers’ thing, too. Our sponsor BELAY believes you deserve top notch bookkeepers to produce balance sheets, pay bills, reconcile bank and credit card statements, and monthly reports to keep you up to date on the numbers of your organization. Whether you’re a church, nonprofit, or a business, they have the right people ready to help. Talk to their team today, and never lose sleep over your financials again. Get started by visiting belaysolutions.com/services/bookkeepers today.
Lisa Zeeveld:
I’m so excited about this, because I feel like when I talk to, I’m going to give it away, I’m not gen Z, I’m a little older than that. Not that anybody had any doubt if they’ve been listening long. But, I’ll talk to my peers and we’ll be talking about money and they’ll say, “Yeah, why didn’t anybody ever talk to me about this?” Now as a parent, I have young adult children, I’m actually bringing them to the table when I go buy a car. I’m sitting down when I’m paying my bills and I’m talking to them about this, because I want them to be really educated consumers, but I want them to have that financial wellbeing piece.
Lisa Zeeveld:
I love that you are partnering with employees to bridge that gap for the missing, there’s a knowledge gap. Right? The knowledge gap that happens around financial wellbeing, because unfortunately most of us didn’t learn it in school, and our parents didn’t feel confident enough to teach us about it. That’s where you’re floundering and maybe going paycheck to paycheck, or you just need a car and so you’re going to the guy down the street who’s got really high interest rates, and you’re not even thinking about that you should be shopping for a better rate. I think about just what an incredible tool this is to employers, because I think all employers should just want to help people. Right? Selfishly, they’re going to get a better employee. Unselfishly, they’re going to be helping to create better consumers, better community members, and we all need that. I love, I love, I love this.
Ilyce Glink:
No, it’s super important. What I think employers miss, though, is they think they’re giving their employees financial wellness if they have a 401k program. They’ll say, “Well, I have a 401k program. I have a calculator that they can use if they want to calculate their savings.”
Lisa Zeeveld:
Sure.
Ilyce Glink:
Or they’ll say, “Oh, we’re already doing something over here with student loans, and over here we’ve got a short term loan program. That’s financial wellness.” But, what they’re missing is the context. I love that, for example, you’re taking your kids to go buy a car, because what are they learning? It isn’t just about you picking out the latest features or adding in this fancy thing or that. Right? They’re also sitting there watching you negotiate. They’re watching you go shop from place to place to place. They’re listening to you talk about loans, and they’re watching you actually pay or structure those payments, and you’re telling them how much your monthly payment will be if you’re having one, or why you’re choosing to pay in cash if you can. All of that is important context, and you don’t even see it until later with your kids. Right? My kids are older now, but I see that they’re very good stewards with their money. They’re thoughtful. I never would’ve guessed this when they were young. Right?
Lisa Zeeveld:
Right.
Ilyce Glink:
Always wanted to spend money on video games, and this and that. Today, they’re savers. One of them has bought his very first condo. They’re interested in funding their 401ks. Those lessons that we don’t even think we’re teaching them when we take them to the store and we say, “Okay, this milk is $2.99 and this milk is $3.99. What’s the difference?” You don’t know what they’re going to say, and then one of them says, “A dollar,” and you’re like, yes.”
Ilyce Glink:
Those lessons are the things that multiply, but a lot of parents, to your point, didn’t feel capable, or they were making bad financial decisions, or maybe they were already working two jobs and they didn’t even know how to balance the books, so to speak. Right? They weren’t their own CFOs or CEOs of the household. Those are hard lessons to learn. While I am all in favor of learning European history, boy, would I have benefited from a semester of, here’s how life really works, and here’s how checkbooks work, and here’s how credit cards really work, and here’s how student loans work. We don’t do that for our high schoolers, although it’s starting to get required in more places.
Ilyce Glink:
But, Best Money Moves steps into that void, and we offer this really wonderful objective, helpful step by step instructions that are for life’s major and minor financial milestones, all written by financial journalists, people that I’ve known for years. That content is really top drawer, and people just come back to read it because they know they can trust it. While you’ve got a bazillion things on the internet, you don’t know who’s behind it or the perspective of that content that’s coming to you. You don’t know if it’s objective. You don’t know who’s getting the clicks and the links, and what their interest is in your eyeballs. But, with Best Money Moves, your employer pays for it, you get it free an employee, and it’s there just to provide the help you need.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah. I know we have some people who are listening right now who are going, “Please let me forward this over to my company, because I want to take advantage of this.” You were talking about, from a parent’s point of view, not feeling like we have the confidence for it. I can kind of see how maybe a leader, a business owner might be thinking, “Maybe this is getting a little too personal. Should I really be getting this invested in my team members’ personal finances?” What would you say to somebody who’s listening who feels like maybe this is just a little touchy feeling, and maybe the 401k is as much financial wellness that they are comfortable with right now?
Ilyce Glink:
Yeah, I would say to them that you better wake up and see what’s actually going on with your workforce. A tremendous amount of Americans have student loan debt. 45 million Americans, working Americans have student loan debt, $1.6 trillion.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Wow.
Ilyce Glink:
While that’s been on pause for people who have federal student loans, that’s all going to come back a little bit later on this year. Your people who are already stressed, are going to be even more stressed. Most of your employees are carrying credit debt. Typical American has over $6,600 of credit card debt, and credit card consumer debt is at its highest level ever. There are more people taking on car loans and buying new cars. Housing prices have gone through the roof. Rental prices have gone through the roof.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah.
Ilyce Glink:
If you’re an employer, who’s looking to build a diversity, equity, and inclusion, and if you’re an employer who wants your employees to not cross the street for an extra 10 cents an hour, right?
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah.
Ilyce Glink:
You have to be concerned today about your workforce financial stress, because it doesn’t just impact turnover and retention. I mean, it impacts healthcare costs and outcomes. If you’re giving healthcare to your employees, which most companies are, that’s a huge financial benefit. If you look at how some bigger companies are thinking about it, they don’t actually think about how the deductible and the maximum out of pocket that they have for these, high deductible plans are actually hitting their lower wage employee. But, you have to be concerned about all of that. Gen Z is going to force the issue. Millennials have already requested it. They need help with student loan debt. The IRS has just initiated a favorable ruling, where companies can divert the money that they would put into the 401k and pay down student loan debt directly.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Wow.
Ilyce Glink:
There’s some tax benefits now associated with that. Your employees ask for financial wellness. It is the number one requested benefit, and it has been the number one requested benefit throughout this pandemic, and even a little bit beforehand. If you as an employer, as an employer, if you’re not sensitive to this, if you’re not thinking about how you can make your employees feel safe in the jobs that they have, they will get up and leave. There’s 11 million jobs out there. I would encourage all employers to give us a call, let us help you understand why this is only going to benefit you at an extraordinarily low cost. You won’t believe how inexpensive it is, and yet the good that it does for your most at risk employees is just incalculable.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah. Oh, that’s so good, so, so good. Well, what would it look like to have a successful adoption of the program?
Ilyce Glink:
Well, we have an average usage rate of somewhere around 33%, but that doesn’t get at what’s really going on with us. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of people who have access to the platform. In fact, we’ve just signed a health wellness platform with 3 million people, we’ll be bringing those online this year.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yeah, yeah.
Ilyce Glink:
What we’ve discovered is that if a company actually talks about this, people listen. They love it. In companies where they run custom contests, getting people into the platform to try it out, where they talk about using it, they remind people about it, they bring it out at open enrollment to help with open enrollment season, they get a usage rate of 40 to 80%, total population.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Wow.
Ilyce Glink:
This just proves the point, right, that people will, if you open the door for them and you give them cover and say it’s okay, you’re using it too, they’ll go and they’ll test it out. These employees are happier. We find that they’re more engaged. They come back into the platform, half of them come in almost monthly. Then on the flip side, if you never ever say anything about it, you just offer it, between 18 and 20% of your population are going to come in regardless. There’s just a really wide variety of success, and it doesn’t matter to the platform. We don’t care. I mean, we have PhDs who use it, and people who earn six figures, and we have people who have high school degrees and are on a manufacturing line who use it.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Sure.
Ilyce Glink:
There’s something in this platform for everybody, because we take an agnostic view. Our feeling is everybody wants to make smart decisions with their money, our job is to give you the tools to do that.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Yes. Well, I’m convinced, and I know that our listeners are convinced. How can they connect with you and Best Money Moves?
Ilyce Glink:
Go to our website, bestmoneymoves.com, and you can ask for some free information, you can watch some of our videos, you can reach out to me directly, you can sign up for my newsletter at Substack, learn and more about money and more about what we’re doing at Best Money Moves. We have a newsletter for HR leads that scrapes all the internet data on what’s going on with financial wellness, so that every week you’re really on the cutting edge of the latest news and information. All of that is available, and we would love to talk to you.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Awesome. Well, I do have a favor. Would you mind sticking around for one more question?
Ilyce Glink:
I would be delighted.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Awesome, yes, yes, yes. Well, the conversation has been so good, guys, you definitely don’t want to miss it. Ilyce is going to hang around after this interview to answer one more question about all the benefits of a financial wellness program. You definitely don’t want to miss it. To hear that clip, subscribe to our email list, and we’ll send you a link to our bonus content, or visit onenextsteppodcast.com where you can find a link in the show notes.
Lisa Zeeveld:
With each episode, we have a one next step for you to take. This week, we have a special download for you. It’s BELAY’s tip sheet on how to build an irresistible benefits package. This is great information about how to really attract the best employees through your benefits. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, own your journey. Join us next week for more practical tips and actionable tools to advance your business one step at a time.
Lisa Zeeveld:
Next week on One Next Step, our Senior Marketing Manager, Ryan Fitzgerald is looking back at some of the best marketing advice we’ve heard from our guest on the podcast, all to ensure you have an incredible year in 2022. We’ll hear from many guests on everything from improving your marketing and sales pitches, to building a marketing team to hiring salespeople who have emotional intelligence and more. All leaders need to know marketing, so this is an episode you don’t want to miss. Here’s a quick preview.
Amy Appleton :
Because I literally had that conversation with someone the other day where they said, oh no, I just spent thousands of dollars on a website. Yeah. And now I’m looking at it and it makes no sense to me and I work here. I feel like that probably happens frequently. Especially when, after someone meets you or learns about the story brand framework, what do you tell them to do?
Announcer :
Thanks for listening to One Next Step. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts or follow us on Spotify, then join on us next time for more practical business tips and tools to help you get more done, grow your business and lead your team with confidence. For more episodes, show notes and helpful resources, visit onenextsteppodcast.com.
Ilyce Glink is the CEO of Best Money Moves and an expert on financial wellness programs. She will share with our listeners why a financial wellness program is important, how it benefits teams and organizations, and how an employer can successfully incorporate a program like this.
