5 Ways to Encourage Your Employees to Save Money

As an employer, you have a vested interest in your employees’ overall wellbeing. This incorporates many facets of their lives, but places a particularly important focus on their financial wellness - it’s tough to experience great mental and physical health every day if your financial situation isn’t in line.

A fundamental part of achieving of financial wellness is developing the habit of saving money. Saving is essential: it allows people to achieve their long-term financial goals and also helps them prepare themselves to face financial emergencies. Without any liquid savings to fall back on, employees are liable to experience regular financial stress, be forced to take on high interest debt and remain unable to reach large financial milestones like home ownership or retirement. 

When employees are stressed out about money, they also carry that stress from home into the workplace each day. This has a tangible impact on their employer’s bottom line, as research shows that a stressed out employee is one that’s less likely to be productive, engaged and to stay employed with the same job over a long-term period of time. Plus, a study by Commonwealth shows that employees who have a lack of emergency savings are more likely to need to leverage their retirement savings to stay afloat in a short-term timeline and are thus less likely to take advantage of retirement contribution benefits. 

As such, as an employer, it’s in your best interest to be encouraging and fostering the habit of saving amongst your team. But, how can this be accomplished? We’ve got a few tips that’ll help you push the habit within your business and see your employees (and your organization) reap the benefits in return. 

1. Incentives

It should come as no surprise that employees are extremely motivated by the idea of earning additional incentives from their employer as they save money. According to the same study by Commonwealth, 90% of employees expressed their interest in opening an account to save if they were to earn incentives for it, such as a starting bonus, matching employer contributions and rewards for consistent saving and/or reaching a target savings goal. This overwhelming interest in incentives shows that offering rewards is a surefire way to increase saving amongst employees. 

As such, if you’re not offering a benefits program that promotes saving money for short-term needs, you’re missing out on an excellent opportunity. Benefits plans that put the focus on saving liquid funds will make your employees happy, foster long-term behaviour changes in the way they approach the habit and create productivity and retention benefits for your business in one fell swoop. 

→ QUBER offers an innovative saving platform that makes rewarding employees as they grow their savings easy. Through our branded and customizable match-based saving plans, employers can choose to offer their employees numerous kinds of incentives as rewards for staying consistent with their saving goals. If you’re interested in learning more about our programs, click here. 

2. Gamification

An excellent way to help increase interest in saving amongst employees is to find some way to make it fun for them, such as including point scoring or rules of play. This strategy is called gamification.

As an example, why not promote a bit of healthy competition within your business? Different groups within an organization, like various company departments or different locations, can easily be called upon to compete to see who can save the most money. The desire to be the top team will help push each individual to boost their savings in pursuit of the group’s goal. This could be bolstered by some kind of reward or incentive for the top team, though everyone will walk away a winner due to their increase in personal savings. 

3. Automate the process

If you’re trying to make saving as widespread as possible amongst your team, it makes sense to help remove any and all barriers to saving. One way to make a major change is to help your employees automate their savings. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how effective it can be.

When people automate their savings, they’re much more likely to reach their goals than those who don’t. Research by financial psychologist Brad Klontz shows that people who set goals and then automate their savings save 70% more than those who neglect to do so. This is because automation doesn’t allow any wiggle room for employees to short-change their savings in favour of spending or to forget to save entirely.

As their employer, think about ways you can help automate the savings process for your employees and encourage them to take advantage of it. For example, if you offer automated savings directly out of paychecks to the account of each employee’s choice, your employees are likely to notice a major uptick in the overall amount they’re saving each month. 

4. Employee ambassador programs

As an employer, it can be tough to know if your messaging regarding benefits is reaching your employees in the way you intend it to. Even if they are aware of your offerings, they might not fully understand how they’ll benefit from it or what’s required of them to take advantage of what’s on the table. This can lead to poor program uptake within your organization and create a drain on your resources. 

An employee ambassador program is an excellent remedy for this problem. Having a team of employees who are familiar with the benefits program you’re offering is like having an internal outreach team helping you spread the word. They lend legitimacy to the program, can help get employees signed up as needed and can create an environment where employees feel more comfortable asking for help than if just left to ask HR or their bosses. Plus, employee ambassadors can help create a community that can make other employees feel more comfortable speaking about their challenges with saving and sharing what’s worked for them. 

5. Prize-linked saving

Finally, don’t underestimate the power of prize-linked saving if you’re trying to encourage employees to grow their savings. A prize-linked saving account works the same way as any basic savings account would, except that account holders are given the opportunity to win cash prizes or other rewards through random draws as they grow their account balance: the more they save, the more draw ballots they earn. 

This can be a powerful incentive for employees to not only save money, but keep their money saved as long as they can. You can compare it to a lottery, only instead of costing money to participate, employees get to grow their savings and walk away better for it even if they don’t end up winning any prizes. 

→ QUBER leverages prize-linked saving through our Save to Win contests. All QUBER users gain the chance to win cash prizes as they grow their Vault balance by earning draw ballots through saving and special in-app promotions. We give away numerous monthly prizes of $50 and a grand prize of $1000 twice a year! That means every employee that’s saving with QUBER earns both matched incentives from their employer and the chance to win big as they save.

If you’re looking for a way to combine each of the above strategies into one platform, look no further - QUBER is your answer!
QUBER has a gamified platform that’s proven to help employees grow their short-term savings, learn more about personal finance and make long-term, positive changes to their financial habits.

If you’re interested in learning more about how QUBER can improve your employees’ lives or seeing a free 30-minute demo of our platform in action, please click here to book yourself a time or send us an email at contactus@quber.ca.