2022 Signature Awards - Financial Wellness

Financial wellness programs strive to address employees’ total financial circumstances, rather than focusing solely on retirement. These programs can help employees with cash management, debt reduction strategies, saving for college, home buying and other financial life events that people face throughout their careers. This category highlights financial wellness programs offered by plan sponsors that achieved significant results.

​1st Place – DTE Energy Company with Empower Retirement

DTE Energy is a leading provider of electric and natural gas in the Detroit, Michigan area. Many of the 10,500 employees are members of families who have worked for the company for generations. As a past Signature Award winner, DTE knows how to create successful retirement campaigns. For 2021 the company chose to leverage America Saves Week as the catalyst to increasing overall engagement with the retirement plan. They created an Amazing Animals week-long campaign featuring employees’ pets. It began with a pet photo contest and the winners were featured in the communications. The animal images inspired copy editing for financial wellness topics such as “Whether you’re a cat person, dog person or any kind of animal person, the elephant in the room is your financial future” and “Don’t just sit or stay where you are” which had a photo of an employee’s dog. The tools used were daily emails including a kick-off from the Director that featured DTE mascot Nora, an interactive game to test what employees learned during the week for a chance to earn prizes, electronic articles on the intranet and in the company newsletter and fun animal facts throughout. Email open rates ranged from 25.79 percent to 37.63 percent, 5,387 unique participants visited the plan website starting with America Saves Week through the following month-end, and 7.72 percent of the target audience increased deferrals in just one month starting with the week of the campaign with increases ranging from 1.75 percent to 4.89 percent. The judges felt that this was a fun, engaging campaign. Incentives to earn stock was a great way to capture employees’ attention. They loved the use of animals and their characteristics, with lots of great catchy phrases which made the campaign fun. Their communication was on target and once again DTE comes out a winner!

2nd Place – Northwell Health with Transamerica
Northwell Health is New York’s largest private employer and healthcare provider, with 22 hospitals, more than 830 outpatient facilities and 74,000 employees. They chose to enhance their benefits programs to ensure financial wellbeing at all levels of the organization. Multiple wellness programs are offered: Ready to Retire for people aged 60 and older to prepare for retirement; Stocktoberfest which provided webinars held during National Financial Planning Month in October; a discount program and various employee giving programs; plus other benefit programs. To promote all these resources they used emails, the company intranet, their provider’s retirement website, and virtual and phone meetings. The results show that 78.6 percent now have a positive financial wellness outlook. The retirement readiness workshops connected with 5 percent of the target audience. Since inception the Well-being Credit Program had a 104 percent increase in interactions and a 49 percent increase in action rates. They won because they developed a program that takes into account not only financial wellness but how other dimensions of wellness (and life) can impact a person's financial wellbeing. They conducted surveys to understand the needs of each individual. Plus, the program continued all year long to support an individual's need to focus on their financial well-being more than once a year.

3rd Place – Bechtel Global Corporation with Empower
Bechtel Global Corporation has been an engineering, construction and project management partner to industry and government since 1898. The company’s 6,500 employees serve multiple markets: Infrastructure; Nuclear, Security and Environmental; Oil, Gas and Chemicals; and Mining and Metals. After successfully moving to virtual education in 2020 the company chose to continue with a virtual approach in 2021. The goal was to try a new approach by first engaging with their business resources groups and HR managers to share a new webinar series “Get Fit Financially.” The feedback from these groups coupled with feedback from the prior year’s webinar series shaped the new campaign’s tactics. To promote the webinars a series of emails were sent, messages and a scheduler for the webinars were posted on the website and post-webinar surveys were provided to attendees. The campaign resulted in an average email open rate of 40-75% with read rates of 18-28%. There were 1,163 webinar attendees with 97.5% of them satisfied with the presentations. Over 200 survey responses were gathered to be used as a guide for future campaigns. Bechtel came out a winner because the campaign has a focused message and the communication pieces are simple, clear and easy to follow, with great graphics. Also, the campaign yielded great results.