Not everyone is lucky enough to have parents that prioritized teaching them about money. I ran into this problem with employees at my publishing business. This post explains why it’s important to make sure your employees have a firm grasp of money management – and what you can do to fill the holes.
I realized we had a problem when a new hire asked me if she could have her paycheck deposited directly to her parents’ credit card. Come again?
Even though this wasn’t the first time I had fielded a red flag question about managing personal finances from an employee, it was certainly the most eye-opening. I did some casual polling around the office to see if there might be any interest in a brown bag lunch on Personal Finance 101.
A few days later, almost the whole company turned out to hear me opine about things like active and passive earnings, FICO scores, and applying for loans. I taught from my own experience and favorite books. …and the response was overwhelmingly positive! Over time, we expanded this education into a modified version of open book management, where we shared almost all of our finances (good and bad) with our staff.
How financially capable are your employees? If they’re anything like mine were before we got proactive, the answer is ‘not very’. This isn’t necessarily their fault. High schools and colleges long ago stopped making financial literacy a requirement for graduation. If you’re lucky, your parents gave you some kind of idea about how to successfully manage your money before you entered the world of runaway personal debt.
When you teach your employees about money, it’s critical to start with your goals. As a manager, it’s important to know why you want your staff to know about money management. If you run a successful business, you probably have a good idea how to manage money within your company. Why should it matter to you that your employees can do the same?
There are actually several good reasons you’d want your employees to be excellent money managers (and we experienced these benefits firsthand at my company):
• If your employees can better manage the money they make, those extra savings will be a bump to their bottom line. You’re giving your employees useful life skills they can apply beyond your company.
• By helping your employees learn about managing their finances (this includes concepts like retirement planning and budgeting), they can hopefully put a great financial plan in place and reduce their money-induced stress.
• By giving your employees tools that few others have, they can now teach their spouses, children, and friends sound financial skills. Taking the ripple further, you are helping society and your country by educating people in a necessary but under-taught set of life skills.
• Having financially-savvy employees helps your business in turn. Your employees will better understand what’s really at stake in your business and will be more in tune with helping you increase your bottom line.
We found that our employees’ productivity went up at work, partly because of the above items, and partly because they better understood how the company worked and how they could affect change. A small investment in financial education ended up having a meaningful effect on the company.
Getting Started
As I said before, when you teach your employees about money, it’s critical to start with your goals. As a manager, it’s important to know why you want your staff to know about money. Do you want them to have better control of their personal expenses? Do you want them to be better stewards of company resources? Do you want them to focus on selling a better mix of products and services to your clients?
The second step is to assess your employees’ current knowledge. While some are well aware of the company’s finances, they might be lacking in personal finance skills. The inverse could be true as well—they might know their own finances well but they don’t necessarily know how the company makes money. Once you know what they know and what they don’t, you can customize your lesson plan.
Your lesson plan should include these items, but feel free to add and customize as you see fit:
• Begin with their personal finances. Start with the Give, Save, and Spend concept (the children’s finance concept where kids split their earnings into these three baskets), then address borrowing and how debt can threaten financial stability.
• Explain why they need to pay down their credit card debt and start to stockpile a safety fund.
• Push retirement savings and explain the benefits of long-term investing.
You can get more detailed as you discuss different kinds of debt and different ways to invest, especially as your employees become more interested in what you’re teaching. Once you’ve covered personal finance, move the conversation to how their new skills apply to your company’s bottom line.
The benefits from running an informal financial education program at my company were tangible. I wish I had realized sooner that most people haven’t had a great financial education. Just like we focus on helping people develop their Excel or communication skills, financial knowledge should be in the same bucket.