In order to effectively communicate financial wellbeing support to its wide range of employees, UK NHS teaching trust Oxford University Hospitals uses a variety of methods to suit their needs and preferences.
The trust is made up of four hospitals: the John Radcliffe Hospital, the Churchill Hospital, the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, and the Horton General Hospital. It employs 15,000 members of staff aged from 16 to 87 in roles such as professors, nursing assistants, estates and facilities staff, and IT professionals.
It offers financial wellbeing support, provided by Salary Finance, such as lower interest and higher acceptance rate loans, and a help-to-save scheme that deducts savings from salaries each month, and has launched a dedicated intranet site for its cost-of-living support.
The trust also promotes its other available benefits to help to tackle the cost of living in Oxford, including childcare and discounted retail vouchers, a bikes-for-work scheme, car leasing, free bike maintenance and free car parking, a £250 payment towards employees’ commute, free breakfasts and subsidised lunches across all hospitals, and snacks in staff rooms.
The aim of these initiatives was to reduce financial stress in the workplace by removing additional costs, improving wages and positioning the trust as an attractive employer, explains Adam Kirton, assistant director of workforce – pay, policy and reward, at Oxford University Hospitals.
“We wanted to target every stage of people’s financial journey, so we offered pre-retirement and pension support to older employees and deployed Salary Finance solutions across the workforce,” he says. “This fits into our objective to empower people in the long-term and help them take ownership of their financial wellbeing, which is part of our Growing Stronger Together wellbeing strategy.”
The trust recognised that it had to overcome cost-of-living support communication challenges and find a combination of methods that suited employees who work online, offline and on the go, with no unified work patterns and rhythms.
These include emails and briefing PDFs to managers and its wellbeing team, the use of enterprise social networking service Microsoft Viva Engage to its wellbeing champions, a standalone Salary Finance launch email to all staff to ensure everyone had received information about it in their mailbox and SMS messages to reach those who do not engage with email, digital screens across all sites, a staff bulletin with succinct information that is widely read and that redirects to its intranet, and its benefits platform with a dedicated intranet section to maximise visibility.
“We use a variety of channels: electronically, printed materials, and its wellbeing champions network. To us, word of mouth and empowering key people to relay messages is essential to access harder to reach employees, get the conversation going around financial wellbeing and to create a safe space,” Kirton concludes.