Having given each of their employees access to Bippit, Twinkl’s COO David Angrave speaks to us about the importance of creating a holistic employee wellbeing programme that offers physical, mental, and financial support.
Twinkl exists to support those who teach which, in the past 18 months, included a lot of us!
When the pandemic first started the majority of schools around the world closed their doors and moved classes online. Teachers had to adapt and parents had to remember their times tables. Twinkl was there throughout to help, advise, and encourage.
Their engaging and inspiring resources - from lesson plans and assessments, through to online educational games and augmented reality - have been a major source of comfort for many. However, it’s not been without its challenges.
As David says: “Twinkl is an international business and the last 12-14 months have created an incredibly challenging environment for educators. We’ve had to step up our game to make sure we’re serving their needs (which vary quite considerably), all while balancing the needs of our team.”
At the risk of stating the obvious, the switch to home working, schooling, and living has been tough for everyone. People have had to adapt, as have companies. To support their remote-working employees companies have adopted a range of new practices and processes.
“There has been a huge increase in wellbeing requests and needs for wellbeing-based interventions,” says David.
“We haven’t furloughed anyone, but a lot of team members have partners and family who have been furloughed and that’s impacted their finances. There's definitely a step-up in the need for wellbeing support.”
“The pandemic has increased the need for financial wellbeing, and this is something we’ve always been keen to support our team on.”
At Bippit we’ve heard a number of company leaders talk about having a duty of care towards their staff. It’s a duty that extends to how they approach their company benefits, day-to-day interactions, and wellbeing support.
David says: “One of the big drivers of stress is finances. That may be around financial planning for family life, the future, retirement, a first home, or managing mortgages. There are very difficult knock-on effects of poor financial health. I know for a fact we’ve had people absent from work because of the stress of their finances.”
“Supporting our employees’ financial wellbeing is the right thing to do. Yes we are a business and a commercial entity. But we've got a large team that we're very close to. There is still a family feel here.”
“We want to make sure our team is looked after and their whole needs are met. Realistically we spend most of our lives at work. We ask a lot of our team and they give a lot to the educators we support. The least we can do is make sure there is that wraparound support for them.”
Twinkl has a dedicated Wellbeing Team (two are trained counsellors and one is a CBT specialist).
David says: “We provide ongoing health insurance cover and mental health support which allows us to provide interventions as well as a host of CPD and training to help both the team and my managers.”
For many companies, offering physical and/or mental health solutions is where their wellbeing support ends. A third element, which is a silent killer, is often missed: financial wellbeing.
“For us, financial wellbeing was the last bit of a missing picture. You don't see the damage that poor financial wellbeing does to your team. It's like an invisible toll. But it does damage other areas of your business.”
“We've done stuff with the traditional banks but it was every quarter as an intervention or to deliver a seminar. We didn’t have on-demand financial support. Support which is effectively there 24/7 but which is also specifically tailored to each individual rather than just being generic like with seminars. This is where Bippit came in.”
Getting started on Bippit doesn’t require any employee training or payroll integrations. While our customisable and easy-to-use marketing assets (including launch emails) help promote Bippit to staff and drive ongoing engagement.
David says: “Implementation support is what separates good services from great ones and Bippit was so easy. The starting-up process was brilliant. I think we signed a contract and then a week later we were inducting staff.”
“It was incredibly easy to get everyone set up on the platform. Bippit did most of the heavy lifting which made a big difference.”
Previously, getting support from financial experts has been expensive, intimidating, or simply not accessible. When we built Bippit our main goal was to give every single employee - no matter their age, background, or situation - access to financial coaching.
This is something Twinkl was looking for, as David describes: “With Bippit we really liked the ability to actually connect with a human being and to have that 1-1 financial coach and expert.”
“A lot of other financial wellbeing tools target a specific demographic or age range. That doesn’t work for us. We've got an incredibly diverse age range (from 18-60s) and demographic in our team so putting in just one tool would have excluded a large quantity of our staff.”
“Bippit’s support covers all ages and situations. It enables every single one of our team to see that there is actually support for them and their situation.”
However, it’s not just our financial coaches that Twinkl is benefitting from…
David adds: “Being able to see a dashboard showing the financial health of our team is invaluable. It’s made us ask: do we need to look at some of the benefits that are in place? Do we need to actually do a harder push with some of our existing benefits?”
“Bippit helps you maximise all your other employee perks. For example, many of the team were spending a lot of money on things like dental work but we actually provide that cover already. So Bippit helps us see where we need to improve communication around the benefits available to our staff.”
While this partnership has only just begun, Twinkl is already looking ahead to how Bippit can help in the future.
David says: “Bippit will reduce a genuine level of stress that poor financial wellbeing can exert on an individual.”
“While some of the team might not need Bippit right now, it's great to have it there. And it's actually got people thinking about what more they could be doing with different financial elements, or helped them discover something they’d not thought about.”
“Our team knows financial wellbeing is something to take seriously, and it’s great they see us as an employer leading the way in it.”
Long may that continue!
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