Most companies that offer a financial wellness benefit have a utilization problem, and most of them know it. The engagement report comes in at 18% and nobody is quite sure what to do with that number, so it gets noted and the renewal happens anyway.
The instinct is to blame communication. Send more emails. Put it in the newsletter. Mention it at open enrollment. That rarely moves the number much, because the problem usually is not awareness.
The problem is not that people do not know how to budget
Financial wellness, as the category is usually built, means education. Budgeting tools. Debt calculators. A webinar series. Articles about the importance of an emergency fund.
That content assumes the employee has money coming in and is managing it poorly. For a meaningful share of the workforce, that is not the situation. They know what they spend. They have already cut what there is to cut. They do not need a class explaining that an emergency fund would be useful, because they are already aware that they do not have one.
Asking that person to attend a lunch-and-learn about budgeting is asking them to spend an hour being told about a problem they think about constantly. Low utilization is a rational response.
Two different problems wearing the same label
It helps to separate financial wellness into two distinct needs:
Helping people manage the money they have. Budgeting tools, debt counseling, planning resources, retirement education. This is real and valuable, and for employees whose issue is organization rather than capacity, it works.
Helping people bring more money in. This is a different problem, and almost nothing in the standard benefits stack addresses it. Wage increases are the obvious answer and also the one most organizations cannot apply broadly on demand.
If you already offer something in the first category and utilization is low, it is worth asking whether the employees who are struggling most are the ones the offering was never designed to reach.
What the second category looks like in practice
The employees who need more income coming in are often already trying to solve it. They are picking up shifts, selling things, driving for a delivery app on weekends. What they generally lack is an efficient way to turn what they already have into income without adding a second job on top of the first one.
Most people own things that sit unused most of the year and have skills that other people in their area would pay for. Connecting those to actual demand is a logistics problem, not an education problem.
That is the gap GigMatch was built for. It is an employer-paid benefit that matches employees to short-term earning opportunities based on the things they already own, the skills they already have, and the interests they already spend time on. There is no plan amendment, no recordkeeper integration, and implementation is designed to sit lightly on an HR team that is already at capacity.
The measure that matters
Whatever you decide to do, the number to watch is not enrollment. It is repeat use. A benefit that people sign up for once and never open again did not solve their problem. A benefit people come back to on their own has told you something true about what they actually needed.
If you want to see what that looks like for your population, contact us at GigMatch and we will walk through it.
