If you prefer to read, here’s a shortened version of our conversation:
Q: Could you provide some background on your career and how you came to be the Benefits Manager at Vera Bradley?
A: I went to college here in Ft. Wayne, Indiana and interviewed at a large financial services company. I remember them asking me if I knew what a “savings and profit sharing plan” is. Being very young, I said I had no clue. Then he said, “Do you like math?” and I said I did. So, I ended up being a Savings Plan Assistant in HR at a local Fortune 100 insurance company.
I spent the next 10 years growing my career in HR, working in employee benefits, and went from EB to benefits consulting. Then I was asked to move over to a 401(k) product side to teach compliance and regulatory rules to a large group of employees providing services for outside clients.
After that, the perfect opportunity opened up at Vera Bradley, and I moved back into an HR role overseeing all of our employee benefit programs in a period of time where we went from about 100 full-time employees to 3000 employees over the course of a few years. It was a very challenging time, but in a good way with a lot of growth.
Q: So you’ve seen a lot of different things within the benefits industry. What is unique about Vera Bradley’s employee population that our audience would benefit from knowing?
A: We have a diverse workforce and a pretty young demographic, so that’s something important for us to consider with our employee benefits. We have about 1,000 employees that are obviously eligible for more benefits than our 2,000 part-time employees, but our part-time employees serve as an employment channel for us. As they finish their educations and decide they want a career in retail or want to move to the corporate office, so we always want to make sure we engage across all ages, levels at the company, and job types. That’s sometimes more challenging than when you’re only dealing with a population of all full time employees where you aren’t trying to balance across both types.
Q: As a leader in the benefits space, could you tell us about your approach to benefits and what you are trying to achieve with a competitive and thoughtful benefits package?
A: We try to take a holistic approach to what I would call total rewards — not just benefits but a combination of all of the other perks and compensation programs that are out there. We need to meet the needs of employees, but, as we all know, not everyone is good at looking forward and thinking long-term about how they need to be positioned at certain points like owning a home, starting a family, putting kids through college, and retiring.
One of our guiding principles as I design employee benefit plans is to enable employees and their families to “Live comfortably now and retire with dignity.” That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to go around the world on a cruise ship for a year, but when people retire, they need to be able to live comfortably and do the things they want to do.
That even ties into our wellness program. For many years, companies have done physical wellness, but a number of years ago we stepped back and realized that it’s not just the physical aspect of the employee that comes to work — the whole person does. So, our holistic wellness program is also comprised of financial wellness, social wellness, community wellness and career wellness.
For social, we think it’s important for employees and their families to have good connections with coworkers and friends. Something unique to the Vera Bradley culture is that we do a lot of fun things in our office, like celebrating holidays (especially Halloween which is an all-day event here). We also had an eclipse viewing party last summer where we handed out viewing glasses for everyone and some employees even brought their children.
On the community side, we’re very philanthropic. We have an endowment at the Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis and have donated nearly $30 million to fund breast cancer research. We encourage all employees to be involved in their communities, and volunteerism is very important to us.
We also provide the career resources to grow and develop. We hope it’s with us, but we understand that our younger workforce is a lot more “mobile” when it comes to changing employers, but we want to develop them as much as we can while they’re with us.
Financial wellness is a critical component of all of that, because you need to be financially secure, comfortable and confident to be healthy physically, to have those good relationships with your family, to volunteer in your community, and really focus on your career. All aspects of wellness are important, but from my perspective, that financial component is the foundation that has to be stable and well put-together for people to build the rest of that house.
Q: Let’s dig a little bit more into financial wellness. What are the specific problems that you wanted to help your employees solve? How did you identify them and then identify the solutions to solve them?
A: I’m very engaged with our associate base. I have an open door policy. I’m also in our distribution center and our manufacturing areas at least on a weekly basis, so people feel very comfortable talking to me, which is something I’m very proud of, and I’ve worked very hard to build that trust and confidence with employees.
When employees needed funds to repair the transmission in their car, or to pay their rent if something happened, I’m the first person in the company they would come to.
Everyone knows they should have a budget and emergency savings, but how do you help an employee who doesn’t feel as if they have enough disposable income to get there? That’s what started us down the path of searching for financial wellness solutions.
How do we offer them access to credit that’s not a predatory loan or credit card cash advance? It was that issue that led me to discover Kashable through an announcement on Plansponsor and reached out to Kashable after a bit of research. The biggest financial stress I’ve seen is when our Associates don’t have emergency savings and, for example, their car breaks down.
Q: Were there any other deciding factors that played into your decision of implementing Kashable? Who were some of the other people that helped to make that decision within your organization?
A: I feel strongly that I will only put in programs that I’m 100% confident are beneficial for the majority, if not, all of our employees to take advantage of.
We do have a benefit committee which I chair, but even prior to taking something to that committee I do quite a bit of research online to understand what Kashable was offering because it was innovative – I hadn’t seen it before.
It was a very, very smooth implementation. Once the committee agreed that this is what we wanted to do, I looped in our payroll department and IT team to pull information out of our HRIS system and met with our corporate communications manager to decide how to roll this out and make sure the right people were hearing about this and understood it.
The planning process probably took a month or two for us to get everything aligned. It was super easy, super smooth. Right from day one, our associates embraced it. As I have conversations with people who are struggling financially, I’d refer them to our intranet site, where we house all of our wellness partners, “The Thread” where they could see Kashable’s program overview and link out directly to Kashable’s site to apply.
I’ve never had anyone say they couldn’t figure out how to do it, we’ve never had issues with data files, it’s been super easy.
Q: About 45% of Vera Bradley employees that have taken a Kashable loan have used it to pay down other debt. I was wondering if that’s something you had expected or were surprised by?
A: I wasn’t surprised that people were using Kashable to pay down other debt, but I was surprised at the number of people that were.
We offer individualized credit counseling where they sit down with a financial counselor who offers suggestions on how to improve their credit score and restructure their debt when someone has high-interest rate credit cards or has medical collections on their credit report. Many times Kashable’s program makes sense to help with that.
What I’ve seen is that once people can build that emergency savings up, they become much more confident in focusing on other areas of their financial health whether it be saving more for retirement, putting money away for their kids’ college funds, or saving for other major purchases.
We’re seeing great strides from our employees that want to focus on financial wellness.
Q: How has Kashable affected other benefits that you offer? For example, you mentioned providing employees an alternative to 401(k) loans and that credit counselors were suggesting Kashable to employees that needed help — did Kashable enhance any other benefits?
A: Kashable provides that safety net for our associates. Knowing they have one allows them to focus on other areas. Maybe they put an extra $20 a month into their HSA, increase their 401(k) deferral, or open up that 529 plan, because they know if something unexpected happens that exceeds what they have in their emergency savings fund, they’ll be able to apply for a Kashable loan to see them through that period.
It’s like when our grandmothers put $1,000 under the mattress or in the coffee can because they knew it was there if they needed it. Kashable is the modern-day version of that. You know it’s there if you need it, so it allows you to really focus on the other things you want to do.
One thing that we didn’t touch on that I think is equally as important is – because you do report on-time payments to the credit bureaus – it helps improve their credit score. That’s another part of getting them where they need to be so when they do have to go out and get a commercial loan in the future, they’re able to get a lower rate because of the better credit score that this program helped them achieve.
I can’t think of a situation where an employer wouldn’t want to have this program available to their employees.