In a new report, “Measuring the Value of Your Financial Wellness Investment,” MetLife discussed how employers can gauge the success of their financial wellness programs.

The paper is the last in a four-part series offered by MetLife.

“The conventional return on investment (ROI) standard of measure, in which dollars invested can be directly tied to cost savings, provides only a limited view of a program’s success,” MetLife says. “Increasingly, companies are using value of investment (VOI) to evaluate workplace health and financial wellness programs. A subset of ROI, VOI offers a more nuanced and accurate representation of the impact a program is having on employees and the company.”

VOI considers intangible outcomes, such as employee productivity, engagement and overall job satisfaction, as well as costs associated with absenteeism, disability claims and turnover.

According to the report, companies should first assess how effective their financial wellness programs are, with the intention of using this data to benchmark progress.

Next, they should set goals for the program, such as reducing absenteeism or improving employee morale.

Then they should identify the metrics that will be used to determine the success of each component of the program, keeping in mind that value can be subjective and not easily translated into dollar amounts.

Finally, the report suggests, they should “measure the impact of the program based on key metrics and aggregate findings into a VOI dashboard.”

Links to the other three papers in the series can be found here. The fourth white paper may be downloaded from here.