Customer Profile

Employees: 900

Industry: Technology, Education

Locations: Bay Area, Denver, Dublin, Ankara, Singapore, Sao Paulo and New Delhi.

Udemy is the world’s largest destination for teaching and learning online. Headquartered in California, Udemy has over 900 employees globally and serves more than 40 million students and over 70,000 instructors in 180+ countries.

Udemy sought to expand their employee benefits programs to support employees’ personal financial needs by delivering access and solutions for all money matters from taxes, to stock compensation, life planning and more.

Udemy also aimed to identify a critical partner for the People and Benefits teams to navigate employee requests for personal financial questions. Prior to selecting Origin, Udemy already offered a robust benefits program including physical and mental health benefits.

Challenges

Udemy identified financial wellness support as a top request across all employee populations, including U.S. and International teams.

Additionally, personal financial guidance needs have been exacerbated by the recent global pandemic and ongoing economic impacts, with Udemy team members, like most employees across industries, regularly looking for personalized support from their People teams. Providing recommendations for employee financial planning is complicated, and often includes questions outside of the scope of expertise and appropriate engagement for the internal teams.

While personal financial challenges impact productivity, engagement, and satisfaction across all employee populations, helping in these areas has cost and time burdens for the company. It is estimated that financial stress costs employers $1,900+ per employee per year*. For Udemy’s roughly 900 employee population, this is estimated at a loss of $1,710,000 annually.

How the Origin benefit helped

Udemy partnered with Origin, a personal financial benefit and Total Rewards platform provider on a mission to improve the financial lives of every employee, everywhere, in mid 2020. Origin engaged with Udemy to address key areas of concern for their employee and People teams, including cross team financial wellness education, personalized employee guidance and professional support for all things money and total rewards, and to reduce the risk and burden on the People team of supporting employee personal financial needs.

Origin worked with Udemy’s People and Benefits teams to understand the employee population demographics, critical personal financial concerns, and additional areas for support. Internally, Udemy has a diverse employee population with a wide range of benefits including mental health, 401k, stock options, medical benefits, remote worker programs and more.

Origin completed a streamlined discovery phase to determine opportunities for financial planning guidance for employees to optimize their use of existing benefit programs. As a part of this effort, Origin identified benefits relevant for employees’ financial plans and equipped Origin Planners to assist with addressing benefits questions in the context of both Udemy’s current benefits and each employee’s financial goals—a sophisticated approach to delivering holistic support to the complex ongoing employee requirements. Delivering cutting-edge employee financial planning and money management technology as well as access to professional Certified Financial Planners for personalized 1:1 support in the context of their total rewards and compensation is a core pillar of the Origin Benefit.

“In just the first few months, Origin is our number one most utilized new benefit.”

Results, return on investment, and future plans

Udemy launched the Origin platform and programs starting with the U.S. employee team members in mid 2020 achieving immediate positive engagement and feedback. Initial participation shows over 25% U.S. employee user activation within the first 3 months since launching in July 2020.

In addition to usage, Udemy employees have continued to share positive feedback on their experiences with Origin, granting an overall satisfaction rating of 9.67/10, with a 93 NPS. As Udemy’s partner for employee Financial Wellness, Origin also delivered targeted educational programming via company-wide virtual sessions hosted by Certified Financial Planners. This included two Financial Wellness workshops on Personal Finance and End of Year Planning, as well as ongoing financial expertise to help keep employees happy, healthy and on the road to financial success.

With a focus on supporting every employee, everywhere, Origin and Udemy also engaged with an initial international employee cohort across global locations such as Ireland, Singapore and Turkey, with plans to expand international support further in 2021 and beyond. By adding the full Origin program to the Udemy benefits suite, Udemy is supporting employees end-to-end on money matters, even during a time of unprecedented change.