How Companies Can Help Employees Achieve Financial Wellness

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Even before Covid-19 shook our entire humanity and disrupted our lives, employees have already reported finances as their number one source of stress. This is more than their work situations, health issues, and family affairs. With the problems that the pandemic further pushed into their field of view, financial stress has only doubled, heightening their concerns and anxieties about how they will manage their money.

Who wouldn’t be worried when layoffs, reduced hours, unpaid rent and mortgages, and those costly medical bills run around in your mind one after the other?

An employee's financial wellness usually isn’t just a personal problem. What employers may not realize is that the stress their employees feel in terms of their finances often harms their physical and mental well-being. This is a spillover that directly affects your employees’ productivity.

When employees can’t help but think of their money concerns even as they work, they tend to get so distracted that they won’t be able to do what they need to effectively and efficiently. Whether it is your contractors or your long-term employees, the loss of productivity and staff turnover caused by financial wellness can cost you up to £15,000 per year per affected employee.

Even if it’s their finances, employers and human resource leaders need to step up and create programs that will support their employees as they begin their journey back to financial wellness.

Here are a few ways on how to do just that:

Assess the Situation

Before employing the aid of financial tools and platforms, employers and human resource leaders need to first understand the financial condition of their employees and uncover their unique wants and needs. It’s most often not a one-size-fits-all approach as there is a diversity of people in your company, but it aids in developing programs that will effectively help your employees meet current and future financial needs.

Conduct a company-wide financial wellness assessment to weigh in on the extent of your employees’ actual financial stress. Evaluations like this will provide you with first-hand information on the financial challenges your employees are facing such as debt payments and mortgages, consumer debt, or high-interest payday loans.

Here are just a few questions you can include in your assessment:

• How do your employees feel about their current financial situation?
• Which financial issues are most important to them?
• Which financial resources and tools would be most useful to address their concerns?

Once you are armed with this knowledge, you can then build a financial wellness program fit for your employees.

Adapt Digitally

One of the first things you should think about when creating a financial wellness program is prioritizing employee experience above all. There are a host of mobile-first and highly intuitive financial wellness platforms and software available in the market that uncomplicate the process of achieving financial wellness for your employees.

Solutions like these can provide a range of functions such as personalized coaching and on-demand financial advising. These tools also have the capability of allowing your employees to improve their financial knowledge at their own pace through e-learning.

Compared to financial counselors, adapting digitally and using technology platforms are better at giving your employees round-the-clock access to what they need in order to achieve their financial aims and objectives. This can include goal planning as well as decision-support tools.

Furthermore, not only do these technologies help in encouraging your employees to save for retirement and build college education funds, they also aid in the management of spending, pay off student loan and credit card debts, and build emergency savings funds.

Many digital platforms use machine learning and artificial intelligence to create personalized road maps for employees, making their financial wellness journey easier and smoother.

Focusing on Financial Education

There’s no need to put so much pressure on yourself and the company, however, if you don’t have the budget for a comprehensive wellness package at this stage. Your efforts will be appreciated either way so start small.

Attend virtual seminars on money management as this will help educate your employees about their personal finances. You can also invite regular guest speakers to run seminars on topics such as debt management and reduction, investment advice, creating an emergency fund, and retirement planning.

Look into hiring organizations that provide personalized sessions with financial professionals that can give one-on-one guidance on topics such as debt consolidation, budgeting assistance, and home buying and mortgages.

Constant Communication

A successful financial wellness program always has an ongoing communications campaign behind it. Without this, you run the risk of employees seeing these tools and platforms as just a marketing ploy.

Utilize communication channels such as staff meetings, orientations, and internal newsletters to encourage employees to make use of their financial wellness resources. You can even bring in vendors to further educate them about the platforms and tools you use to make sure they are on track in achieving their financial goals and objectives.

Now more than ever, it is important to take an active and visible role in your employees’ financial wellness. Motivate your employees to not just equip themselves with the knowledge they can gather through your financial wellness program, but to also apply what they have learned in their daily lives.

What the future holds after the pandemic is still unknown to us. With this uncertainty, there is no doubt that your employees are under a lot of financial stress. By offering financial wellness benefits at your workplace, you have a chance to improve the financial health of your employees which can lead them to be more worry-free and productive while at work.

This article was guest written by Regi Publico. Regi Publico is a full-time writer based in Manila who is also an artist for fun. She takes pride in her towering collection of books and loves reading about anything under the sun. She is passionate about sharing her knowledge through every article that she writes.