Employers: Your employees’ financial wellness is crucial to your business

Consider this for a second. Your employees spend a large part of their waking lives working for the success of your company. In fact, they spend more time helping your company be successful than they spend on themselves or their loved ones.

So helping your employees to lead a secure life is the right thing to do. Most employers want that for their employees.

In that effort, employer-sponsored health insurance is now ubiquitous, and gives good coverage for employees’ physical and mental wellbeing needs. There is another critical aspect of people’s lives that needs a wellbeing solution too — their personal finances.

Curious to learn how bad the situation is? Here are some unfortunate realities of your employees’ financial health:

• More than 70% of your employees in the middle-income segment live paycheck to paycheck.
• The issue is not restricted to your middle-income employees. In fact, nearly 40% of employees making $100,000+ also live paycheck to paycheck.
• 70% of your employees probably have less than $1000 in their savings. Nearly 30% of workers do not set aside any savings each month, at all.
• Fewer people are well equipped and educated in healthy money management than in perhaps any other topic, despite every single person needing to do it.

What does all this mean for you as their employer?

The obvious things first — this is an opportunity for you, the employer, to make a meaningful impact on your employees’ lives.

But not so obviously: The unfortunate financial health of most of your employees is not without impact on you, their employer.

Impact of lack of employee financial wellness

Financially stressed employees are more likely to take more days off, be more distracted at work, produce lower quality output or perform at reduced efficiency / effectiveness, and tend to look for that next job that could pay them marginally more. Replacing them costs more money again. It all costs you more money.

In fact, financial stress among employees costs American businesses nearly $500B a year in direct cost (hiring, training) and indirect cost (lost productivity). You’re likely not immune to this effect.

But not so obviously: The unfortunate financial health of most of your employees is not without impact on you, their employer.

So what do you do now?

The answer to this question will soon become an industry norm.

Give them access to a financial wellness benefit that truly makes them financially healthier.

Helping all your employees get healthier in their personal finances is certainly the right thing to do. You likely don’t deny that. However, helping them achieve financial wellness is also the right thing to do for your business.

River is the end-to-end “financial wellness as a benefit” platform for your employees. Our mission is to help you help them on the tough but necessary journey towards financial wellness. If you’d like to know more about how we help your employees, reach out to us to chat at hello@getriver.co.